Wonton soup + cuddly cats

The guys have taken off to the shops. M and I decided to have a nice warm soup for lunch. Here's what we made:



It was great. M even ate bok choy, which is normally not something she would touch. She said it was the best soup ever.

Quick Wonton Soup

Serves 2 (with generous seconds!)

Ingredients

(The measures here are mostly estimates, as I didn't measure precisely as I went.)

1 1/4 litre vegan stock (I used Massel chicken style stock)
1/4 cup sliced dried shiitake mushrooms
10 store bought Chinese vegan dumplings
1 small carrot, sliced
1 plant bok choy, stem and leaves chopped and separated
2cm knob ginger, chopped into thin julienne
1-2 tablespoons soy sauce

Method

1. Rinse mushrooms and put them in a 2 litre saucepan.
2. Add stock. Bring to boil. Reduce heat. Simmer for 10 minutes.
3. Add all remaining ingredients, except bok choy leaves. Simmer 5-10 minutes until dumplings are warmed through.
4. Add bok choy leaves and simmer until leaves are soft.
5. Serve and enjoy!
   

Caturday

Sleepy cuddles!

Christmas Lunch

Hi again. Hope those of you who celebrate holidays are having a wonderful time and all who don't have had some great time off.

We are a blend of lapsed Catholics, vaguely proto-Catholics and atheists in our little household of 5. Despite this, we celebrate Christmas in a rather secular way with gifts, special food and family visits during the week. This year, we stayed home and the 5 of us celebrated a quiet Christmas day. (We saw extended family before and after the 25th.) It was a great day, with lovely family time and time to relax.

Here's our Christmas lunch. I went all out and did 5 courses.


First up was Pumpkin and Lentil Soup. This was Z's request for the meal. He loves this soup. We had Nuttelex or hommous for the rolls.


Then we had Mock Prawn Cocktail. I saw a simple cocktail sauce recipe (mayo, tomato sauce and Worcestershire sauce) in a Margaret Fulton Christmas cookbook. I decided to do a retro entree (appetiser for the US readers). The sauce is served with some mock prawns from the White Jade Garden vegetarian supermarket, lettuce and avocado. Z did not like the prawns, but everyone else liked this. Z still ate all the lettuce and avocado (and some of his sister's).


Main meal. This was cold sanitarium roast with cranberry sauce (cooked the day before), tsueh yu tofu, a roll, Margaret Fulton's beetroot and orange salad, Chang's noodle cabbage salad, mixed tomato salad and a simple pasta salad with italian dressing and olives (Z's favourite). This was all very nice. I loved the beetroot salad, which was both sweet and earthy.


Christmas cake and So Good vanilla ice cream for my small dessert. Others had various icecream/rum ball/biscotti/custard combos. It was a help-yourself thing. The kids enjoyed lashings of icecream, as you can imagine.


Finally, coffee with rumballs and a bite of rocky road.

It was a delightfully quiet day, with a delicious lunch. I'll post some recipes in the next few days.

Pumpkin and Lentil Soup

A little while ago, I decided to make pumpkin soup for dinner again. However, I wanted to make sure that we had a bit of protein to make it more filling. What to do? Add red lentils!

Pumpkin and Lentil Soup

Ingredients

1 small pumpkin, peeled, seeded and chopped into 5 cm pieces (butternut is very good)
1 large onion chopped
1 tablespoon vegan margarine
1 cup dry red lentils
water sufficient to cover (over 1 litre)
2 vegan stock cubes (I used Massel Chicken Style cubes)
1/4 teaspoon dry ground ginger

Method

1. Heat margarine in a soup pot. Add onion and sweat until translucent.
2. Add remaining ingredients.
3. Cook 30 minutes or until pumpkin and lentils are tender.
4. Blend until smooth. I used a stab blender in the pot for convenience.
5. Serve with bread and enjoy.

Happily, everyone loved it, including the normally lentil averse children. The dominant flavour is the pumpkin, with a hint of creamy lentil savouriness. It hit the spot on a cold night. I would happily serve it to omnivorous guests.

Soup for an incipient cold

Ok, this post is not technically an "Aussie food" post. Last night, I felt like I was coming down with a cold. You know the deal, that almost a sore throat, runny nose, almost a fever kind of feeling.

I don't know about you, but when I feel a cold coming on, I want a nice hearty soup. I like ginger, garlic, miso and greens to boost immunity. So I cooked this:


Asian Inspired Tofu, Rice and Vegetable Soup

Serves 6

2 tablespoons rice bran oil or other mild cooking oil
320 g extra firm tofu, cut into 1 1/2 cm cubes
1 small onion
4 cloves crushed garlic (I cheated and used the stuff from a jar)
1 cm piece fresh ginger, minced
1 cup rice
bunch Asian greens (I used choy sum, but you could use gai lan, bok choy or wombok)
2 medium tomatoes, chopped into 2 cm pieces
4 sliced mushrooms
2 sliced carrots
5 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons cooking sherry
4 tablespoons miso paste
Water

1. In a large soup pot, heat the oil. Add the tofu and onion. Fry over a gentle heat until onion is translucent.
2. Add garlic and ginger. Fry gently until ginger is fragrant.
3. Chop the Asian greens. Separate the stems and leaves. You will be putting them in at different stages.
4. Add all the remaining ingredients, other than the miso paste and leaves of your Asian greens.
   
5. cover with water to about 5 cm above the other ingredients. To speed this up, I boiled the water in a kettle and just poured over the boiling water.
6. Bring to boil and simmer for 10-15 minutes or until rice is cooked.
7. Add the leaves of your green and cook for 2 minutes.
8. Remove from heat and add miso paste. Stir well to combine.
   
9. Add more boiling water, if you want more liquid.
10. Serve and enjoy.

It was very good. You could add chilli if you like spicy soups. Did it work to cure my cold? Well I don't feel too bad today, so maybe it helped.

Easy Minestrone

A few nights ago, I made a big pot of minestrone. It is not the most authentic recipe, but it is popular in our house.

The recipe that I use is one that I read ages ago in a women's magazine. Unfortunately, I can't remember which one and now just make the soup from memory, so I have tweaked it a bit anyway.

I used the left-over cabbage from the cabbage roles that I made a few weeks ago. When I made them, I chopped the remaining steamed cabbage and put it in the freezer. The cabbage amount below is just an estimate based on about how much was left.

Easy Minestrone

2 medium onions
2 cloves garlic (more if you like)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 800g(?) tin backed beans
1 440g tin crushed tomatoes
1/4 cabbage
2 sticks celery
2 carrots
1 teaspoon dried thyme
dash black pepper (or more to taste)
2 vegan stock cubes (your choice of flavour)
250g short shapes pasta
water to cover well.

1. Chop the fresh vegetables. Gently fry them in a large soup pot with the oil.
2. Once the onion is translucent, add all remaining ingredients except the pasta. Add water to desired soup consistency.
3. Bring to boil and then simmer 20 minutes.
4. Add pasta. Bring soup back to boil. Reduce to a simmer and simmer until pasta is tender (10-15 minutes).
5. Add extra water if the soup has become too thick as the pasta cooked. Reheat it if you do this.
6. Serve with crusty bread.

This recipe freezes well. It is usually popular with everyone, including omnis.

Asian Inspired Meals

Our meals recently have been asian inspired:



This was Monday, the Queen's Birthday holiday. We had sushi balls with pickled ginger and avocado, Woolworths Rainbow salad, baked tofu, shop bought spring rolls, and miso eggplant and pumpkin.

The sushi balls were simply sushi rice, made according to the packet instructions, with sushi vinegar, and shaped into balls. The tofu was baked with equal amounts of soy sauce and brown sugar.

Miso-baked Eggplant and Pumpkin

Serves 4-6 as a side dish

One large eggplant
Small butternut pumpkin
2 tablespoon white miso paste
dash soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon brown sugar
water

1. preheat oven to 180 degrees Centigrade
   
2. Slice eggplant into 1 cm slices.
3. Slice pumpkin into 1/2 cm slices, with skin on. Cut each slice in halves or quarters.
   
4. Mix other ingredients in a small bowl. Add enough water to make a thin paste.
5. Spray a baking tray with cooking oil of your choice. (I used rice bran oil.)
6. Baste vegies with 1/2 the miso mix.
7. Bake for 20 minutes.
8. Baste with the rest of the miso mix and bake for another 20 minutes or until done.

Last night we revisited the asian theme, with yum cha for dinner:


This was done as a super quick dinner, as I got home late. Most of it came out of packets from the White Lotus Vegetarian Supermarket at Inala. There are cabbage buns, turnip cakes, "chicken" drumsticks, satay sticks on cucumber and tomato, asian-inspired vegetable soup, rice vermicelli with bok choy and soy sauce. The soup was one I made up on the spur of the moment to pad out the meal. It was very good.

Asian-inspired Vegetable Soup

Serves 4-6, depending on your preferred serving size.

1/2 cup sliced dried shitake mushroom
corn kernels from 1/2 cob
2 cm knob of fresh ginger, diced
1 tomato, chopped
1 bok choy plant, chopped, keep leaves separate
4-5 cups water (enough to fill a medium saucepan)
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tsp white wine vinegar
2 Massel "Chicken style" vegan stock cubes
pepper to taste

1. Place all ingredients except pepper and bock choy leaves in a pot.
2. Bring to boil, then reduce heat.
3. Simmer for 15 minutes until mushrooms are tender.
4. Taste. Add pepper to taste. Add additional soy sauce if you wish.
5. Add leaves from bok choy.
6. Simmer for a minute or two to soften bok choy leaves.
7. Serve!

For both these meals, we put the food in the centre of the table and let the children help themselves. We find that they take more food and try more things if they can select. The favourites for the under 10's were the rice balls, noodles, spring rolls and cabbage buns, though they tried most things other than the turnip cakes, which they have tried and disliked in the past.

Easy pumpkin soup for lunch

Today my Mother-in-Law popped over for a while, including for lunch. I needed to make a quick omni-friendly lunch. Fortunately, I had a big pumpkin in the cupboard. Pumpkin soup was on the menu!



I made fresh bread rolls and pumpkin miso soup, which everyone loved. The rolls were a breadmaker cheat. I used Laucke whole gran bread mix, added a couple of tablespoons of pumpkin seeds and followed the instructions for ingredients (basically adding water and yeast). After a mix in the bread mixer, I shaped the dough into rolls. After an hour of rising, a brush with soy milk and a sprinkle of sesame seeds, they cooked for half an hour and they were ready. It takes a little rising time, but is very simple.

Pumpkin Miso Soup

2 medium onions, diced
1 tablespoon Nuttelex margarine
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 very large butternut pumpkin
3 vegan "chicken" stock cubes (Massel brand for me)
large pinch of ground ginger
2 generous tablespoons white miso paste
black pepper to taste
water to cover

1. Melt margarine in a large pot.
2. Add onions and sugar. Turn heat to low and gently caramalise onion while you chop the pumpkin.
3. Peel pumpkin and cut into in 2-3 cm chunks.
   
4. Add pumpkin, ginger and stock cubes to pot with onion. Add water to cover.
5. Simmer pot until pumpkin is tender, around 20-30 minutes.
6. Once the pumpkin is tender, blend contents of pot until smooth. I used a stab blender in the pot. Heat to a low boil and turn it off.
7. Add the miso past and stir until dissolved. Add pepper to taste.
8. Serve. It's good with warm crusty bread.

Serves 6 small serves or 4 large serves.

This went well with everyone. Even my younger children, Z amd M, who will not eat pumpkin by itself, like this soup. If you like it less salty, cut back on the stock cubes.