A couple of recipes - soup and pasta

Well the first one isn't really a recipe. I just took some spaghetti noodles, boiled them, and then sauteed up some onions in Earth Balance and stirred in the noodles with some Organic Basil & Dried Tomato pesto from Rising Sun Farms. Then I tossed in some fresh cut tomato. It was a nice way for me to be able to imagine for a couple of minutes that it was summer.

When it got cloudy and miserable again I tried out making this Mushroom Barley Soup with Fresh Herbs, since I had that thyme and dill left over from making the rosemary dumpling soup. It turned out pretty good I think. But it reminded me of how far I've come in cooking.

The last time I used barley in my cooking was back when I was newly vegan in Hawaii and still had no clue how to cook. For some reason, back then, I didn't seem to realize that I could easily look up amazing recipes on the internet and buy whatever ingredients listed that I didn't have... and also that this was much less risky than trying to make stuff up myself with what I had. I remember boiling barley and then putting almond milk and random herbs in it, trying to make it into a passable soup. It was terrible. Kind of like a really bland but chewy porridge. Also I made a pasta salad where the dressing was mostly ketchup and some kind of oil. This is why you make sure you only try recipes on vegweb as a noobie if there's like a TON of good reviews on that recipe. It actually didn't taste horrible but it was kind of weird....

In any case most of what I cooked back then was just spaghetti with canned sauce, and burritos with canned vegetarian chili and tomatoes in them, sometimes corn too. That was about the extent of my knowledge and it stayed that way for a really unacceptably long time. At some point I finally broke out of it and started experimenting with recipes. I got discouraged a lot of the time when stuff didn't turn out at first. It's really hard when you try for hours to make something delicious and at best it's just kind of "meh". But I didn't give up for long. I'm really grateful to live with a best friend who puts up with my mistakes and encourages me to keep trying. Now I can make stuff that makes people go "wow!" Although that's mostly due to the wonderful recipes at The Post Punk Kitchen, I think I had to hit a learning curve first and start developing a sense of what works and what doesn't in cooking, because up until about half a year ago, I really didn't get it.

So the moral of that story is just keep trying, and it helps if you're getting your recipes from a good source!

Creamy Pasta Sauces

So lately we've been trying different ways to make creamy pasta sauces without using tomatoes, since Danielle is more into alfredo-y stuff than marinara-y stuff. The first try was a complete success thanks to the Post Punk Kitchen's amazing Cream Red Chard Linguine recipe, where the creaminess is cashew-based and alfredo-like. I used fettuccine noodles instead of linguine, and sherry instead of red wine. Oh man... it was delicious.

Then we tried using the Pesto Soup recipe to make a sauce to put over Rising Moon Organics Spinach Florentine Ravioli and that was delicious too. There the creaminess was cauliflower based.

Feeling encouraged, yesterday when my original plans for lunch (lentil sloppy joes) fell through, I decided to use some of the sweet meat squash to try and make a creamy squash-based pasta sauce. I figured if I found a couple of recipes and then used the basic idea of the pesto soup sauce recipe, it should work.

Here's what the finished product looked like. I feel like it needs something more to it, flavor-wise, but the consistency was really good.

So I took a look at this recipe and this one too. And then here's basically what I did:

Chopped half a very large onion, about equivalent to one large onion... then 3 cloves of garlic. Peeled about a pound or two of the squash and chopped it into 1/2 to 1 inch pieces, chopped 2 carrots into small pieces, and chopped up a bit of fresh rosemary too.

In a big pot, sauteed the onion in olive oil until translucent, then added garlic until fragrant, then added a cup of broth (made with Better than Bouillon's No Chicken Base), 1 1/2 tablespoons of dried basil, a pinch of thyme, and the rosemary. Put in the squash, stirred it around, and it looked like there wasn't enough liquid so I poured in a little bit of almond milk, then covered it and let it simmer until the squash and carrots were soft. While this was going on, I chopped up two leaves of kale and mixed together a little over half of another cup of broth with about half a tablespoon of cornstarch. I also started cooking my pasta (I used penne). When hte squash and carrots were soft I stirred in the cornstarchy broth and then let it boil uncovered for a while until it was slightly thickened. Then I poured it by halves into a blender (be careful to let the steam out) to make it all smooth and creamy, and poured it back into the pot with the kale to let it wilt and soften the leaves. Drained the pasta and stirred it in with the sauce. Added garlic salt as needed, and when Danielle got home she put in a little cube of frozen basil to add more flavor. I also put a little bit of nutritional yeast on mine, but it didn't make much difference with the taste actually...

So, a cooking experiment which was a semi-success but leaves a lot of room for improvement. If anyone tries this and comes up with a way to make it taste more like BAM THAT WAS GOOD let me know xD