Split pea veggie patties with cabbage salad

I got this recipe out of the October 2009 issue of Vegetarian Times, and I’m going to come right out and tell you that it has an Achilles heel. Like many Vegetarian Times recipes, it doesn’t fill me up, at least not at anywhere near the suggested serving size. I think VT is very health-conscious, which is great, but their form of health-consciousness is a little different from mine. I think that by eating a wide variety of foods, mostly not-very-processed plants, I am doing OK. I am not trying to lose weight, and I don’t count calories. VT has a little bit of a war on calories. I think 350 Calories is their definition of “lite,” and I think they try to make sure a high percentage of their recipes come in under that mark. I am a hungry girl, and 350 Calories is not a meal for me! I halved the original VT recipe, which claimed to serve 6, and had a little more than a third of it for lunch. An hour later, I was hungry and ended up having a not very nutrition-dense snack of bread and butter. I had the rest of the recipe for dinner, and while I didn’t go to bed hungry, I wasn’t terribly full either. So the original recipe probably serves more like 2-3 people than 6. This is both an advertisement and a warning. This meal is yummy and full of good veggies, but it might not fill you up for long. (In case you were wondering, the recipe says that 1 of their servings, which is 2 patties and 1 cup of salad, has 190 Calories. If I had read that first, I probably would have known that I needed to increase the serving size dramatically.) If you are looking to cut calories and lose weight, this is probably a great recipe for you.

Now that I’ve ranted about VT’s mission to deprive me of satiety, let’s move on to the recipe. The patties are held together by leftover split pea soup and an egg, which I think is ingenious. I have made veggie patty-type foods quite a few times, and often they don’t hold together very well at all. The soup really takes care of that. Some carrot, sugar snap peas, and corn round out the patties. I like that the patties are flavored with sesame oil, soy sauce, and ginger, but those flavors are not overwhelming. It’s served on a terrific bed of cabbage and carrots. This might have been my first time to eat Napa cabbage. It is not exotic to me, but it’s something, like turnips or radishes, that I see all the time in the store and never eat. Napa cabbage is pretty awesome! I guess I kind of just thought it was expensive white cabbage, but it has a less bitter flavor, and the leaves are easier to work with than cabbage leaves. I guess it’s more like lettuce that way. I really liked the crisp texture of the cabbage in the salad.

Split pea veggie patties

makes about 6 patties, 3 VT servings, 1-2 Evelyn servings; multiply as needed

1 cup split pea soup (of course, you could use canned)

1 egg

1/4 cup cornmeal

1/2 cup sugar snap peas, coarsely chopped

1/2 cup grated carrot

1/2 cup corn kernels (frozen are fine)

1 green onion, chopped (both white and green parts)

1 tbsp toasted sesame oil

1 tsp soy sauce

1 tsp fresh ginger, minced or grated

Whisk together soup and eggs in a medium bowl. Stir in cornmeal, followed by the rest of the ingredients.

Heat a nonstick or your preferred frying pan over medium. Add some oil if you need it, and once the pan is hot, drop 1/4-cup scoops of pea mixture onto the pan. Flatten into disc shapes with a fork and cook 5 minutes, or until bottom is slightly browned. Flip and cook 5 minutes more.

Serve 4 patties each on a bed of cabbage salad, below.

Cabbage salad

makes 1 salad; multiply as needed

4 leaves Napa cabbage

1/2 cup grated carrot

2 tsp sesame seeds, toasted if you feel like

Miso salad dressing or other salad dressing (An Asian-ish one makes a lot of sense, but I think this would be fine with a vinaigrette or whatever you have. OK, not ranch.)

Thoroughly wash and thinly slice cabbage leaves. Combine with grated carrot and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Dress salad with 3 tbsp or so miso salad dressing (probably less of other salad dressings). Place 4 veggie patties on cabbage salad and dress with a little more dressing to taste.

Salad days

We love salad. Almost every day, we have a big one with dinner, and we often bring one in to school to eat with lunch. The usual ingredients are lettuce, tomatoes, red pepper, and cucumber, but we keep it interesting by adding things like carrot, daikon, beets, or celery and varying the extras: nuts, seeds, croutons, beans, and cheese. Sometimes I supplement the regular red leaf or romaine lettuce with baby greens, sorrel, kale, or herbs from my garden. Despite being a vegetarian since 2002, I was never much of a salad person until Jon and I started dating. He showed me that salads don't have to come from a bag* and are interesting and different every time. Now I miss them when I leave town for a few days. When I get back from a math conference or other out-of-town trip, I often call Jon from the airport and tell him to have a big green salad ready for me when I get home.

Every once in a while, I go crazy and make a wacky salad that doesn't even have lettuce! When we discovered the great new Chinese grocery store that's convenient to my tutoring gig, I bought these little yellow melons and tons of pea shoots. Here's a little salad I love that I've made a few times now.
Just chop up half a little yellow melon (I don't know a name for them), toast 1 tbsp sesame seeds, grate one carrot, and toss it together with a handful of pea shoots and blueberries. Green, sweet, crunchy, and springy. I didn't dress it. Maybe a squeeze of lemon juice and a drizzle of honey or agave nectar, maybe some almond oil? But it was good naked too.

I don't have any other good salad pics on this computer right now, but I might update this post with some salads of which we are especially proud.

* We don't buy bagged salad greens, but I am certainly not opposed to them. We eat salads regularly enough that the lettuce rarely goes bad, and we have time to wash and tear the lettuce leaves each time we make a salad, but I completely understand that bagged greens are more convenient, and that convenience might be the difference between eating a salad and having lettuce rot in your fridge. So if bagged salad greens work for you, go for it! Anything that leads to a larger number of salads eaten is good.

Carrot flan

I got Vegetable Heaven by Mollie Katzen as a wedding shower present, and it seems to be full of really inventive recipes. This is the first one I tried, and while it didn't come out exactly the way I expected, it tasted really good. The thyme and sage flavors are present and harmonize beautifully with the carrot flavor. This was also my first flan attempt, and I'm pretty pleased with how well they set. And I didn't spill boiling water on myself or an innocent bystander. Victory!
The description of the dish in the book is as follows: As these fragrant custards bake, they turn a creamy shade of yellow on the outside and a beautiful deep rust color on the inside. It's like magic. As you can see, that didn't happen to me at all. I don't know if the carrot juice I used was too pulpy or something, but instead of that color explosion, the solids in the carrot juice, along with most of the color, aggregated, and the rest of the flan was beige. The taste was fine, and the texture of the carrot solids was not objectionable in the least, but I was kind of looking forward to the rich orange inside I was promised. I did, however, get a bonus color explosion during baking: the blue dish towel I used under the ramekins leached dye into the water. I found that disconcerting until I realized that towels aren't meant to be color-fast at 350 F.

The carrots I am growing in my garden have been a great success, despite my wimpy thinning. It's hard to tell how big they are from above, but I picked a few nice ones for the garnish for this dish. They're a nice special treat. I eat them with the greens still attached, although at this point the greens are getting a little fibrous.
Carrot flan

Nonstick spray for the ramekins
1 tbsp butter
1 1/2 cups minced onion
1 1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp minced garlic
1 tbsp dried thyme
1 tbsp dried rubbed sage
4 cups fresh carrot juice
6 large eggs
1 cup milk, any fat content, non-dairy OK
Homegrown baby carrots, greens still attached, for garnish, optional

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Place a folded kitchen towel neatly in the bottom of a 9x13-inch baking pan. Spray 4 12-oz, 5 10-oz, or 6 8-oz ramekins with nonstick cooking spray and place them on top of the towel. (The towel will help distribute moist heat during baking.)

Melt the butter in a large skillet or saute pan over medium heat. Add the onion and salt and saute for 8-10 minutes, or until soft and translucent. Stir in the garlic and herbs and saute for about 2 more minutes. Add the carrot juice, bring to a boil, then turn the heat way down. Simmer uncovered until the carrot juice is reduced by about half, 10-12 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.

Combine the eggs and milk in a medium-large bowl, and beat slowly with a fork. Place a strainer over the bowl and strain the carrot juice mixture into the eggs and milk, pressing out as much liquid as you can. Discard the solids. Gently stir until thoroughly blended. Immediately ladle into prepared ramekins. Pour hot water into the baking pan until it reaches halfway up the sides. Bake 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until the custards are just set.

Serve straight from ramekins or invert onto plates. To invert, let cool for five minutes, loosed sides with a knife, put a plate on top of the ramekin, say a little prayer, and turn over. Garnish with baby carrots if desired.

Roasted root vegetables with fennel spice blend

My sister gave me a coffee grinder for my birthday so I could use it as a spice grinder. I had always relied on pre-ground spices before, including a lot of pre-mixed spice blends. Now that I have the spice grinder, I feel free to make whatever exotic spice blends I want. This month's Vegetarian Times had an interesting-looking fennel spice blend, so I made it, and now I'm trying to use it in a bunch of different stuff. It was OK but not great in hummus and pretty good sprinkled on roasted butternut squash seeds, but it was perfect with this vegetable roast.

The vegetables themselves were pretty exciting. We used a total of seven different vegetables. Five of them were new to me in cooking, although I have probably eaten them before. Instead of the usual sweet potatoes, we used a garnet yam and a Japanese sweet potato (at least that's what Central Market called them). The Japanese sweet potato had deep maroon skin but a white interior. It was stickier than regular potato or sweet potato when cooked.

Japanese sweet potato on the left, garnet yam on the right

I am looking forward to doing a potato and sweet potato roast with Japanese sweet potatoes and normal new potatoes. I think the contrast in texture and flavor would be neat since there wouldn't be a color contrast. The other new to me root vegetables were celery root, turnip, and rutabaga. The celery root was pretty neat. I only used half of it and plan on trying remoulade with the other half. The rutabaga and turnip mostly provided contrast. This dish took a lot of scrubbing and chopping, but other than that it was really easy. Next time I might start cooking the celery root before the other vegetables. It was still a bit crunchy when the other ones were done, but we didn't mind the textural contrast. We served this with a beautiful salad made by Jon and corn chowder I made while the veggies were roasting. That recipe should be posted here soon.

Roasted root vegetables with fennel spice blend
Of course, you can vary the roots as desired. I think we had about 8 cups total.

1 garnet yam
1 Japanese sweet potato
1/2 of a large celery root, peel removed (This is a bit annoying. Just accept that you'll lose some of the root and use a sharp knife to cut the peel away as best you can.)
2 carrots, peeled
3 beets, greens and "tails" cut off
1 turnip, peeled
1 rutabaga, peeled
1 tsp olive oil (not extra-virgin)
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp fennel spice blend (see next recipe)

Preheat oven to 400 F. Thoroughly wash and scrub all the vegetables that aren't peeled. Cut everything into 1 1/2-inch-ish chunks. Place all vegetables in a large baking pan. Mine was 13x9x2. Drizzle with olive oil and toss to coat thoroughly, adding a little more if necessary. Sprinkle with salt and fennel spice blend. Bake until vegetables are tender, about 45 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes. Sprinkle with more salt and fennel blend at the table if desired.

Fennel spice blend (from Vegetarian times)
If you don't have a spice grinder, you can use the same amounts of pre-ground spices instead.

1/4 cup whole fennel seeds
2 tsp whole coriander seeds
1/2 tsp whole peppercorns
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp paprika, either smoked or regular

Toast fennel seeds, coriander, and peppercorns in a dry skillet on medium heat for 2-3 minutes or until they are very fragrant and maybe have gotten a little golden. Put aside to cool. When they are cool, grind them with a mortar and pestle or spice grinder until they are just short of completely powdered. Stir in the cinnamon and paprika. Store in a resealable baggie or rinsed-out spice jar.

Curried carrot raisin salad

I don't have a picture of this because my camera batteries died last night and I couldn't find another charged pair. But it's not much to look at anyway. I have always quite enjoyed Luby's cafeteria-style carrot raisin salad (shredded carrots, raisins, mayo, maybe some pineapple). The latest issue of Bon Appetit had a more mature carrot-raisin salad recipe, and I really like it. First of all, I prefer raw carrots to cooked, but they can be hard on the jaw. Shredded carrots are the way to go. Also, the mint really makes it sparkle, and the yogurt and lemon juice balance the sweetness of the carrots and raisins. I used to be somewhat against mint in non-dessert foods, but I've been coming around (having a ton of mint in my garden doesn't hurt), and I really like it in here. I don't think the amount they recommend is enough. Maybe just add that amount and keep adding more until you're happy with it. I think this salad would also be good, albeit very different, with any fresh-tasting herb in place of the mint. Parsley and cilantro are the obvious choices, although maybe basil or Thai basil could work too. I would like to experiment with it, but I like the mint so much that I might not be able to bring myself to try something else. I added a sprinkling of whole cumin seeds because I love cumin and can't get enough. The first time I made it, I added a little too much curry powder, and I think I added too little this time. But it's easy to just sprinkle a little more on at the table.

Curried carrot raisin salad, with my modifications in italics:
3/4 cup plain yogurt
Juice of 1/2 lemon
2 tbsp fresh mint, minced (I would use about twice that much, or to taste)
3/4-1 tsp curry powder, or to taste
1 lb carrots, peeled and grated (food processor is best for this)
1/4 cup raisins, or more to taste
Healthy sprinkling of whole cumin seeds, maybe 1/2 tsp

Whisk first four ingredients together in medium bowl. Add carrots and raisins and mix thoroughly. Sprinkle with cumin seeds and serve.

I served it with tortellini with a creamy, cheesy pea sauce. They didn't go together at all, but it was just what I wanted. That's why I love cooking at home. Restaurants would never serve curried carrot salad with tortellini and peas. They're bullies.

Miso soup

I made miso soup for the first time on Friday. It was raining cats and dogs, so soup seemed appropriate. Plus, I had bought miso a while ago and hadn't gotten around to using it yet. I threw in some extras to make it a little more substantial than your standard Japanese restaurant miso soup. Beyond the dashi and miso, everything else is optional, and you can add any other fun extras you want. I don't know very much about miso, and I forgot to write down the kind I used. It was a light brown color. I know each kind has its own flavor but are to some degree interchangeable. Dashi is Japanese kelp stock. It traditionally has bonito fish flakes in it, but I didn't add them. This was my first time making or using it, and I also added some other seaweed to the soup itself. I had only had seaweed in the form of Japanese restaurant seaweed salad, but I bought a bunch of dried seaweed in Chinatown a few months ago and have decided to explore a little bit. So far, so good.

Miso soup (adapted from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman):
1 quart dashi (see next recipe)
1/3 cup miso
8 oz firm silken tofu, cut into small cubes
1/2 cup frozen edamame
1 carrot, cut into small rounds
1/4 cup dry hijiki seaweed, rehydrated in about 1/3 cup warm water for a few minutes

Heat the dashi in a saucepan over medium heat until it's almost boiling. Then scoop out about 1/2 a cup and mix it with the miso. Then add the miso mixture back to the dashi. Toss in the rest of the ingredients, including the water used to rehydrate the hijiki. Let it cook without boiling until the edamame is cooked to your taste.

Dashi (also from Bittman):
2 quarts of water
1 piece of kombu (kelp), about 4-6 inches (I'm a seaweed newbie, and the whole piece looked awfully big to me (about 4x10 inches or so), so I cut it in half, and it seemed to work fine.)

Put the water and dashi in a saucepan over medium heat until almost boiling. Bittman says it takes about 15 minutes. I wasn't paying attention to the time when I made it, so I don't know. I used one quart immediately in the miso soup and froze the other quart for the next batch of soup.

The next day for lunch I had leftover miso soup with spring rolls. I made a dipping sauce for the spring rolls this time: peanut butter, orange juice, rice wine vinegar, toasted sesame oil, and srirachi (Thai chili sauce), all to taste. I also tossed a couple leftover leaves of lacinato kale (aka dinosaur kale) into the soup. Both were good choices.

Spring rolls

Since the blog is just beginning, I think I should have a post about something that went right: spring rolls! These were for a special dinner for Jon when he got back into town after being gone for a whole week.

First, I dry-fried some firm silken tofu. I just used a nonstick pan and cooked it until it was brown on each side. I had never tried that technique before, but I was really pleased with the texture.

Next, I laid out the other fillings: apples, carrots, kohlrabi, cucumber, lettuce, asparagus, herbs, and (self-sprouted) bean sprouts. To make each roll, we soaked a wrapper in warm water until it was pliable. Then we filled it the way we wanted to and rolled it up like a burrito. It was fun because each one was different. Jon made a little dipping sauce with Hoisin sauce, Sriracha, and some other stuff. I might try a peanut-based sauce next time.

To round out the meal, I served hot and sour soup, seaweed salad, and leftover mung beans in coconut milk with jasmine rice. It was a good way to welcome him home.