Two Seasons: Quinoa soup and Garden wraps

The colors at the farmers' market are getting brighter, richer, and more diverse as we move into fall. Root vegetables and ten different kinds of squash, purples and yellows and oranges and blues are everywhere. But today, the air in West Philly feels unseasonably warm, soft, and freshly-scrubbed. It feels like springtime outside.

So let's have a a look at a festive, summery food, and then I have a nice soup for you. First, and I know you may be getting tired of pastry wraps but I'm not out of them yet (told you, that $1.39 is stretchy) so, here' s one more thing you can do with them.

A garden wrap.

This one has green lettuce, tomatoes, portabella mushrooms, cauliflower, and onion, and it's seasoned with olive oil, salt, and lemon pepper. It would be great to have some spinach, kale, turnip greens, or other interesting greens.

You don't have to heat or cook the filling, just cut everything up like a salad, only finer. Spoon it onto the wraps, fold, and fry in olive oil. Here are some finished ones cooling while I'm prepping some more to go into the oil. What you see in the background on the plate are blue potatoes.

A closer look at the veggie mix that goes inside the pastries:


If I looked at the mix and didn't know what was in it, I would think I was seeing chicken or tofu or some "meat substitute," but what that actually is is the portabella mushrooms. We usually buy two giant caps at the market on Saturday, and they last us throughout the week, just slicing pieces off for stir-fries and things like this.

Now. Want something good for lunch, that will keep you full throughout the afternoon and rush hour? Something good and cozy for fall? Something to help you fight colds and the flu and the cold-weather blahs?

Quinoa soup.

Quinoa is incredibly rich in protein, fiber, and iron. Because of its high protein content, NASA thinks it would be a good choice for its Controlled Ecological Life Support Systems for long space flights. And that's kind of our situation here on Earth. We're here for a long time, and we don't have enough space to feed all of us the way some of us currently eat. Quinoa could help.

Now, Mark made this soup/stew (I'm not sure which it is), so it has a lot of ingredients. It contains: quinoa, carrots, cauliflower, corn, mushroom, black beans, Great Northern beans, and onion, and was made with our homemade vegetable stock and seasoned with garlic, salt, lemon pepper, and a Season All mix.

Two kinds of beans, plus quinoa, will fill you up. This soup is a nutrient-fest and tastes like it cures what ails you. I brought it for lunch two days this week. You don't need to bring much.

I like to have this soup with a slice of rye toast with strawberry jam. Any type of heavy food makes me feel like I need a nice piece of toast and jam to lighten it up. I'm a little childish about heavy foods. I feel like I've accomplished something when I eat something heavy, and I want a treat for that. Fortunately, the same woman who grows our spices also makes jellies and jams.

Happy fall, happy Friday, and I hope it's as lovely where you are as it is here.

Puff: Sweet & Savory Pastry ideas that set off the smoke alarm

Since the delicious success of the soy sausage pastries, I've had two more successes with ingredients that I'm much more likely to have on hand than soy sausage.

For dessert last night, I made Peach Puff Pastries.

Warm the diced peaches in a pan with a little oil and a good bit of cinnamon.

After spooning the peaches onto the pastry sheets, you could add some brown sugar if you had some (I would). I drizzled a little molasses over the mixture for two of my pastries, but the third I left without molasses, just peaches and cinnamon. You can see the difference in the finished pastries. Both were good. The one without molasses was a little more refreshing and fruity, while the molasses ones were heavy and sweet and smoky.


Perfect.

We have quite a bit of leftover vegetable stew (apparently Mark thought we were more than two people when he made the stew). So for lunch today, I spooned some of the stew (mostly vegetables, leave out the liquid) onto some pastry sheets and fried them up.

Here's the secret. Pour some olive oil into a little dish. Add very finely diced onion and... wait for it... ground rosemary. After adding the stew mixture to the pastries (about a tablespoon and a half per sheet), spoon a little of the oil, onion, and rosemary mixture around the edges to seal the pastry. Rub it in with your fingers if you want and pinch the edges together.


Serve the finished pastries (samosas, basically) with blue and red potatoes, which look nice and pink and purple when they fry. The potatoes are seasoned with salt, pepper, onion, and rosemary.
The stew mixture has black beans, corn, Great Northern beans, peas, carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, and tomato. I found the corn was actually pretty dominant. That, combined with the rosemary and the pastry itself, gave these a sweet taste.

For the peach pastries, and for the soy sausage ones last night, I used single pastry sheets, but for the stew, I found I had to use two sheets together for each one. Otherwise, the wetness of the mixture caused the sheet to tear. When I used one sheet, the whole thing fell apart in the oil and started spitting hot oil sparks all over the kitchen and the smoke alarm went off.

Good times.

making vegetable stock

We made our own vegetable stock. First try, first time. We're saving scraps for the next batch. Here's what happened.

Earlier this week, we were going to make this potato-leek soup:

INGREDIENTS

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 leeks, white and light green parts washed and sliced into 1/4-inch slices
2 cups chopped yellow onion
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 large Yukon Gold potatoes (about 1 pound), peeled and cubed into 1/2-inch cubes
4 cups vegetable stock
2-3 teaspoons fresh rosemary leaves

1. Heat a 4-quart soup pot over medium heat and add the oil.

2. Add the leeks, onion, and sea salt and saute for about 5 minutes, stirring often, until the onion begins to turn translucent.

3. Add the garlic and stir well. Cook for 1 minute more.

4. Add the potatoes and vegetable stock, cover, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to simmer. Cook 20 minutes.

5. Remove the soup from the heat and use an immersion/stick blender to blend the soup in the pot or ladle the soup into a blender, 1 cup at a time. Blend the soup with the fresh rosemary leaves until smooth and free of chunks. Pour smooth soup into a heat-proof bowl and continue until all of the soup has been blended.

6. Transfer the blended soup back to the original soup pot and warm over low heat until heated through. Serve hot.

Serves 4 - 6.

Adapted from The Great American Detox Diet, by Alex Jamieson (Rodale Press, 2005).

It would not really serve six. Not six people. We got four servings out of it.

The interesting part is the vegetable stock. The day before we made the soup, we made our own vegetable stock for the first time.

All of the vegetables or vegetable parts you don't necessarily want to use for anything else, set them aside in a container in the fridge. Onion skins, the ends of zucchini, garlic peel, corn husks, rubber carrots, greens past their prime, squash that's gone soft.

Put it all in a big pot, season it however you want, pour water on it, bring it to a boil and simmer it down for an hour or so.



After it simmers for about an hour, strain out the vegetables and vegetable parts and save the liquid in the fridge.

The nutrient-rich, flavorful stock from the exact vegetables shown in the pictures made the four-serving potato-leek soup and, like, a two-dozen-serving stew with two kinds of beans, tomatoes, corn, carrots and general goodness. Both dishes were very hearty. I brought them for lunch, I was full for the whole afternoon.