January 1, 2012- Food Blog

And so my food blog begins! I’ll be blogging everything I ate for one week so follow along or block me for a little while. It’s up to you!

Today I woke up after very little sleep and by some miracle without a hangover. Last night we were lucky enough to hang out with some good friends at a local Quincy restaurant called Remicks. It’s a new place and we were able to get a reservation for six at the last minute. The service was prompt, as was our food and drink, at least compared to our pitiful experience at Siros last year. It was, as my daughter would say, so so so good. My Cosmos were crisp with fresh lime and just the right amount of cranberry. The oysters weren’t the best I have ever had but were good. The arugula salad was great, barely-there dressing and shaved parmesan that let the peppery arugula stand on its own. However, the size of the salad was pretty pitiful. I’ve become accustomed to a large salad and I don’t think there is a restaurant out there that has a serving bowl large enough. I like a LOT of greens and very little of the accouterments they drown salads in now-a-days. In order to make greens filling you need a great deal, and like I said most restaurants just can’t accommodate that. For dinner, I had steak tips. They were nice and rare, flavored beautifully and served next to nice crisp fries. Anyone who knows me knows I am a sucker for fries and nice crispy one makes me melt. My delicious evening was topped off by a chocolate torte drowned in caramel. YUM.

So it’s easy to see that though I didn’t have a hangover, I had a bit of a food coma going on. Most restaurants you go to worship flavor over all else and sacrifice any thought of healthy in order to achieve it. I personally think a better balance can be struck so I turned to my shelf of recipe books to inspire our dinner today. I selected Tomato Bisque from The Conscious Cook By Tal Ronnen. I have some major things to thank Tal Ronnen for, most notably cashew cream, a DELICIOUS cream substitute that I swear you cannot tell in recipes isn’t heavy cream. There are other favorites, such as Cream of Asparagus Soup and Fresh-Baked Focaccia with Caramelized Onions, but most of the recipes in this book I find to be beyond my abilities. I tried to make his goat cheese from cashews and that was a huge failure. Many of the recipes involve mushrooms which, despite a fervent desire to enjoy, I hate. Or they employ tofu, which my husband feels the same way about tofu that I do about mushrooms. He would like to like it, but no matter how many times he tries to convince his taste buds that tofu is good, they disagree. Still this book is worth the purchase just for the cashew cream alone. Cashew Cream is a life saver for lactose intolerance or for people who just don’t do dairy. Of course my recipes and commentary to follow.

BREAKFAST

For breakfast I had my traditional smoothie. I’ll do my best to relay to recipe but I make this every morning and I never had a recipe for it so I never measure.

Quinn’s Purple Mooshie (Vegan)

1/2 cup frozen blueberries

1/2 cup  frozen mixed raspberries, strawberries, blackberries

1 banana

2-3 cups soy milk

BLEND

Make two large servings, three smaller. Just cut down the recipe to make less.

This a makes a delicious smoothie that tastes sort of like a blueberry creamsicle. Blueberries are loaded with antioxidants and are scrumptious and fiber-full. The same is true of strawberries, raspberries and blackberries. Bananas have tons of potassium and fiber. Soy milk makes a tasty and not horrible for you filler liquid. For Quinn’s sake, I add psyllium husk to bring in yet more fiber. This seriously helps her poop and combats the binding nature of banana. Lately, I will also add a fresh pear if I have it on hand. This also helps her poop.

I use frozen blueberries because they are yummy and I use a frozen berry mixture that my local BJ’s carries. Both are easily available to me. If you want smoothies, see what options are available and use them. Also use a fruit juice if soy milk isn’t to your liking. I’ve tried just water but it was pretty gross. Play. See what you like. I drink a big ol’ smoothie every morning because I need it to keep me full til lunch.

LUNCH

Today I ate a LARGE and I do mean LARGE salad. As I mentioned above I like greens and I don’t like a lot to interfere with them, today’s salad was:

Becca’s Lunch Salad (Vegan)

8 oz or so spinach

4 oz  or so arugula

1 cup or so snap peas

tablespoon or so balsamic vinaigrette.

Toss in a large bowl till everything is evenly coated.

This salad took me about an hour to eat. That is my only complaint with salads. Now I was also running around cooking other things while I ate it but the very act of chewing that much salad takes a long time. I challenge you to eat that much salad by yourself and not be full. I say it can’t be done or you just need to add more greens.

DINNER

I really didn’t snack today. I had some water throughout the day. I also had a coffee before breakfast. But other than that there should not be any extraneous calories creeping in there. Dinner was:

Tomato Bisque (Vegan)

1 Onion (sweet), chopped

1 Carrot, chopped

1 Stalk Celery, chopped

3 cloves garlic smashed

2 tablespoons whole wheat flour (Tal Ronnen calls for unbleached all purpose)

5 cups faux chicken stock

1 (28 oz) can whole fire roasted tomatoes with juice OR approximate that amount of fresh and fire roast them yourself as we did.

1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley

leaves from 2 fresh thyme springs

1 bay leaf

freshly ground pepper

1 1/2 cup Cashew Cream

Parsley for garnish

Note: At this time of year we never have any of those spices fresh so just use dried. It’ll taste fine.

To fire roast the tomatoes, we cut them into quarters and baked them for 25 minutes on the top over rack right next to the heating element. They get slightly charred and it totally changes the flavor. We skipped this step once and just used fresh and we will never do that again. It made for a very bland soup.

Place a large pot on medium heat. The author here uses earth’s balance, a vegan butter substitute to saute the onions. We just use a little olive oil. Its healthier and I use way less than he does. Add onion, carrot, celery, and garlic. Saute for 10 minutes. Sprinkle flour over the vegetables and continue cooking and stirring for two minutes.

Add the stock, tomatoes, parsley, thyme and bay leaf. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes, season with salt and pepper, then add cashew cream. Continue to simmer for another 10 minutes, but do not boil.

Remove bay leaf. Working in batches pour the soup into a blender, cover the lid with a towel and blend on high for several minutes. until very smooth. Pour the soup through a fine mesh sieve ( we never ever do this. A: why? B: that takes out a lot of the good fiber). Ladle into bowls and garnish with parsley.

This soup is AMAZING. Its so creamy you would swear it was a decadent, terrible for you concoction. Instead it is oh, so delicious and GOOD for you. Read that recipe again. No cream and almost all the fat is all from the cashews! Note. BE CAREFUL blending the hot liquid. We normally use our blender and we tried our food processor today which was a FAIL. The liquid started slopping out the top and when we tried to transfer it to the blender it started spilling out the bottom too. If you have an immersion blender USE THAT! If not the blender does work but the steam tends to blow the top off the blender when you start it. So have a towel on top to catch the liquid and for goodness sake don’t burn yourself.

Cashew Cream (Vegan)

2 cups whole raw cashews rinsed well under cold water.

Put the cashews in a bowl and add cold water to cover them, cover the bowl and refrigerate over night.

Drain the cashews and rinse under cold water. Place in a blender with enough cold water to cover them by 1 inch. Blend on high for several minutes until smooth. If still piece-y, strain.

To make a thicker cashew cream use less water. Have it just cover the cashews.

My notes on cashew cream. We can NEVER find raw cashews so we just buy the roasted ones from Bjs. They are salt laden so we rinse them very well. We never bother to pick out the broken ones. We don’t always soak them for more than four hours or so and we never cover them. It always comes out tasting just fine. Also it doesn’t keep very long so we just adjust the recipe to make enough for whatever recipe we are making.

 

Josh and I ate the Tomato Bisque with a crusty whole grain bread(probably not so vegan). It was amazing and our best ever thanks to our new found roasting technique. We used the bread to sop up the soup and I would swear to you it was some of the best soup I’ve ever had. It felt like comfort food. I might have gone a little over board with the bread, (4 slices!) because I just couldn’t get enough of the combo. We have made this before but it will certainly stay on the roster because it was AH-MA-ZING. Till tomorrow.

-Rebecca Garrison