Shawna Coronado's Pumpkin Harvest

Yep, that’s right.  It’s another #meatlessmonday and another installment of the 2009 Nude & Echo-Cheap Cooking Initiative.  Today we’re making

Pumpkin Soup

If you’re not familiar with the 2009 Nude & Eco-Cheap Cooking Initiative, that’s where I take the delicious veggies grown by the always awesome Shawna Coronado and turn them into a meal for a family of four that costs less than $11.50.  Can I do it?

Yes I can with this easy, but delicious pumpkin soup.

I actually love pumpkin season.  I think it’s kind of a shame that it only seems to be popular for about two months.  Still, every year people go NUTS for pumpkins: pumpkin desserts, pumpkin soups, pumpkin coffee drinks, pumpkin pizza, and so on.  Then even before the Thanksgiving leftovers are done…BOOM… everyone’s on to peppermint or sugar cookies or some other Christmas phase.  Anyway, I’m ranting.

The good news is that for the next month or so we can continue to enjoy pumpkin recipes like this one.

Making Pumpkin Soup

This recipe is so easy, but it takes a little while to make because you want to cook the pumpkin before you put it into the soup.  Boiled pumpkin sounds ridiculously unappetizing and the stuff would take forever to boil anyway. So, instead, you need to bake it first.  Once it’s ready, the rest of the soup is a breeze.

You will need:

• 1 pumpkin, halved and seeded (free from Shawna’s garden)
• 8 tablespoons olive oil, divided (free as part of the challenge)
• 1 loaf bread ($2.00)
• 1 clove of garlic (5 cents)
• 1 medium yellow (non-sweet) onion, 1/4 inch dice (free from Shawna’s garden)
• 16 ounces of mushrooms, cleaned and sliced ($3.50)
• 2 teaspoons black pepper
• 6 cups broth ($1.50)
• 2 cups heavy cream ($3.50)
• 4 leaves basil, thinly sliced (free from Shawna’s garden)

Total: $10.55 (cream is expensive, but still made it!!)

Heat your oven to 350 degrees.  Cover both halves of the pumpkin in about two tablespoons of olive oil and sprinkle with a bit of salt.  Bake for forty-five minutes cut side down or until the pumpkin is fork tender.

When the pumpkin is finished, let it cool and then cut into a small dice and set aside.

Next, cut the loaf of bread in half and then cut into 2 inch wide pieces. Rub with the cut clove of garlic and drizzle with olive oil.

In a soup pot, add 2 tablespoons of olive oil then saute the onions until they start to turn translucent.  Then add the mushrooms and cook them until the are brown and shriveled.  Add the black pepper and the broth and bring to a boil.    (At this point, put the bread in the oven and keep an eye on it.  You will want to remove it when it gets brown.)

When the broth is boiling, add the cream and bring the soup back to a boil.

Finally, add the pumpkin and let it get warm. 

Serve with the basil on top of the soup and enjoy!

Related posts:

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However, before we get into this dish, I’d like to thank Gourmet Girl for all her tempura advice.  Thanks!

Now without further ado…

Tempura Veggies

There’s just something wonderful about tempura vegetables.  The lightness and the saltiness of the batter mixed with the crunch and the natural flavor of the vegetables… there’s no finer way to eat vegetables.  Of course, despite the lightness of a tempura fry, it’s still a fry.  Which is how tempura veggies made it to unResolution month and why they’re a sometimes food.

With that being said, on to the recipe!

Tempura Vegetables

You will need:

• 2 cups rice flour
• 2 cups soda water
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 eggs
• 8 mushrooms
• 1 onion, sliced in rings
• 10 okra, cut into bite sized pieces
• 1 head of broccoli broken into large florets
• 1/2 cup corn starch
• Oil for frying
• Kosher salt to sprinkle on the vegetables

Mix the flour, soda water, salt, and eggs well with a fork until it has the consistency of pancake batter.  Dip the vegetables first in the corn starch and then the tempura batter.  Let the vegetables rest on a plate while the oil heats.

Bring the oil to 350 degrees or heat over medium-high temperature.  You know it’s ready when you add a piece of vegetable and it fries furiously.

Fry the food in small batches until golden brown, usually 2-4 minutes.  Remove to a cooling rack and sprinkle with salt.

Once they are cool, pop them in your mouth and enjoy!

Notes:

• Leave the stems on the mushrooms or else the hole where the cap was will fill with batter and have a hard time cooking completely.

Photo courtesty of jslander.

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2. Deep Fried Vegan Sushi – Junk Food Post #10Consider the following entry into the amazing world of sushi-dom...
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The go-to protein food for many vegetarians is tofu.  Which is great, but the problem is that the way I like it (firm or extra firm tofu put into stir fries or fajitas) takes about 2 hours to do right.  When the boy is hungry, that’s way too much time.

Enter Seitan (pronounced, unfortunately, as say-tun or as everyone’s favorite bringer of evil, Satan.)

Seitan has allowed me to keep my vegetarianism once already and may be what lets me stay vegetarian a second time.  The first time occurred maybe two months after I decided to stop eating meat.  I had taken my son to a restaurant for dinner and sat down next to a man enjoying a slab of ribs.  The smell of the sauce from those ribs nearly threw me into an absolute frenzy to the point I wanted to reach across the aisle and take the ribs.  On pain of death if necessary.

After complaining to my wife that I could not do the vegetarian thing anymore, she reminded me of an article in Vegetarian Times where they did vegetarian pulled pork with seitan.  One trip to Whole Foods later, I had a package of seitan which I cooked in some barbecue sauce and voila! vegetarianism saved.  Crisis averted.

Anyway, I am finding myself in a situation where I need more protein.  Suddenly things I would not normally eat, namely kidney beans and cheese sandwiches, taste like gourmet food fit for royalty.  My wife again reminded me that seitan, made from wheat gluten, is very high in protein and that I should consider fixing it and eating it more often.

Last night gave me the chance to try out her suggest.  We invited a vegan friend over dinner.  My wife said she was going to fix stir fry, but when our son needed her attention, I ended up fixing dinner.  This is what we had:

• 1 Package Seitan, cut into 1/2 inch squares
• 1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons low sodium tamari
• 2 tablespoons of soy ginger sauce (may substitute with 2 more tablespoons of tamari and 1 teaspoon of ginger)
• 2 teaspoons of garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon of ginger powder
• 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil 
• 2 medium or 1 large onion, diced
• 3 pinches of kosher salt
• 1 green pepper, diced
• 4 carrots, peeled and cut into 1/4in. coins
• 1 leek, sliced into 1/4 in coins
• 1/2 cup of broccoli florets
• 1 broccoli stem cut into 1/4 in. coins
• 3 portabellas cut into 1/2 in. wide strips
• 2 ears of corn, kernels removed

1. Boil the seitan over medium low heat in the 1/4 cup of tamari, soy ginger sauce, ginger, and garlic powder for 10 minutes or until it is soft all the way through.
2. Bring the heat to medium high, add the olive oil, and sauté the seitan for three minutes to give it a little structure.
3. Reduce the heat to medium and add the onions.  Add 1 pinch of kosher salt.  Cook until the onions are soft.
4. Add the green pepper, carrots, leeks, broccoli florets, broccoli stem. and another pinch of salt.  Cook until carrots reach desired softness.  This step is pretty much up to each individual cook.  I like my carrots to have a bite to them, so I cook them for maybe 10 minutes.   Some may want them to cook longer.
5. Add the portabellas and the final pinch of salt.  Cook until the mushrooms have released their liquid about 5 minutes.
6. Add the corn and cook for about a minute.
7. Add the last two tablespoons of tamari and cook for another minute.

Serve over rice and enjoy! 

Oh, and on a side note, I can’t wait to tell my family that liking seitan keeps me vegetarian.  Especially when I pronounce it properly.

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