White Orchid Melody Blog

…that’s Italian for Spicy Pumpkin Soup. In English, I’d probably call this recipe Pumpkin Chili. I used “zucca”, which is an Italian pumpkin, though the flavor and texture is a bit different than the pumpkin we have in the states. You couldn’t use zucca for pie, but you can use pumpkin for this soup.

Pumpkin Chili

2 Tbsp Canola oil
2 cups onion, diced
2 cups sweet red pepper, diced
4-6 cloves garlic, minced
4 cups pumpkin (or Italian zucca), diced into 1/2″ pieces
16 oz frozen corn kernels
2 cans black beans
4 cups water
1/3 cup tomato puree
1 Tbsp chili powder
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp paprika
1 Tbsp salt
1/2 tsp chipotle chili powder
1 tsp dried cilantro
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

In a large soup pot or dutch oven, heat canola oil and saute onions and red pepper until tender. Add the garlic and pumpkin and saute for about 5 minutes. Add water and bring mixture to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for about 20 minutes or until the pumpkin is tender. Add chili powder, paprika, cumin, salt, cilantro, and chipotle seasoning, and stir well. Stir in tomato puree, corn, and beans. Simmer until corn is thawed. Remove about 1/3 of soup to food processor and puree. Return puree mixture to soup pot. Simmer an additional 20 minutes to blend flavors. Stir in parsley and fresh cracked sea salt and pepper to taste. Serve with vegan cornbread.

These are so good I can hardly stand it. The recipe is a variation on the Reduced Fat Banana Muffins from Joy of Cooking.

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cranberry Muffins

Mix in a medium bowl:

1 cup white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup turbinado sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup oatmeal

Mix in a large bowl:

1 Tbsp ground flaxseed + 3 Tbsp water
2 over ripe bananas, smushed
2 Tbsp canola oil
1/4 cup water

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients mixing gently until about half way blended. Then add:

3/4 cup dried cranberries
2 ounces dark chocolate (vegan), chopped
1/2 cup almonds, chopped

Mix just until blended. Batter should be really lumpy, but there shouldn’t be any dry flour left. Spoon into greased muffin tin and sprinkle tops with turbinado sugar. Bake at 400 degrees until lightly brown. Makes 12 muffins.

I do believe this to be THE BEST lasagna I’ve ever eaten. And it’s vegan, my friends. Try it; you’ll see. You won’t even miss the cheese.

Perfect Summer Lasagna

1 lb box lasagna noodles

vegetables:
1-2 medium eggplant
2 medium potatoes
3 cups of frozen broccoli florets (or you could use fresh zucchini if you have it)

filling:
1 can chickpeas (or navy beans or cannelloni beans)
6 sundried tomato halves
2 tbsp pine nuts
bunch of fresh basil and parsley (~1 cup)
3 cloves garlic
olive oil

sauce:
3 – 15 oz cans tomato puree
1 – 15 oz can chopped tomatoes
4-5 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup olive oil
fresh basil, chopped
1-2 tbsp salt

Grease a large baking dish. I used a 9×13 glass dish. Preheat oven to 350F.

For vegetables:
Slice eggplant into 1/4″ rounds. Toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Bake at 350F until browned and tender.
Slice potatoes into 1/8-1/4″ rounds. Boil until just tender. You’ll want them to retain their shape– not fall apart.
Saute broccoli with olive oil, salt, and pepper until tender. Use the edge of a spatula to chop up into small pieces.

To prepare sauce, warm olive oil in a small sauce pan and add garlic, stirring until garlic releases a nice aroma. Then add the tomato puree. Add salt and stir well. Simmer for a minute or two, tasting to see if there is enough salt. The salt is what takes away the bitterness of raw tomatoes, so be generous. Remove about 2/3 of the sauce to a bowl. Then add the chopped tomatoes to what is left in the sauce pan to make a chunky tomato sauce. Add basil and stir, simmering gently for a minute or two. Remove from heat.

To prepare filling, combine beans, sundried tomatoes, nuts, herbs, and garlic in food processor. Process until smooth. Add oil as needed, and process until you have a smooth but not runny consistency.

I used no-boil noodles. If you use the other kind, you’ll want to boil them briefly–just until they become flexible–then submerge in an ice bath.

To assemble: From the bowl of sauce, ladle in enough sauce to cover the bottom of the baking dish. Add a layer of noodles. Spread the noodles with filling. (Using no-boil noodles, I found it easier to spread the filling on first, then place them in the pan.) Then layer potatoes. Repeat with sauce-noodles-filling, then a layer of eggplant. Repeat with sauce-noodles-filling, then a layer of broccoli. Then layer sauce, and add one more layer of noodles. Now grab the pan of chunky tomato sauce and pour all of that over the whole dish. Cover with foil, and bake at 350F for about 45 minutes.

Prepare to stuff yourself! It’s crazy good!

Life is good. And so was the delicious pasta salad that I’m eating in the photo above! So for you, my friends, a picnic or boat day friendly recipe:

Kickin’ Pasta Salad

8oz small dried whole wheat pasta (I used Ditali)
1 – 15oz can chickpeas (garbanzo beans), drained and rinsed
1/3 cup olive oil
2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
6 sundried tomato halves
1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes (or to taste)
2 Tbsp pine nuts, toasted
generous amount of fresh ground pepper and sea salt

Cook pasta to al dente. Drain and rinse with cold water. If you are using dry packed sundried tomatoes, as opposed to oil-packed, the chop them up into 1/4 to 1/2 inch pieces and add to the boiling pasta for the last minute. To toast pine nuts, place in a dry skillet over medium heat until lightly browned.

In a large bowl, mix oil, vinegar, basil, red pepper, salt, and pepper. Add chickpeas, pine nuts, and pasta. Toss well to coat. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

The vinegar has a strong flavor at first, but after marinating overnight, it was perfect! I used approximately 1 tsp of crushed red pepper, (but of course I didn’t actually measure) and it definitely had a kick. If you don’t like much spice, use a 1/2 tsp instead.

Buon Appetito!

These Chocolate Chip Blackberry Banana Muffins turned out really tasty! They are also very filling, with a denser texture than a normal muffin. I had some bananas to use up and a bowl of blackberries that were too sour to eat raw, so I threw it all together with some chocolate for good measure.

Note: I put replacements in parenthesis in case you don’t want to do them vegan.

CCBB Muffins
  (chocolate chip blackberry banana)

1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup white flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 bananas, mashed
1 tbsp ground flaxseed + 3 tbsp water (or 1 egg)
1/4 cup canola oil
1/4 cup unsweetened soymilk (or cow milk)
3/4 cup dark chocolate chips (or semi-sweet for non-vegan)
3/4 cup small fresh blackberries (if they are larger you might want to chop them up)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. In a medium bowl, mash up bananas. Add oil, milk, and flaxseed/water mixture. Whisk well to blend. Add wet ingredients to the flour mixture in the large bowl. Mix with a few strokes, then add chocolate chips and blackberries. Stir to distribute evenly, but don’t over mix. Batter should still be lumpy. Spoon into greased muffin tin. Bake for about 15 minutes until lightly browned and a toothpick inserted in center of muffin comes out without crumbs. I toss the extras in a freezer bag and store in the freezer for quick and easy weekday breakfasts. Just thaw for a few seconds in the microwave!

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing some vegan baking for awhile, but I was a bit nervous. My cooking experiments sometimes produce conversations such as this:

Me: “Hey, try my new recipe. It’s vegan-spelt-gluten free-whatever!”
Bri: “Um, okay. I’ll try it.”
(awkward silence)
Bri: “Hmmm….they make me feel funny.”

But last week when we had house guests, one of the girls wanted dessert. I had the stuff to make chocolate chip oatmeal cookies (yum!). Or I thought I did. We were out of eggs. But I remembered I’d bought some ground flaxseed to try as egg substitute. What the hell, I thought, might as well try it. If they turn out nasty, we will be spared the calories. Fortunately for our tastebuds, not so much for our waistlines, they turned out delicious! Maybe even better than with egg! They weren’t vegan, though. I still put a stick of butter in there. I have a hard time imagining cookies without butter. But alas, the flaxseed experiment was successful. Which brings us here, to Vegan Cornbread, also delicious!

Vegan Cornbread

1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 cup whole wheat flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp ground flaxseed + 3 Tbsp water (egg replacement)
1 1/3 cups unsweetened soymilk
1/4 cup canola oil

Mix cornmeal, flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl. In a small bowl mix flaxseed and water, then add in oil and soymilk, mixing well. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix well. Pour into a greased 12-muffin tin or alternately, an iron skillet or 9″ cake pan. Bake at 450 for about 20 minutes for muffins, up to 30 minutes if using a cake pan. They should be lightly browned on top.

They are a bit more dense when using the flaxseed versus egg. But the texture was still nice and the flavor was excellent! Yay for vegan baking!

What don’t I love with roasted vegetables???? Seriously, there is no better tasting way to eat a vegetable.

Roasted Vegetable Calzone

1/2 batch of Whole Wheat Pizza Dough*
olive oil
salt and pepper
1/4 cup vegetable broth
2 potatoes
3 carrots
1 each red and yellow peppers
1 onion
4 cloves garlic
2 zucchini
1 cup green beans
1 to 2 cups asparagus

Preheat oven to 400. Dice potatoes, carrots, onion and peppers. Mince garlic. Combine in a large roasting pan. Toss with oil, salt and pepper. Pour in vegetable broth. Cover with foil and cook for about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, dice zucchini, green beans, and asparagus (the latter two, I just cut into 1″ pieces). When the 20 minutes is up, remove foil and add green veggies to pan. Return to oven for another 20 minutes, stirring periodically. Veggies should be lightly browned.

Split dough into two balls. Roll out into circles or ovals about 8 or 10″ in diameter. Brush with olive oil, leaving a 1/2″ border around the edge. Using a slotted spoon to drain off any cooking liquid, spoon a generous amount of roasted veggies onto one half of each circle. Fold over and mash the edges together. Then fold the edges up and mash again. This will make a nice tight seal and keep any of your filling from seeping out. You will have lots of filling left. Save it for tossing with pasta or filling sandwiches for a quick meal.

Bake at 400 for about 20 minutes. They should be golden brown. Serve with small bowls of basic tomato sauce for dipping.

These turned out so good I didn’t miss the cheese at all. But you could also throw in some mozzarella if you’d like.

*I use the “whole wheat pizza dough” recipe in the manual for my bread machine. If you are making it by hand, most cookbooks have a basic pizza dough recipe. Just substitute half whole wheat flour for half of the white flour. 

I pulled a bunch of recipes off of various vegan cooking sites to last me through the month. But I have a VERY difficult time actually following a recipe. My creative impulses get the best of me. So, tonight I started with a rather basic pasta recipe: Pine Nut and Vegetable Penne. But it occurred to me that I might be able to do a cream sauce using pureed white beans. I have posted my sundried tomato cream sauce here before. It is one of my favorites. This is an excellent vegan version–less rich, but very tasty.

Vegan Sundried Tomato and Herb Cream Sauce

2 cups of cooked white beans (I used navy beans)
1/4 cup each fresh parsley and basil
1 tbsp pine nuts
olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
10 sundried tomato halves
1 cup water

In your food processor combine parsley, basil, nuts and beans. Process until evenly chopped. Meanwhile in a small saucepan, heat just enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan. Add garlic and stir, cooking until you smell the garlic. Add in tomato halves and water. Bring to a boil. Then, turn off heat and allow to sit for 5 minutes. Add tomato and garlic mixture to bean mixture and process until evenly blended. It won’t be totally smooth.

I served this on penne pasta with sautéed vegetables (onion, celery, red and yellow peppers, and green beans). It was really good! I didn’t miss the cream and cheese at all.

This is stupid simple, super healthy dinner recipe! Lentils cook quickly, so you don’t have to plan ahead and start making dinner early in the afternoon!

Lentil Spaghetti

2 cups dried lentils, rinsed and picked over
16 oz dried whole wheat spaghetti
2 cups tomato puree
4 cloves garlic
olive oil
basil, parsley, oregano (dried or fresh)
salt
white wine vinegar

Heat oil in a large deep skillet or sauce pan. Mince garlic and stir into oil, cook slightly to release the aroma. Add your clean lentils and enough water to cover about an inch. Add salt and herbs. Cook until tender. Stir in tomato puree, more salt, and vinegar. Bring to a boil. Simmer until sauce thickens.

Once the lentils are tender, you can turn on your water to boil for the pasta. Then as your sauce is thickening, you can cook the pasta al dente. Spoon sauce over pasta and enjoy! High protein vegan yumminess!

(Serves 4-6)