Recipes – Page 4

Black Bean and Salsa Soup

March 5, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

I continue to search for great vegetarian recipes. I have a couple of wonderful cookbooks I keep drawing from, but occasionally, I hit a recipe wall. Recently I was in this predicament and asked some of my Facebook friends for help.

This is tricky, because our family avoids dairy, pork, and eats gluten-free (did I miss anything?) Invariably someone’s recipe suggestion gets nixed for one of these reasons. But a friend gave me a great recipe and the best news of all is, it’s quick! The recipe calls for a can of beans, but we can buy only dried here. Never fear, it can still be quick.

Here’s the best tip ever: don’t worry about all that pre-soaking and cooking. Put dry rinsed beans in a pressure cooker and cover with three times as much water as beans and cook for 30 minutes, then let cool down by the natural cool-down method (i.e., turn it off and let it sit until it’s ready to open), and TADA! Beans, ready to pop into your favorite recipe. Just make sure you use a stainless steel pressure cooker. Those aluminum ones leach aluminum into your food, and we weren’t meant to consume aluminum!

Black Bean and Salsa Soup

Serves 4 (so we doubled it)

Ingredients

1 15 oz. can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 c. salsa
1 1/2 c. vegetable broth
1/2 tsp. ground cumin
1c. frozen corn, thawed
dash hot sauce
cornchips (We did without these because they’re not readily available. Still yummy!)

Directions

Place 1 cup beans. salsa. broth, and cumin in a blender. and puree til smooth
Transfer to a saucepan and add remaining beans, corn, and hot sauce to taste
Stir to combine and heat thoroughly over low heat
Once warm, serve, garnished with broken corn chips ove the top. Freshly chopped cilantro anmd a dollop of vegan sour cream or vegan yogurt also make a nice garnish

Enjoy!

Our China: The Local Market, Part 3

February 18, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

This week, I’m continuing to give you a taste of the China we know by taking a last look at the Chinese market. And I have a treat for you–a special recipe our family loves made from ingredients we buy at our local Chinese market.

While pork is much more commonly eaten here than beef, (beef is considered expensive), we don’t eat pork, so we frequent the lamb and beef lady. There is only one stall selling beef at our market to the three or four that offer pork, and during Chinese New Year, that stall was closed for eight full days (so was the chicken stall–fortunately the supermarket was open).

Here I can order my meat chopped, ground, or in 片儿 piǎn er (thin strips that resemble bacon). These thin strips of beef or lamb are used for special recipes. I can have it ground or chopped, at my request. price of beef has gone up recently, and now both lamb and beef cost almost $6.00 per jin.

As promised, here’s a special recipe that uses lamb 片儿 (lamb in thin strips). But if you don’t happen to have a Chinese grocery handy that sells the 片儿, then thin stir-fry-type slices will do. This is a very northern dish. We never ate it in the south–in fact the 片儿 were hard to come by there, and much more expensive. This is the recipe, as it comes from my bilingual cookbook, Chinese Cuisine Beijing Style (out of print but worth getting your hands on if you’re serious about Chinese cuisine), but I always double it. The method of cooking, with separately mixed sauces, is very typical of Chinese cuisine.

This recipe disappears pretty quickly at our house. Serve over rice, of course, with a side of bok choy, cooked this way (you’ll thank me).

And here is the photo of this recipe, straight from my cookbook, and complete with authentic food stains created while cooking this fabulous recipe :)

Coriander Lamb

1/2 lb. thinly sliced lamb
1/2 lb fresh cilantro
1/4 cup shredded ginger
2 teaspoons garlic cloves

Sauce 1

1 Tablespoon cooking wine
1 Tablespoon salad oil
1/2 Tablespoon cornstarch (I use arrowroot flour instead)
1/4 teaspoon salt

Sauce 2

1 1/2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 Tablespoon cooking wine (try to get the kind sold at Asian groceries)
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Directions

Marinate lamb in Sauce 1 for 20 minutes. Wash coriander and cut into 1″ sections
Heat a wok, add 4 T oil. Stir-fry minced garlic and ginger root until fragrant. Add lamb and stir-fry over high heat ntil lamb color changes slightly (I fry it a little longer).
Stir in coriander and Sauce 2, stir-fry quickly and serve.

Enjoy!

Lamb Tagine

February 5, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

So remember that New Year’s resolution to add more vegetarian to the diet? This is not one of those posts.

We still enjoy our meat. I’ve been trying to add meatless dishes to the menu every other day or so. This meal is definitely one that makes us happy to be carnivores–or I guess that would be omnivores.

Recently the price of lamb here has caught up with the price of beef. When Pumpkin found that out, he said, “Why not eat more lamb, then?” Indeed. We like lamb a lot. And this recipe takes it over the top. AND it cooks in the slow cooker. What could be more perfect?

I’m sharing the recipe in its original form, but note that I cut it in half and it serves our family of five just about perfectly for a single meal. And I broke my rule on this one. I actually did do the pre-slow cooker cooking for this recipe (I didn’t want to mess it up. It’s lamb after all):

Ingredients:

1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
3 lbs. lamb shoulder meat, fat trimmed, cut into 1-inch pieces
1/2 cup olive oil
3 large onions, coarsely chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
pinch of saffron threads
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup beef broth
1 cup pitted dates, quartered
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh cilantro

Directions:

Mix the flour, salt, and pepper in a large zipper-top plastic bag. Add the meat, toss to coat, and shake off any excess flour.
Heat 1/4 cup of the oil in a large skillet over high heat.
Add the meat a fw pieces at a time and brown on all sides. Transfer the browned meat to the insert of a 5- to 7-quart slow cooker. Add the remaining oil to the same skillet and heat over medium-high heat.
Add the onions, garlic, cumin, cinnamon, ginger, and saffron and saute until the onions begin to soften, about 5 minutes.
Pour the chicken broth into the skillet and heat, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan.
Transfer the contents of the skillet to the slow cooker and stir in the beef broth and dates. Cover and cook on low for 6 to 7 hours, until the lamb is tender. Skim off any fat from the top of the sauce and stir in the cilantro.
Serve from the cooker set on warm

Served with my cheater version of saffron rice and these lovely little buttercup squashes we can buy here that sliced in half and served with a little coconut sugar and nutmeg are well–my mouth is watering. Need I say more?

Serves 8 (or halved, 5 hungry omnivores).

Crockpot Banana Bread

January 29, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Consistency is a tough battle. We haven’t been 100% successful in our effort to keep homeschool on schedule, but we’ve been successful more than not, and we’ve definitely all seen the benefits of keeping on track.

My day begins at least an hour before everyone else’s, at 6:00. It’s the early morning that wins or loses the battle for me, and often if things are going to fall apart, they do so at breakfast. Eating gluten-free in China means we don’t eat a lot of bread because eating bread means baking it for ourselves in our toaster oven and we grind our own brown rice flour ahead of time. Just to recap, that means I have to have:

ground the rice flour ahead of time with my hand grinder
have all the ingredients on hand, including tapioca and potato starch flours in addition to the aforementioned rice flour
found the time to hand-mix and bake the bread in our toaster oven

That may not seem like a lot of steps, but somehow it just is. Gluten-free recipes by their very nature are high-maintenance affairs with a ton of ingredients.

And so, in the effort to please my crowd, I am constantly in search of the “perfect” collection of breakfast recipes. I think I may be getting closer. In the past–those late mornings before my new year’s resolution–in the dark days of late homeschool and questionable productivity during homeschool hours, I’d make banana muffins for breakfast. The reasoning here was that they didn’t take as long as banana bread to bake. Both options are great on the gluten-free front because I can use buckwheat flour, which is readily available (already ground) at our local market.

But the clean-up and the last-minute preparation always put me behind schedule in the mornings, so something always had to give–my exercise time or homeschool starting on time–or both.

Enter Crockpot Banana Bread!

What an amazing invention. I mix it up the night before, pop it in a stainless-steel bowl inside my crockpot on a rack, stumble out of bed in the morning at 6:00, turn the switch on the crockpot to “high,” go about my morning routine, and right about when I should be calling out, “Breakfast is served,” it’s ready! (The smell in the kitchen during the morning routine is pretty wonderful too.)

I found a number of different recipes for this, but I like a lot of banana in my banana bread, so this is the one I arrived on, and then tweaked it just a little bit to make it even more yummy. If there’s a downside to this bread, it’s the number of bowls necessary to mix it up–one for the mashed bananas, the wet ingredients, the eggs, the dry ingredients, and the finished batter. But since I’m doing it up the night before, they’re all washed and put away by morning anyway, so it’s not that big a deal, and the taste and convenience of this recipe the next morning make it totally worth it in my books.

So without any further ado, here it is, my new favorite recipe for Crockpot Banana Bread:

Ingredients:

1 ¾ cups flour (I use buckwheat flour for a GF recipe)
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup butter (vegan conversion: grapeseed or coconut oil)
1/3-1/2 cup honey
2 eggs, well beaten (vegan conversion: 2 flax eggs)
1 ½ cups well mashed overripe bananas (2 or 3 bananas)
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions:

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. With the electric beater on low, fluff the shortening in a small bowl, until soft and creamy. Add the honey gradually. Beat in the eggs in a slow stream. Add the vanilla. With a fork, beat in 1/3 of the flour mixture, 1/2 the bananas, another 1/3 of the flour mixture, then the rest of the bananas, and finally the last of the flour mixture. Fold in the walnuts, if using.
Turn into a greased and floured baking unit or a 2 1/2 quart mold and cover. Place on a rack in the slow cooker.
Cover the cooker, but prop the lid open with a toothpick or a twist of foil to let the excess steam escape. (Don’t forget the toothpick–your loaf will be too moist without it. It’ll still taste great, but it won’t come out of the “mold” very well. Ask me how I know this!)
Cook on high for 4 to 6 hours. Cool on a rack for 10 minutes. Serve Warm.

Note: I know this recipe says 4-6 hours. The person who originally wrote the recipe without my modifications noted that hers was ready in about two hours, and that was my experience as well. All slow cookers are different.

Enjoy!

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