Lentil Salad

Inspired by the lentil salad recipe I found on The Garden of Eating, I decided to whip this up for dinner. It is a great recipe because it is inexpensive, very nutritious, tasty, and simple to make! Feel free to use the vegetables and spices you have on hand (for me it was carrots and cilantro). This is quite adaptable to whatever is sitting in your fridge so don’t feel limited by the vegetables I had around.

Ingredients:

2 cups uncooked brown, black, or Du Puy lentils (avoid red lentils, because they get too mushy)

1 – 3 carrots, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

1/4 cup onion, minced

1/4 cup minced cilantro (substitute parsly or basil)

1/4 cup Delavignes Mediterranean Blend (substitute with olive oil, red wine vinegar, and Italian spices)

1 T strong mustard

1 T maple syrup

1 T agave nectar (or local honey if you eat honey)

Salt and pepper to taste

Bring the lentils and 4 cups of water to a boil. Turn down to simmer until the lentils are soft but not mushy (20-40min). Depending on the type of lentil you may need to add a little water, or if they are soft and there is still to much water, drain them. Combine the warm lentils with the rest of the ingredients and you are ready to serve. The lentil salad tastes better the next day though, so you might want to make it ahead of time. I served my lentil salad with rice and sauteed kale. Enjoy!

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Easy Peasy Soy-Free Miso Soup

I woke up this morning to find Rachel on the couch sick. Offering to make her breakfast, nothing sounded good except for miso soup. I whipped this up in less than half an hour and it tasted fantastic. Plus, it is full of the things she needs to make her healthy again (and what I need to avoid catching what she’s got).

Ingredients:

Olive oil – I used Sicilian Bread Dipping Oil

1 small onion, chopped

1 head of garlic, chopped

1/4 green cabbage, chopped

1/2 cup Soy free miso – I use South River’s Chickpea Miso

Sautee the chopped onion in oil until translucent. Add the garlic and green cabbage, cook for another 3-4 minutes. Next add water to generously cover the vegetables. If you like your soup with more broth, add more water. Bring to a boil. Turn off the heat, or bring down to very low heat. Stir in the miso (add less or more to suit your taste – I like a lot of miso) and serve. Enjoy!

This soup is very healthy because it has an entire head of garlic, which has been shown to be effective in preventing colds. There is also cabbage which is a little known superfood full of vitamins and minerals. Finally, the miso is full of pro-biotics which is why it is important not to add it to the soup until after you have boiled the water, otherwise you will kill all the good bacteria you want to end up in your stomach!

Here are the other things I have in my medicine closet to fight off colds:

Oregano oil – Prevents and helps cure a cough or colds that come with a cough.

Netti pot – Drains your sinuses which can help you get rid of a clogged nose, or by regularly flushing out the germs that get up there, keep you from getting sick at all!

Vitamin C chewable – I try to eat citrus instead. A grapefruit in the morning with some local honey is full of vitamin C and the local honey will fight a cold as well. I know this is not 100% vegan, but I have some friends who are very responsible beekeepers and do not feel bad consuming their honey. Sometimes it is easier to just take a chewable so I keep them around.

Tea – Traditional Medicinals makes a number of amazing teas – I keep Cold Care PM, Throat Coat, and Echinacea Immune Support stocked at all times.

Note: I have no medical training, these are simply the items that work to fight colds for me and my family.

Sicilian Pasta with Winter Vegetables

Rachel made me dinner last night and it was amazing! So simple and yet, fabulous. Plus, it cost us almost nothing since she used all vegetables from Riverbank Farm (yes they still have vegetables in the winter) and we used some Sicilian Dipping Oil from my job at the Olive Oil Factory for flavoring.

Serves 2

Time: 30minutes

Ingredients:

1 box of gluten free pasta (quinoa garden pagodas are my favorite)

.5 lb baby kale

1 lb carrots, finely chopped

1 head of garlic, finely chopped

1 onion, thinly sliced

olive oil

Sicilian Dipping Oil (note the parmesan flavoring doesn’t come from real dairy, so it is still vegan)

Salt + Pepper

Boil Pasta. While pasta is cooking, sauté the carrots, onions, and garlic in olive oil. When these are soft, throw in the baby kale for less than a minute just to turn it bright green, be careful not to overcook the kale. Add the vegetables to the pasta and smother the whole dish with Sicilian Dipping Oil. Salt + pepper to taste. Enjoy!

Tuscan Herb Spaghetti Squash

I love spaghetti squash. It’s something I don’t eat very often, but it is so easy to make and it’s a naturally gluten free pasta! This fall I accidentally found an amazingly simple sauce for spaghetti squash that makes me love it even more. Here’s how it came about. I made spaghetti squash with tomato sauce, lentils, and some roasted Carola potatoes (for good measure) – pictured below.

It tasted good, but was nothing to write home about. However, when I went to get my second plate (yes, I always go for seconds), I found I was out of sauce. Adding squash to my bowl, I had a hint of tomatoes left, but it wasn’t quite enough flavor. I decided then to drizzle on some oil that had been given to me by my new employers. Oh man, this is amazing! And thus, my Tuscan Herb Spaghetti Squash recipe was born.

Ingredients:

1 spaghetti squash

olive oil

hint of tomato (1 T of tomato sauce, pinch of sun dried tomatoes, or a toss of fresh tomatoes)

1 – 3 T of Tuscan Herb Bread Dipping Oil

salt and pepper

Pre-heat the oven to 415 F. Cut the spaghetti squash in half and scoop out the seeds and pulp. Lightly oil the squash, on the inside and the outside. Place on baking sheet and cook until it is tender when pierced with a fork (about 30min). Pull out the ‘spaghetti’ by scraping the inside of the squash with a fork until you get all of the meat out. Add a touch of tomato flavoring (sauce, sun dried tomatoes, or some fresh tomatoes). Heavily drizzle the whole bowl with Tuscan Herb Bread Dipping Oil and season with salt and pepper. Enjoy!

Sauteed Delicata and Kale

Angel from Wellness Angel put together a week-long fall inspired blog series.  To start the week, Angel shared a wonderful vegan lentil loaf recipe. Tuesday, Amber from The Tasty Alternative posted an awesome dairy free, cane sugar free, grain free no-bake mini pumpkin cheesecake. Yesterday Heather from The Soulful Spoon wrote about a tasty frozen pumpkin latte smoothie!

Today, I will be sharing with you a favorite recipe of the crew members on Riverbank Farm: our famous delicata and kale sauté. This meal is awesome because it takes very little time to make, has only 6 ingredients, and tastes, well, amazing.

prep time: 5 minutes

cook time: 35 minutes

serves: 1

Ingredients:

1 delicata squash

5 med red russian* kale leaves

1 small onion (optional)

olive oil

salt

pepper (optional)

raspberry balsamic vinegar (optional)

*You can use any type of kale, but we all think red russian tastes best in this recipe.

If you are using onions, start them sautéing in a skillet with olive oil. Cut the ends off of the delicata squash and slice the squash into quarters. Don’t peel the squash, the skin is thin and tasty. If you don’t like the taste of pumpkin seeds you can core the squash, however we prefer to leave the core and seeds in as it is quicker, the seeds crisp up and taste great, plus the seeds give you an extra mineral and protein boost. Sautee the squash in a skillet on med heat with a lid for about 30 minutes stirring occasionally. Your aim is for the squash to brown nicely and cook through until soft. During this time you can strip the leaves off of the kale stalks and coarsely chop them.

When the squash is soft and browned, add the kale and salt/pepper to taste. Let the kale turn bright green and wilt a bit (about 2 minutes). To make this dish fancy and add a little flare to your cooking, drizzle some raspberry balsamic vinegar over the meal as it is finishing its cooking.

And there you have it – a simple, filling meal you can make with almost no work – and a great reason to love fall vegetables. Enjoy!

Vegan Teriyaki Stir-Fry

Now that broccoli and red peppers are in on the farm, I decided I needed to make a stir-fry. Following this recipe I found at the Plant Powered Kitchen, I whipped up a truly tasty meal. For the soy sauce, use coconut aminos — it tastes great. Honestly, next time I will make twice as much because we ate it all in one sitting and were wishing we had more for lunch the next day! I didn’t have cashews at the time, so instead I used Roasted Chickpea Nuts and I think they tasted even better. Lacking a good substitute for tofu I just left that part out, and it cut down on the cooking time which is always a plus (-:

Mung Noodle Stir Fry

Of course, anytime I make the 12 hour car ride to Dakar the first thing I want to do is to stock up on groceries from the Hypermarche Exclusif. This time, browsing through the shelves I found two very exciting items: mung bean noodles and tomato sweet chili Chinese cooking sauce (that is gluten-free, soy-free, and vegan)! Remembering the Thai stir fry my mom used to make me in high school, I decided to give it a try with this new sauce and loved the results. The first taste is a simple and sweet veggie noodle stir fry, but it finishes off with a pleasant kick.

serves 4

 

Ingredients:

1 onion

1 tblspn vegetable oil

2 carrots

2 small/medium zucchini

3 small bell peppers (yellow, green, and red)

4 cloves of garlic

1/4 cup Tomato Sweet Chili Chinese Cooking Sauce, or to taste

1 (250g) package of mung bean noodles

salt and pepper to taste

 

Julienne the vegetables. Sautee the carrots and onions in oil. It is best to do this in a wok if you have one, but if not, a large, deep pan would work as well. Add the remaining vegetables and the Tomato Sweet Chili Chinese Cooking Sauce. Stir and cover, stirring occasionally until vegetables are fully cooked. In the meantime, add the mung noodles to boiling water (it may seem like you have a lot but these noodles don’t puff up the way pasta does so there will actually seem like less once they are cooked). The noodles only have to be in the water for maybe two minutes before they are soft, as soon as they are soft drain them and rinse with cold water. Then throw these noodles into your stir fried vegetables, mix and serve.

This is also great cold – I had leftovers for lunch the next day.

Tomato Sandwich

I think this is my mom’s favorite sandwich. When she found out the date I was coming home to visit the first thing she said was “I’m going to go get you some soy-free veganaise so you can have a tomato sandwich from the garden before the frost comes”. I thought she was a little too excited about this, then I had one. Oh man, I am completely addicted. I want to eat these all day long (I did for a few days then I realized I should probably vary my diet a bit).

Ingredients:

1 or 2 slices of fresh tomatoes (tomatoes out of season don’t taste good)

generous amounts of soy-free veganaise

1 or 2 slices of gf bread or gf english muffin

basil (optional)

mustard (optional)

Toast bread. Slather mayonaise. Place tomato. Place Basil (optional). Eat like this, or add a second slice of bread to close the sandwich. Put mustard (optional) on this second slice if you want to switch things up a bit.

To me, this is the taste of summer.

Now that gardening season is here in Senegal I can’t wait to grow some tomatoes, anyone want to send me some veganaise?

Maharagwe

Tasty and quick to make, what more could we ask for? Substitute agave nectar for the honey to make this recipe vegan.

Double Coriander Eggplant Tagine

I found this recipe in the Vegetarian Times. I skipped out on the yogurt sauce, but if you are feeling adventurous perhaps try making this with some So Delicious Coconut Yoghurt.