VeganMoFo #4: Chickpea Leek Soup

kara — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:30:00 +0000

I’ve been sick for a few days and today is grey and rainy, so obviously it’s soup time! I love love love soup. Could eat it every day. Well, at least when it’s cold out, which means about nine months in Chicago. The problem is, Dan and Matilda aren’t so stoked on soup. Usually a loaf of bread and some olive oil for dipping will cure that though. This particular soup I start to crave as soon as fall hits. It’s so velvety and luscious and simple, with just leeks, garlic, potato, and chickpeas. It’s from The Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver, only tweaked a little bit to use canned beans, which makes it pretty fast to pull together. (The only other recipe I’ve tried from the book is the basic risotto recipe, which is perfect and I use all the time as a base. It has teeny bits of celery that stay crunchy for a nice contrast.) I’m still a total loser when it comes to photographing soup, so it looks like a mess of yellow goo, but it’s pretty outstanding, especially sprinkled with sea salt, pepper, nutritional yeast, and a drizzle of olive oil. The perfect thing to soothe my itchy throat.

Hey, that’s a lot of leeks!

Mexican Pizza, or: What Happens When I Have to Shop at Jewel

kara — Tue, 20 May 2008 02:54:00 +0000

Dan and I were on our way home from work and I had nothing planned for dinner. Completely out of character, we decided to go to Jewel. I’ll admit that I have an aversion to normal (i.e., not Whole Foods) grocery stores–something about the two aisles containing nothing but chips and soda–but I’m really against Jewel. It always smells funny. It probably comes from years of living in Wicker Park, home to Junkyard Jewel, which is a truly disgusting place. Plus, the lines are always super long. But at the Jewel I ended up, on a search for something to use as a pizza crust. I knew there wouldn’t likely be anything actually pizza-crust-like to be had, but I thought I’d at least find pita bread. Nope. No pita bread in the whole store. After walking up and down the “natural foods” aisle (gee, that’s a lot of cereal and soy milk) six or seven times, I spied some refried black beans (thank you, Amy), and the Mexican pizza was born. Another search turned up some flour tortillas with fewer than twenty ingredients–as well as a pile of super moldy tortillas. Yum. After an incredibly long wait in line, it was home to assemble the suckers. And you might look at this creation and say, “That looks like a tostada.” Yes, it does look like a tostada, but we wanted pizza, so it’s pizza. Refried black beans between two flour tortillas, topped with melted Teese, olives, red and yellow peppers, avocado, mango, and a lot of Cholula and baked until crispy and melty. Sure, it didn’t quite satisfy the pizza craving, but it was still pretty incredible. How can anything topped with avocado and mango be anything less?

Cookery & Cakery » beans

VeganMoFo #4: Chickpea Leek Soup

Mexican Pizza, or: What Happens When I Have to Shop at Jewel