Veganmofo: Fuck yes pumpkin! Thai Pumpkin Soup

So along with spuratic posting comes my theme of spuratic themes for Vegan Mofo. Perhaps my favourite of all the various theme's I've been experimenting with is Fuck yes Pumpkin! which as the name suggests is me making pumpkin shit!

And I will never, ever, ever get tired of it.

Starting off with something simple inspired by the now closed Satisfaction Feast in halifax n.s. canada where they made some wicked soups one of which was a thick, creamy, spicy pumpkin soup called Thai Pumpkin.

Thai Pumpkin Soup

• 1/2 medium pumpkin roasted and pureered [roast for an hour at 400]
•  1 can coconut milk
• 3 tbs red thai curry paste
• 2 tbs corriander
• 3 tbs cumin
• 2 tbs paprika
• 2 tbs yellow curry powder
• 1 inch ginger minced or grated
• 3 large garlic cloves minced or grated
• 2 large onions minced
• 3 tbs olive oil or margerine
• 4 cups homemade vegetable stock
• salt and pepper

To start roast and puree pumpkin (or pull some from the freezer to defrost) and chop the onions. Preheat your oil/margarine in a large dutch oven on medium heat. Once heated add your curry paste and cook for a few minutes. Add spices and cook for 2-3 mins string/scrapping the bottom to get everything toasted and bubbling.

Now add your onions and salt continuing to stir and cook until the onions are translucence (5-8 mins). Things should be smelling pretty good and you can now grate in the ginger and garlic. You want to make sure everything cooks and the flavours develop but nothing burns so adjust heat as needed.

Once things are smelling good, add your pumpkin and stir/cook for 5 mins. You want to make sure the spices/onion are evenly throughout the pumpkin and it is heated through. Slowly pour in your stock until you reach the desired thickness cover and boil for 20-30 mins stirring occasionally. The soup should thicken up a bit and smell awesome. Turn down the heat and add the coconut milk, stir to thicken.

Here you can either eat immediately or if your patient you can let it cook for a bit more to mix up the flavours.

Eat with bread/naan or toppings:

• cajun roasted pumpkin seeds
• coarse sea salt
• earth balance swirled
• crushed chili flakes
• drizzle of siracha or hot sauce
• vegan coconut yogurt swirl

Happy Fall Mofo-ers!

VEGANMOFO 2012!

AHHH!!! MOFO!!! I cannot believe I almost forgot about the best month ever! It's time to dig out my camera and make my way back into the kitchen!

Sorry for all the neglect, my time's been pretty eaten up with the new Feminist Job
and stuff like 41 Days for Choice, but damned if i'm not gonna find some way to mix activism with vegan eating!

Veganmofo: Cheddar Onion Biscuits:Cooking from the Mofo Feed

During one of my feverous Mofo Reader comment-a-thons I came across Mo's post on Best Thing You Never Ate where she posted these amazing biscuits!

So simple and flavourful, they come together quickly. I wasn't making gravy but I wanted a flavourful biscuit for breakfasts and to round out my lunches. Plus Diaya's been on sale here recently so I have a stock pile and Green onions were 99cents!

I followed Mo's Recipe with the following changes:

• I subbed Earth Balance Margerine for Shortening (because I oddly had none left)
• And I subbed 1 cup of WW Flour for the white and used WW to roll out the dough.
• Used a sili-pad to bake them on, so I didn't bother with the greasing
• I did a soy milk brush glaze on the second batch to go into the oven as well as played with some shapes.

The almond milk didn't seem to curdle as much as I expected, but I added it anyway. I also seem to have lost my Pastry Cutter, so I used my Mezzaluna and some butter knives/forks. It worked out OK, not supper pebbly but manageable.

I used a mason jar to cut my biscuits and played with the remaining dough to make tiny hand pies and some braids to see how they'd bake up!

The first batch cut with mason jars and rolled maybe 1 inch thick? Were in for 25 minutes before I checked on them.They didn't brown a whole lot on the top, but the were pretty firm. The second free-formed batch where much bigger and I think that helped them to get a flakier texture.

Sorry about the bad lighting. But there had to be a fresh outta the oven shot.

It turns out the smaller, denser biscuits that were rolled pretty thin because extra fluffy when microwaved the next day. All and all these are super flavourful and pretty damn tasty biscuits to stuff your face with!

I used a silipat  to bake mine, 

VeganMofo: Cheap Eats, Recycle your leftovers!

Making a large batch of foods definitely saves you on two major resources time and power. But sometimes eating the same thing for weeks (especially if you live alone, and you wind up with even more meals/portions) makes your stomach turn, or heck you get bored with whatever it was.

This is where leftover recycling comes in, a concept I first hear about from the amazing Cheap Vegan Guru Stephanie (author of the Cheap Vegan series of Zines).

 

Leftover recycling allows you to enjoy one meal for a variety of days in different ways and helps strench out your food and time budgets. 

This meal was a combo of leftovers from earlier in the week. I had made the AFR Not-refried beans earlier in the week, some leftover kidney beans from when I cooked up a lbs of them to make the beans + in sauce, plus some chick-in brown rice (brown rice cooked in vegan chick-n stock from bulk barn), steamed carrots from a meal I cooked for the boy and I and the crumbs of Kale chips.

The beans were used with chips originally, rice was a side for some meal same with carrots. So tonight's meal was essentially a bowl. Rice topped with the re-fried bean, kidney beans in sauce, kale chips, steamed carrots topped with some cock-sauce, salsa and Daiya.

 The result was a nice creamy dish that doesn't photograph well but tastes great. Alternatively, it would also be great in a wrap as a burrito. MMM burritos.

So there it is, recycling your leftovers one simple way. Stay tuned for more examples, because this made more than I could eat!

Vegan Mofo V !!

That's right kids, Vegan Mofo is back again! So gear up for the 2011 version of vegan internet food madness!http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

I'll be back again this year and am hoping this blog-a-thon month (coming to an internet near you this October) will give me the boost I need to keep eating/cooking and writing about it regularly.

So stayed tuned for my soon to be announced theme and check out the veganmofo site to get the lay down on how to join or to grab the much coveted RSS Feed when it is realease.

Vegan Mofo 2011