what i eat for lunch every weekday

When people find out how restricted my diet is (I'm vegetarian and don't eat refined sugar, gluten, eggs or most dairy), they want to know what I *do* eat. And a lot of people are intrigued by the fact that I eat (homemade) soup every day for lunch. So I made this recipe video to show you how I prepare delicious soup every weekday morning for my bag lunch.

You're welcome.

blessings in a salad

I took the above photo this morning when I went into my fridge to get some almond butter to eat with my Extra Strength Advil. I noticed that the pea shoots that I bought yesterday at the farmer's market were all backing away from the top of my fridge, as if repelled by the cold or something. Made me laugh. I know food that's stored right beneath the freezer tends to freeze, for sure.

This morning at church the guest preacher (a member of our congregation who is also a member of parliament) talked about a mission and service trip that some of the congregation took to a First Nations tribe in northern Ontario this past week. We had raised money to buy nets to allow the tribe to feed itself according to its traditional ways, and Glen's story of that visit was very moving and also heart-wrenching. Among other challenges, these First Nations people can't afford the healthier food that can be shipped into their community (a carton of eggs or a bag of potatoes can cost $20), and therefore their diets are often poor, and diabetes runs rampant through the community.



When I got home and started making my lunch, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for the abundance of affordable, healthy food here in southwestern Ontario. The above salad (my lunch) is made with fresh organic spinach and pea pods from organic farms, as well as Ontario carrots and apples. The only thing that was shipped from somewhere else was the celery, and even then it was really inexpensive (although don't remind me how many pesticides were used to create it - I might lose my lunch).

Seriously, though - that is some miracle sitting in my bowl. Awesome.

Really quick, here's how I make homemade dressing for my salads: drizzle olive oil over everything (don't ask me how much), and then splash red wine vinegar on top of that, and sprinkle liberally with salt or Herbamare. I toss salads with my bare hands. True. I usually wash my hands first, if that helps. Besides, I'm usually the only one eating my salads. Anyhow - when everything's all tossed, I test the flavour by popping a leaf or two in my mouth. If the salad tastes like something you'd buy in a nice restaurant, you probably drizzled, splashed and sprinkled right. Otherwise - lather, rinse, repeat. Wait - that's for shampooing. Nevermind.

pantry stew (a cautionary tale)

Doesn't this stew look awesome? Too bad it doesn't taste that awesome. But don't worry - it's not because this recipe is no good. It's because I can't seem to stop burning things, lately. Usually while I'm goofing around on Twitter. I need to make one of those red circles with a line through it and the Twitter bird and a stove in the background. "Don't tweet and cook." Or something.

Anyhow, I made up this recipe on the spur of the moment when I was hungry last night and wanted to cook something with ingredients that I had on hand. Hence the title (pantry stew). You could also call this "too lazy to go to the grocery store" stew.

Actually, the main motivating factor behind making this stew was that I had a bunch of yellow-eyed peas in my fridge that I'd cooked Thursday night in my crockpot, and I was afraid they'd go bad if I didn't MAKE SOMETHING WITH THEM ALMOST IMMEDIATELY. I'm a little averse to the fart-like rotting food smell that too-old cooked beans make, y'know? I also wanted the stew to be somehow tomato-y, but the only kind of tomato ingredient I had on hand was a jar of spaghetti sauce. Done. But I didn't want a stew that TASTED like spaghetti sauce, so I had to think up some weird new flavour twist to explore. More on that later.



So I started by chopping one sweet Vidalia onion. I think you could use any kind of onion - I just happened to have sweet Vidalias on hand - thanks to my Mom, who had two big bags of them, and was giving some away. I think she might have got them from the Shriners. Whatever - you probably don't need to know why I was using a Vidalia.



I also chopped about five or six stalks of celery, but crap, I forgot to photograph that part. To be honest, this entire recipe is kind of light on informative photos. Above is the chopped celery and onion, sauteeing in olive oil in my soup pot.



Once the celery and onion were a little soft, I added the cooked yellow-eyed peas. You could use any kind of cooked beans in this stew - or even a mixture of beans. If you cook your beans from scratch, use one average-sized package of dried beans. Don't ask me how much that is. Just average-sized, okay? If you're using cooked beans, I'm guessing you'd need about three cans of beans for this recipe, although by all means use less if you're not too fond of beans. Wimp.



Next I peeled and chopped about four large carrots, I think. I didn't want to chop them the same shape as the onions and celery - hence the rounds. Whatever. Add the carrots to the pot.



The infamous jar of spaghetti sauce. Add a jar or can of spaghetti sauce to the pot.



Now comes the interesting part. I decided to add a tablespoon of curry powder to the stew.



And a tablespoon of garam masala (which is an Indian spice mixture, and my latest favorite spice).



These tortilla chips have absolutely nothing to do with the recipe. I just had them sitting on my counter while I was cooking, and thought they looked pretty. So I took a picture of them. I think they would totally taste good with this stew, though, come to think of it. Too bad I ate all of them before the stew was done.



Finally I added a bit of water to the stew, until it reached the consistency I wanted. Don't ask me how much water I added - all I can tell you is it looked like this when I was done.



Awesome, eh? The above picture would be the bottom of the soup pot after I spent too much time on Twitter and accidentally burned my stew. Also, I dropped my camera - really hard - rushing to take this photograph. Good thing my second (and current) camera is a shock-resistant one, eh? (Guess how I destroyed my first camera...)

In an effort to salvage things, I dumped the hot (but not totally cooked) stew into another container, and then went to work on the bottom of the soup pot. Fun stuff. Do I know how to rock my Saturday nights, or what?



Was not too impressed to discover (after scrubbing the pot for five minutes) that the pot seemed permanently stained with burnt. Awesome. Like I need to be reminded, every time I make a new recipe, that I totally sucked at cooking one night. (Epilogue: I got the rest of the burnt marks off the pot this morning. Yay.)



Okay, a little tangent: I blame my stove for all my cooking mishaps. Twitter notwithstanding, if my cute little vintage stove actually WORKED PROPERLY, I wouldn't burn so much food. But this charming antique has only two temperatures: lukewarm, and EXTREMELY HOT. And the burners won't work at all unless you turn them to EXTREMELY HOT first, and then turn them down to lukewarm once they start to heat up.

Perhaps I'm a little lazy, but I figure if the burner is already on EXTREMELY HOT, I might as well get some use out of all that power. So I usually let the pot heat up until the food is bubbling, and only then turn it down to lukewarm. Kind of as a time-saving measure, see? (Mom, you don't have to tell me: I've turned into my father, haven't I?)

I had a friend over today, and she wondered why I didn't ask my landlord for a new stove. But see - a new stove wouldn't look this cute, would it? Nevermind.



After I got the pot cleaned up, I finished cooking the (now smoke-flavoured) stew, and added Herbamare to taste. Which was kind of burnt. The taste, that is. Reminded me of nothing more than campfire food, and I haven't been camping since I was a kid. Also, my apartment smelled like cooked BBQ. Which was not so charming, considering that I'm a vegetarian.



The finished stew. Finally ate some for supper tonight. (Oh - and last night's supper? The rest of the bag of Tostitos and a slab of fudge while I cleaned up the stew fiasco. True.) The stew actually didn't taste that bad, if you plugged your nose to avoid the topnote of burnt. The curry and garam masala really give it a lot of depth. Or something. I'm guessing I would totally love this stew if it wasn't burnt. So there you go. You're welcome.

nettle soup

Okay, so today I was at the farmer's market downtown, and Dolway Organic was selling stinging nettles. I'd heard about these things. There were all sorts of signs posted at the Dolway stall, saying don't eat the nettles raw - they're supposed to be prickly, or something.



Good thing they came pre-packaged in plastic. Which is like an organic oxymoron. But anyhow. I bought one bag.



When I got home I totally wanted to cook something with them right away. I pulled out one of my favorite vegetarian cookbooks, The Greens Cookbook by Deborah Madison. I figured if anybody could tell me how to cook nettles, she could.



I didn't find any recipes using nettles, but Madison did share some interesting facts... like how saints use to eat nettle broth for sustenance, or something. And how nettles are supposed to be an amazing green colour when they're cooked. Awesome. I am totally going to eat nettle broth all the time if I ever become a saint.



So basically I was on my own. I started with one leek. Sorry, I didn't take any pictures of the leek before I cut off the tough, dark green parts. Basically you just chop off the leaves, and remove a couple of the outer layers, and then make a slice lengthways through the leek without actually cutting it in half. Leeks tend to be sandy, and you need to wash out all the dirt, like I'm doing above.



When the leek is washed, chop it roughly. Honest, this is me trying not to be compulsive about the widths of the chops.



Heat some olive oil in a soup pot.



Add the chopped leeks, and saute them until soft.



In the meantime, if you're feeling adventurous, you can keep yourself busy with an activity like washing five large potatoes. I do this kind of multi-tasking all the time. Which is probably why so many of my recipes end up burnt.



Because I wanted a good picture for y'all, I kept my eye on those leeks. Right here they are perfectly sauteed. If you still have some other stuff to do (like chopping the potatoes, below), you might want to take the pot off the heat for a little while. Just saying.



My awesomely chopped potatoes.



Add the chopped potatoes to the pot and fill with enough water to cover everything, plus about another inch of water. Or soup stock. You could use soup stock instead of water. I totally forgot about all the soup stock I have frozen in my freezer. Doh.



Okay, now this was totally the most nerve-wracking part of the recipe. Like I did not want to touch those nettles, okay? I just upended the whole bag into the pot. I'm thinking at this point that maybe I've misjudged how many potatoes I should haven't added. (sic)



Luckily the nettle leaves poked down into the pot without any trouble (although I did worry about touching the cooking spatula to anything else, and haplessly transferring raw stinging nettle needles). I think there was something else I wanted to tell you at this point, but I forget what it was.



Here are the cooked potatoes and nettles. (And leeks.) I think everything took about 35 minutes, after the water started boiling. Oh - I remember what I wanted to tell you. I was kind of worried, when I put the nettles in the pot, that I should have removed some of the stems. There were a lot of stems. But I was not interested in putting on some surgical gloves just to pluck off all those leaves... so I left the stems. To be honest, I didn't even wash the nettles. I'm hoping that they washed them at the organic farm. They do that kind of thing, right? I'm sure they would pre-wash things like stinging nettles. Kind of like a public courtesy. Oh well - if they weren't washed, this soup may be a little gritty, that's all. If you're ever foolish enough to actually try making a soup out of LEAVES THAT CAN MAKE YOUR HANDS ALL ITCHY IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY TOUCH THEM, I'll leave that judgement call about washing them up to you.

(In the meantime, I'm feeling pretty sorry for the poor fool who first figured out that you shouldn't eat nettles raw...)



Put the cooked vegetables in a blender with enough water to cover the solids, and puree the soup in small batches. And by small, I mean whatever size you're comfortable splashing all over your kitchen if the blender lid should malfunction.



This is the pureed soup. I'm still waiting for the amazing green colour to materialize.

(True aside: My notebook touch pad is malfunctioning, and when my thumbs pass near it while typing, my cursor tends to randomly fly somewhere else on the screen. Which is not so endearing when it ends up in the middle of the code for the photos, and I need to delete text without screwing up the code. Like right now...)



When you have pureed all the soup, add salt (or Herbamare, my favorite seasoning) to taste. Somebody was asking me what "to taste" meant. (Actually, nobody asked - but I figure some of you might wonder). Basically, it means that you TASTE the soup, and if your first impression is, Wow! I would totally pay $15 for the privilege of eating a tiny bowl of this soup in an overpriced restaurant, then you don't need any more salt. If, on the other hand, your first impression is, Meh, you might want to add a bit more salt. Unless by "meh" you mean, OMG this stuff is WAY too salty, in which case I'm sorry to inform you that you've just wasted a $5 bag of organic nettles.



The finished soup. It was really good, and not at all gritty - so I'm pretty sure they did pre-wash the nettles.



I didn't really mean to post this photo. Most of you probably don't bottle your soup in canning sealers and freeze it in single-size portions for the following week's lunches. I sometimes get carried away with the camera, though. Sorry.

BTW, I made another recipe today, but it didn't turn out nearly as well as the nettle soup recipe. And by "didn't turn out nearly as well," I mean it was basically a total fiasco. Story and photos to come, likely tomorrow. In the meantime, check out these awesome day-old mini cupcakes and fudge that I bought inside Covent Garden this morning. The fudge, BTW, got totally eaten during the fiasco cleanup.



Oops. I guess I forgot to edit a photo of the fudge. Sorry. But those cupcakes are awesome, eh?

trinidadian black-eyed pea stew

After uploading all the photos for this post, I almost didn't want to start writing the copy. Contemplated a nap. Decided to persevere. So this is a recipe for a Trinidadian stew. I can't vouch for its authenticity, not being Trinidadian. But it sounded good.



I based my recipe on the above recipe for Trinidadian Black-Eyed Pea Soup.



I found it in a book called World Vegetarian by Madhur Jaffrey. She's like the Godmother of Indian cooking. I don't know if she knows anything about West Indian cooking... but I bet she can fake it. I'm also thinking she's looking pretty awesome in that photograph, because her Wikipedia entry tells me she was born in 1933. If her recipes keep me looking that fine when I'm 70-something, I'd be happy.



This is a package of dried black-eyed peas. I'm totally making this recipe from scratch, sorry for your luck. You can take the wimpy way out and used canned black-eyed peas. I'll enable you that much.



For the real cooks out there, pre-soak the beans in a pot full of water. I'm using my Crock Pot here. Soak the beans for several hours (eight is always quoted as a good number, but I'm pretty loosey-goosey with cooking times myself, so feel free to make it up), then drain off the soaking water, re-fill your cooking vessel, and cook the beans until they're done. I totally meant to cook my beans in the slow cooker overnight, but forgot to. This morning I was greeted by some beans that had been soaking for about 20 hours. Awesome.



I also made the mistake of trying to cook too many beans for the capacity of my Crock Pot. They made a total mess of my counter and my kitchen floor when the cooking water boiled over. Also awesome.



When the beans are done they will be soft (i.e. try one and see if it breaks a tooth or not). Another way to tell if beans are done is by blowing on them; if the skins start to curl away from the insides, then they're done. I really wanted to demonstrate that technique in the above photo, but apparently my beans weren't cooked enough. I called them done anyhow.



I had the brilliant idea that I would like to cook the entire stew in my Crock Pot, and so I rushed to clean it out after the beans were cooked. I don't really recommend trying to wash a REALLY HOT Crock Pot. Like really - pretend I never even suggested it might be possible. But this hypothetical woman I might know? She does it all the time. And when she doesn't burn herself, it's mostly successful. Just remember to unplug the outside container first if you should be so foolhardy, yourself. After all that work, I realized that IF THE BEANS WERE TOO FULL FOR THE CROCK AND MADE IT BOIL OVER, then the stew would probably be, too. And maybe even more so. Ya think? So I cleaned this bugger for nothing. Sigh.



Okay, don't be frightened. I meant to have a nice picture of three lovely bell peppers to introduce the whole chapter on "How to Roast Peppers," but I neglected to actually take that photo. I'm sorry. The charred mess, above, is actually what these things look like after they've been roasted. When I do them, anyhow. Simply wash and dry the peppers and put them on a cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil. Then stick them under the broiler and turn them regularly. This is one instance when the presence of a smoke alarm anywhere near the vicinity of your kitchen will be really annoying. I had to take the batteries out of mine before these babies were done. True.



Cover the roasted peppers with plastic wrap (if you're fond of zeno-estrogens in your food supply) or aluminum foil (if you're playing Russian Roulette with Alzheimer's), and let them sit, covered, for 10-15 minutes. This helps sweat the skins off. In theory. The above peppers have done their sweating, and as you can see from the middle pepper, the skin should just peel right off without much trouble. I totally recommend you let the peppers cool completely before trying to remove the skins. Not that I follow my own advice. But I totally recommend that you do.



The peppers will now be all limp and slimy; slice them in half lengthwise and remove the stem end and seeds. You may need to scrape all the stray seeds with a knife or something. I don't recommend you use your fingers, because that then becomes a lovely game akin to the whole peanut butter on the roof of your mouth phenomenon. Chop the seeded peppers into a large dice.



Take an onion.



Chop it into a fine dice.



Take some sinfully yummy coconut oil (my new favorite cooking oil, because of its high smoking point and delicious flavour - and its multitude of health benefits including weight loss and anti-infection properties (I'm not making this stuff up, although that doesn't mean that it's true)), and heat the oil in a skillet.



Saute the onions in the coconut oil until they're soft and slightly browned. My onions are a little browner than you're aiming for. Thought I'd offer that up as a bit of a cautionary tale. (More like I just got preoccupied with other stuff in the kitchen before I took the photograph.)



Remove the onion from the heat and add the chopped, roasted peppers to the onions. You can see how successful I was at removing all the pepper seeds. What can I say? I always use my fingers.



Take four carrots.



Chop them into a medium dice. Note that my dice qualifiers are totally arbitrary and only meant to sound professional. Which I am not. At least I've styled the photograph in such a way that it appears to demonstrate how to chop carrots into a dice. I've forgotten what I actually did here, though.



Saute the diced carrots in more coconut oil. Add them to the onions and peppers.



Next comes a bunch of fiddly little ingredients that you add to the onions, peppers and carrots. Start with 4 tablespoons of uncooked brown rice.



Then add this much ginger. I'm calling it 1 1/2 teaspoons, but then I like ginger. If you don't like ginger, add less. Or none. Why are you even making this recipe if you don't like ginger, though?



Okay, the next few photos might be a bit confusing. The recipe called for allspice, which I don't have. But I'm thinking, "Allspice is called allspice because it tastes like all the baking spices." You know - like cloves and cinnamon and nutmeg. I think. So here I'm adding a tiny bit of ground cloves. If you have allspice (show-off), just add some allspice and forget about these other spices, okay?



This is cinnamon. I think.



I'm pretty sure this is nutmeg. I'm pretty sure I don't remember how much I added. Seems to me I was grinding this thing for a long time. I like nutmeg, though. You might not.



Okay, now we're adding some mustard. The recipe called for dried, ground mustard, but I totally didn't have that either. This is prepared mustard from a squeeze bottle. I was thinking it was Dijon or something, but then I noticed the label said honey mustard. Doh. I don't think it will matter, though.



Okay... now here the recipe called for thyme, and I don't have any of that either. But I'm thinking that thyme and sage are kind of the same, so I added ground sage. Sounded good in my head, anyway.



The recipe also called for bonnet peppers. I think those are super hot. I'm not a bit fan of even barely hot, myself, so I substituted red pepper flakes. Feel free to improvise with an eye towards your own particular level of hotitude.



This liquid that looks like dishwater is actually vegetable stock that I save from cooking vegetables and freeze until I need it in recipes. Yes, I am that awesome. Feel free to use plain water if you must, or some kind of vegetable boullion from the store. Total aside: Guerilla Firebox is telling me that I'm spelling boullion wrong. Totally had to look that one up, just to be sure. Don't know where they're getting their spell-check words from, but I think boullion is totally the way Americans spell that word. The French spell it bouillon, and the English and Canadians add another 'u' in there somewhere, I think.



Add everything (black-eyed peas, vegetables, rice, spices and herbs) to your cooking pot, and then add the stock or broth until everything is just covered. I don't like watery soups, which is why this recipe is called "stew." Go ahead and make a soup if you really want a soup. I don't. Simmer the stew (soup) for about 45 minutes until the rice is cooked. You'll know it's cooked because the individual grains will be all puffed up and splitting apart.



This is what my stew looked like when it was done.



Okay, now comes another confession: The soup recipe called for fresh cilantro. I didn't have any of that either. I made a special trip to the grocery store after the stew was all cooked, because while the stew tasted good, I knew it would be so much better with cilantro in it. I LOVE cilantro. Some of you might not. In fact, to some of you, cilantro might taste like soap. True. I'm so glad I'm not one of those people. Anyhow, to finish off this recipe properly, you really need some fresh cilantro.



Cut off a big handful of the leaves, and wash them well. They'll probably be quite sandy, and that's such an unpleasant feeling against the teeth, let me tell you. To chop the cilantro, I use a pair of scissors. It feels like cheating, but apparently real chefs do it that way too, so I'm passing the tip along for what it's worth.



This is what my finished, finished stew looked like. And it tasted awesome. Really.



Packing up leftovers into glass sealers, so I can freeze them for another meal. You don't have to be that anal if you don't want to be. So there you go. You're welcome.