SOUP!

There's nothing quite like a hot bowl of soup. Nourishing. Comforting. What more could you ask for?!
The best part is that you can make a big pot of soup and then keep it in the fridge to eat as a quick lunch or dinner throughout the week.
Here's a simple recipe (kind of), for the soup pictured below.



SOUP!
ingredients (roughly)
-about 2 cups of potatoes*
-1 large carrot*
-lots of garlic
-1/2 package of tofu*
-half a zucchini*
-small can of tomatoes
-1/2 cup of corn
-mushrooms*
-1/3 of a head of sui choi
-6 cups of veggie stock
-a few splashes of tamari
-1 teaspoon of chilli paste
-1/2 teaspoon of oregano
-1/2 teaspoon of tarragon
-chilli powder
-salt and pepper
-1 teaspoon of hoisin sauce
-1-z tablespoons of olive oil

*chopped into bite-sized pieces

Alright...
To start soup of I like to heat up the olive oil in the bottom of my soup pot, and then add in a bunch of chopped garlic to cook for a few minutes.
I then add any spices that I want to flavour the soup with, and stir those around with the garlic and oil for about a minute.
Add the tofu, and let it absorb all of the spicy garlicy goodness.
Add root veggies and stir for a few minutes.
Then add the veggie stock.
Bring to a boil, and then let simmer. Check the root vegetables regularly: when they are almost done cooking, add all of the other vegetables (except the sui choi!!)

This is when I add all of the non-spice ingredients (hoisin sauce etc.)

Finally, when the soup is almost done, I add the sui choi (it doesn't really need to cook a whole lot).

You don't need to add the veggies that I have listed here. You can pretty much ad anything you want. It's just important to keep in mind that different vegetables have different cooking times. If it's a root vegetable, it takes longer. Soft things take less time.

Umm... that's all for now.

3 course meal! thai-style coconut soup, asian noodle salad with spicy peanut sauce, mushroom risotto with smokey tofu and green beans.

Recently, the Grace Gallery in Vancouver held a "40 hours of food and flicks" event, where a local chef cooked for continuous two hour sittings for 40 hours. A movie was shown for each sitting. Sadly, for me and a few of my vegan friends, there was no vegan option... so we decided to make our own fancy dinner. HURRAY!

Course 1: Asian Noodle Salad with Spicy Peanut Sauce.



This recipe was taken from Vegan Planet, with a few modifications. The recipe recommends using Udon noodles, which we agreed were too thick for our liking, so we used some Soba noodles instead. To the peanut sauce in Vegan Planet, we also added a few tablespoons of maple syrup, for sweetness, and the juice from half a lemon. The recipe was also modified with the addition of peas.
This salad was SO delicious! It was also super easy to make. Peanut sauce recipes are easily found in just about any vegan cookbook, or all over the internets. Try playing around with different ones until you get the right flavour for you. You can also experiment with different types of noodles (spelt, kamut, buckwheat) or varying degrees of thickness, and you can basically add any vegetables that please you.

Course 2: Thai Style Coconut Soup.



Also from Vegan Planet, but slightly modified with the addition of fresh lemongrass and thai basil. I'm not sure what i would do differently in making this soup the next time... maybe add more coconut milk? Maybe add some sweet chilli sauce? I just don't know. It was light, and refreshing, but didn't quite have the oomph that I was looking for.

Course 3: Mushroom Risotto with Smokey Tofu and Green Beans.



SO MANY MUSHROOMS! We picked up a variety pack of organic mushrooms from the farmers' market, which included shitake, portabello, pink oyster and some other kind whose name I'm not sure of. We sauteed these for a bit before adding them into the risotto. The risotto was made with a mushroom broth and then finished off with truffle infused olive oil. YUM! We also added some swiss chard.

To marinate the tofu, we took the recipe for Smokey Grilled Tempeh, from the Veganomicon (obvs, without the tempeh). We let the tofu marinate for a few hours and then pan-fried it. Smokey deliciousness!

The green beans were blanched for three minutes, put into a cold water bath and then tossed in flax oil.