Vegetarian Bulgur Burgers

We made flavorful and moist vegetarian/vegan burger at the community kitchen. It is adapted from The Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home cookbook.
These burger patties are faster to prepare than most vegetarian burgers and we ate them with home made preserved carrots (left overs from last months community kitchen preserved in vinegar!) and salad.

3 cups boiling water
2 garlic cloves
1 1/2 cups bulgur
2 tbsp canola oil
1/2 cup chopped scallions
1/2 cup grated carrots
1/2 cup chopped parsley
1/4 cup tahini
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 cup mashed pinto beans (e.g. from a can)
(optional) 1 egg
salt and pepper
Sauté garlic and bulgur in a pan for about 2 min. Add boiling water and simmer for 15-18 minutes until the bulgur is soft.
Stir in the remaining ingredients.
With wet hands, form 8 burger patties.
Either bake the patties for 20 min at 375F / 190C, or fry them for about 5 minutes from each side.
Serve on a bun with tomatoes, mayonnaise, mustard, cheese, pickled carrots or other additions.

Lentils and Vegetables Indian Style

This recipe was an emergency vegetable saver as I had quite a few squash that were going bad after a weekend away. It was also my first try at makeing an Indian dish.

lentils
onion
garlic
ginger
turmeric
cayenne pepper
chili flakes
salt and pepper
leek
carrots
squash
Cook the lentils in water with a bit of salt.
In a frying pan, heat up oil and fry the onions. After a couple of minutes, add garlic and ginger. Add the spices.
Add leek and carrots. After a couple of minutes, add squash. Add spices if necessary.
When almost done, add the lentils and cook until done.

I liked the flavorful result, but it wasn't as spicy as I had hoped, I might have been too careful with the chili flakes. Next time I want to follow an actual recipe to make an Indian dish :)

Spinach Puffs

I started going to a community kitchen event that happens once a week. It's a great way to learn new recipes, the people are very welcoming and the huge kitchen is great, too!

These spinach puffs might just become my favorite recipe. They are easy to make and although I usually don't like feta cheese too much, it adds a lot to the spinach and puff pastry taste AND I can use my muffin pan for yet another non-muffin recipe!

2/3 cups thawed spinach, well squeezed to get as much water out as possible
1/2 cup feta cheese
1 onion
1 garlic clove
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp dill
salt and pepper
2 eggs
frozen puff pastry (4"/10cm squares)
Mix spinach, feta, chopped onion, garlic, olive oil, dill, salt and pepper, and one of the eggs.
Place puff pastry squares into muffin pan molds.
Fill puff pastry with spinach mix.
Fold pastry corners so that they meet in the center.
Beat the second egg and brush the pastry with it.
Bake at 400F/200C for about 25 min until golden.

I could imagine changing the salmon roll recipe to fit into puff pastry cups instead of a roll! Mmmh!

Pound Cake

After the muffins from BakeWise turned out so incredibly well, I wanted to try more recipes. One of the first recipes in the book is the Great American Pound Cake. This cake gets so much attention that there are 4 different recipes. The one that caught my attention was the recipe that called for whipped cream to be mixed gently into the dough just before baking. Clearly any cake that gets whipped cream is going to be a good one! One of the important things for this recipe is the bundt cake as the cake will not rise properly in a normal cake pan (or fall back in after baking and look sad). So I got a beautiful bundt cake pan and tried the recipe to bring to game night.

2 cups butter
2 3/4 cups coconut sugar
1 tbsp vanilla extract
6 eggs
2 3/4 cups flour
1/2 cup whipping cream
butter for the bundt pan
Combine butter and coconut sugar until fluffy. Add the vanilla extract and one egg at a time. Add flour bit by bit.
In a separate bowl, whip the whipping cream until soft peaks form. Gently fold the whipped cream into the dough. Pour the batter into a buttered bundt cake pan and bake for 40 min at 350F / 180C.

I was shocked to find that 2 cups of butter are 1 pound of butter and 2 3/4 cups of coconut sugar are 1 pound of coconut sugar! A scary suspicion about the name of the cake crept up on me..
When I took the cake out of the oven and out of the bundt pan, it seemed quite dark and I was afraid it was burned (it turned out not to be the case), so I quickly made a batch of the delicious and quick Apple-Cinnamon-Muffins to bring to game night as well. To my utter surprise the muffins paled next to the pound cake! Everyone loved moist and sweet pound cake and we got the take most of the muffins back home.

It surely wasn't the last time I made this cake but it won't become a regular one for me, the pound of butter and pound of sugar scare me a little bit.

Savory Corn Bread

What I didn't know before I made this: Corn bread in the US is usually sweet.
This recipe from BakeWise by Shirley O. Corriher is the second corn bread recipe I tried and, as the first one, it is not sweet. So I was quite surprised to find out that this is not the "normal" corn bread.

1 cup cornmeal
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
2 cups milk, hot
4 tbsp butter
3 eggs
1 cup whipping cream
1/2 tsp baking soda or 2 tsp baking powder
1 cup grated Parmesan
Mix cornmeal, salt, pepper, nutmeg and cayenne pepper. Add hot milk while stirring constantly to avoid lumps. Add the remaining ingredients.
Bake at 350F / 180C for

This particular recipe has way too much nutmeg for my taste and if I make it again I will probably leave it out all together. Apart from that I liked it with stew and soup!

Apple Cinnamon Muffin

Until I found this recipe I have mostly used my muffin pan to bake mini quiches, mini corn bread and other mini things that were not muffins.
Then I stumbled upon the following recipe in the book "BakeWise" by Shirley O. Corriher. It promised that the muffins would be deliciously moist and flavorful and I decided to finally make muffins with my muffin pan!
I mostly stuck to the recipe, although I used baking soda instead of baking powder and dried coconut instead of frozen coconut. And as always, I used coconut sugar instead of white sugar.

1 cup pecans
1 tbsp butter
salt
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking soda or 2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1 cup coconut sugar
3 eggs
1 cup canola oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cored and peeled apple, cut into chunks
2 carrots, peeled and shredded
1/2 cup golden raisins
1/2 cup coconut shreds
Roast pecans in the oven, add some butter and salt.
Mix flour and baking soda (make sure that the baking soda is well distributed), add cinnamon and coconut sugar.
In a second bowl mis eggs, canola oil and vanilla extract. Slowly pour the egg mixture into the flour mixture and combine well.
Add apples, carrots, raisins and coconut shreds.
Bake for 18 min at 400F / 200C, then cool an a cooling rack.

The muffins were indeed deliciously moist and very yummy! I made them a couple of times since the first try. Once, I ran out of coconut and made the muffins without it. Surprisingly that had a huge influence on the taste, they are much better with the coconut shreds!

Beef and Vegetable Stew

Soups and stews are easy to make and can be very tasty.

For this one I used home-made stock made from veggie scraps:

6-8 cups vegetable stock
1 onion, cut
3 carrots, cut in thin circles
1/2 lb ground beef
1 can black beans, drained
2 little yellow squash, cut in quarter circles
1/2 cup quinoa, washed
1 cup macaroni
salt, pepper, cumin, parsley

Heat some olive oil in a pan and fry half of the cut onion for a couple of minutes. Add spices and the cut carrots. Fry for another 5 minutes, then add the ground beef and fry until beef is done.
In a pot, bring the stock to a boil, add salt and spices, then reduce to a simmer. Add beans,  squash, quinoa and macaroni. Cook for about 10 minutes, then add the beef-carrot mix.

I first wasn't quite happy with the result because I had forgotten to salt the stock before putting the macaroni in so that they were kind of tasteless although the broth and vegetables had a good amount of spices in and on them. But on the second day the macaronis had sucked up the flavor and it was much better.
I also liked the colors of the dish :)

Vegetabel stock from scraps

I stumbled upon this brilliant idea a couple of weeks ago. It is quite simple:
1. Collect your veggie scraps in a container in the freezer.
2. Cook the veggie scraps with herbs in water for about an hour.
3. Drain. Use the stock.

This site has a useful picture to show which vegetables make good stock and what should be avoided.

Whenever the containers containing veggie scraps begin to take up too much space in my freezer I make a pot of stock (or rather I assume this is what I will continue doing, thus far it has only happened once) and make a soup with the stock.

So easy!

Cashew Spread

Intrigued by the possibility of vegan cheese I tried out this recipe of Vegan Pepper Jack Cashew Cheese.

The recipe calls (optionally) for agar powder. But as I couldn't find it anywhere I left it out.
The recipe also calls for a specific brand of pectin: Pomona's pectin. I had seen this brand in shops for kitchen supplies but didn't have the chance to pick it up before I tried the vegan cheese recipe. Instead I used pectin for jam.

The result was a rather un-cheesy cashew spread with a hint of sweetness. I wouldn't make it again in the same way I made it. But it tasted promising enough that I would be up for trying it again and sticking more closely to the recipe :)