Recipe: Fantastic Fennel and Fiddleheads!

Here's one of our favourite recipes, a grilled summertime salad especially for new mothers, cottage trips & vegans.  It's excellent to bring over when visiting new babies as its delicious and easy to eat with one hand as well as fennel being a great galactagogue that also seems to help with a colicy or refluxy baby.

This is inspired by Molly Katzen‘s Asparagus and Fennel Salad from the Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special, which is such a great book.

It has been tweeked by Laura and Catherine who have made it an awful lot.

Prepare your Ingredients

Roasted vegetables:

1 fresh fennel bulb - cored and thinly sliced

1 pound asparagus – stemmed

1 cup stemmed & blanched fiddleheads

2 cups cherry tomatoes

2 tablespoons olive oil

Additions:

8 ounces penne 

 Dressing:

4 tablespoons olive oil

4 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

2 large cloves minced or pressed roasted garlic

1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1/3 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 cup chopped fresh herbs (parsley, basil, chives blossom and all, garlic scapes, whatever is growing in the garden)

Heat your grill to 400. Place the fennel, blanched fiddleheads, asparagus, cherry tomatoes and garlic in the grill basket, drizzle with the

olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and toss to evenly coat. Grill for about 30

minutes, stirring about every 7 minutes. The vegetables should still be brightly coloured and slightly crisp. 

 

While the vegetables are roasting, whisk all of the dressing ingredients (except the garlic which is still roasting) and then cook your pasta al dente.

Drain your pasta and combine with your roasted veggies, add it to the

bowl, pour on the dressing (which now has the garlic added), and toss well.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

Some great optional additions:

Pitted Kalamata olives

Sundried tomatoes

Feta cheese

Soup Swap Recipe: Anna, Jeff and Papa Bear's Lentil Soup

My cousin Anna and her husband Jeff brought this amazing soup to our swap.  Everybody loved it, especially the people who are pregnant or just learning to eat solids.  It apparently blew the babies' minds.

Its so easy too.  Two guests have already made it for themselves.

Anna, Jeff and Papa Bear's Lentil Soup

1 qt Vegetable stock
1 qt Water
1 lb Dried lentils, washed and picked over
2 medium Potatoes, peeled and diced
2 medium Onions, diced
2 Tomatoes, peeled, seeded and quartered
2 large Carrots, peeled and diced
3 Cloves of Garlic, minced
1 tsp dried Oregano
1/2 c Olive oil
Salt and Pepper to taste

In a large pot, bring soup stock and water to a boil. Add all the other ingredients at once.

Bring to a boil; continue boiling for 15 minutes. Then simmer over low heat for hour and it’s done.

Ta Da!  Delicious!

Soup Swap Recipe: Catherine's lemony-not-like-chilli Black Bean Soup

This week I will be sharing all our delicious vegetarian soup recipes from our soup swap.


Enjoy!

Catherine's lemony-not-like-chilli Black Bean Soup (from Laurel's Kitchen)


1 1/2 cups black turtle beans
1 1/2 quarts/litres vegetable stock
2 T oil
1 carrot
1 onion
1 potato
2 stalks celery
1 bay leaf
1 t oregano
1/4 t savoury
2 t salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
Juice of 1 lemon
1/2 lemon, thinly sliced

Wash the turtle beans and put them in a saucepan along with the stock and 1 T oil. 


Cover tightly, bring to a boil, and simmer for 2 1/2 hours or so, until beans are quite tender.

Chop the onion and saute in the remaining oil until soft. 


Chop the celery, including the leaves. 


Grate potato and carrot on a large grater. 


Add celery, potato, and carrot to onion and cook over medium heat for several minutes, stirring all the while. 


Add the vegetables to the beans, along with the seasonings, in the last hour of their cooking. 


Bring the soup to a boil and lower the heat to simmer until the beans and vegetables are done.

Add the lemon juice

Add lemon slices when the soup has finished cooking.

Makes about 9 cups.

Real Food Recipe: Heavenly Baked Beans

We have always been relatively healthy eaters but everybody has their vices, mine is canned beans.  So this is the first instalment in a series of processed food replacement recipes. Due to the baby’s soy allergy/intolerance, our participation in the Nestle boycott, and the desire to eat more whole foods we’ve been making things from scratch.  There’s little as satisfying as taking an over processed comfort/junk food and using it as inspiration for a delicious meal.

Baked Beans are very easy in a Crockpot but do take a long time.  It sure is worth it though. As is all the sugar (I didn’t say this was health food).  They also freeze well.

1 lb of beans (if I can find solider beans I use those, generally I use navy beans)

1 large peeled onion studded with 3 cloves

½ cup of brown sugar

½ cup of molasses

¼ cup of maple syrup

2 tsp of apple cider vinegar

½ tsp of salt

1/8 tsp of ground pepper

2 tsp dried mustard

1/2 cup of butter (or vegan or carnivore fat of your choice)

Rinse your beans under cold water.  Cover with water and soak overnight/all day.  This soaking helps soften up the beans and starts the germination process, which helps you digest them. 

12 hours later, drain and rinse the beans really well. Toss any split beans, loose skins or generally ugly beans.

Put them in your Crockpot/slow cooker with the clove studded onion.

Add all your ingredients in no particular order.  Stir around a bit.

Turn the Crockpot on low and start the cooking.  Cook them for 12 or more hours.  I have let them cook for as long as 20 hours if that’s how the timing works out.  I know it’s a little excessive, but they really are delicious and the smell of molasses filling your house is spectacular.  Check them a few times, if the liquid has reduced too much, add a little water, if the beans seem close to ready and they’re too wet, take the lid off for a bit.  Pull out the onion bits before serving.

Although the cooking time is long, the amount of work is minimal, probably 5 minutes worth of actual labour.

I like to eat them with mustard and whole wheat toast.  I hear this is an East Coast thing.  I think I need to go have some right now…

Happy to be participating in Vegetarian Foodie Fridays.

Recipe: Perfect Pesto

The last pesto of the season is always delicious but also a little sad.  I suppose not having fresh pesto all winter just makes it more delicious in the spring.  I’ll try to make this quick and painless so I don’t miss it too much.  Pesto is so, so, so simple to make and absolutely one of my favorite foods.

You’ll need:

4 cups of washed basil with stems and flowers removed

1 cup of pine nuts

¼ - ½ cup of olive oil

4 cloves of garlic

1/8 teaspoon pepper

½ teaspoon of salt

garlic scapes

¼ cup of parsley

We typically pick basil right into the salad spinner, then we can collect it, wash and dry it really easily.

Its important to sample your ingredients.

In your food processor, combine pine nuts and garlic and pulse a few times to start your chopping.  Add the basil, parsley and scapes, probably in two batches.  Add the olive oil to keep things moving as you continue chopping with the food processor.  Last but not least, add the salt and pepper.

We used to use a blender, but after two were destroyed by making this recipe, we invested in a real food processor.  Blenders are for smoothies, not nuts.

It will keep for up to a week in a tightly sealed container in the fridge, but we've never been able to last that long with out eating it all.

Our favourite way to eat it is on pasta with tomatoes from the garden. Beyond pasta, it is essential on tomato sandwiches, wonderful on pizza and our old roommate even used to eat spoonfuls straight out of the fridge in the middle of the night.     

Stayed tuned for a post on BBQed pesto pizza by the end of the week. 

Recipe: Autumn Soup

This is a staple at our house once the weather starts to get colder and the vegetables from the garden start to take over the house.  Currently we are overrun with carrots and squash so it must be time for soup.

First things first we need to make the stock.  I like to have some made ahead but lately I’m just not that organized.  We avoid store bought stock for a few reasons; BPA in cans, high levels of sodium especially for the baby, and all vegetable stock seems to have soy, which we just can’t have.  Stock is so easy to make that there’s really no need for the prepared stuff anyway.

Soup stock:

Fill a big pot ¾ full of cold tap water

Add 1 carrot cut lengthwise

4 stocks of celery, the more leaves the better*

2 peeled onions

1 teaspoon of salt

1 teaspoon of peppercorns

2 bay leaves

Let the water reach a boil then turn down to a simmer for about an hour.  Once everything is soft and the stock has a nice colour, strain out veggies.

*We like to use organic celery.  It tastes better and it’s the number one food on the dirty dozen; the EWG’s list of foods with the highest levels of pesticides and therefore the most important foods to buy organic.

If I haven’t prepared the stock ahead of time I start roasting the veggies as the stock simmers.  They will be finished at about the same time.

Roast your veggies on the barbeque:

Roast together with a pinch of salt and a liberal amount of olive oil:

A handful of orange carrots

A handful of yellow carrots

2 red onions

A handful of tomatoes

1 zucchini

Squash.

Normally I would use one squash, but this time I used 3; 2 Waltham Butternut and 1 Royal Acorn. We officially have too many squash.  I normally would never use this much, but we need to use them up and we have a lot of people to feed this weekend.

Sprinkle each half with brown sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt.

Put 1 clove of garlic in each cavity.

Drizzle with olive oil.

Grill veggies at 400° for 45 minutes and squash for 1 hour.

Make the soup:

Scoop out the squash into your pot of stock.  Add your veggies.   Add a chopped up potato for each person. Bring back to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes. 

Blend the soup:

An immersion blender would work best, but since I don’t have one I whizz it up in the food processor in a few batches.  Generally we continue to cook it for at least 20 minutes, or until its time to eat, once the soup has been blended.

Eat! 

Garnish with a nasturtium or some chives and serve with a nice piece of bread (like Ace Bakery’s Rosemary Focaccia) with too much butter.