Meat Recipe Converting: Tomato Bulgur Soup with Tofu & Crumbles

Some recipes just rely on meat or meat products. You can't really make a steak vegetarian. A New England Clam Bake without the clams is missing something rather vital to the recipe. Sure, there are a lot of meat substitutes these days and still more being made, but really, becoming a vegetarian may just mean giving up your favourite foods, because there is no real substitute.

It's been six years since I left meat behind, and at this point, even shrimp has finally stopped calling to me. I've found myself using fewer of these meat substitutes as well. But limiting myself to JUST vegetarian recipes is not necessarily my only option. And in these posts, "Meat Recipe Converting", I will be taking very meat-laden dishes, and turning them into vegetarian lovelies.

These posts will focus on recipes that cannot be easily converted to vegetarian. They aren't ones where you substitute veggie broth for chicken. These are ones where the meat is a key part of the meal, and thus, converting requires creating almost a whole new recipe.

Algerian Green Wheat Soup with Meatballs becomes...

This recipe comes from a large book of soup recipes called Best Soups in the World, and it features soups from all over the world. I adore this book; it is complete with good food, interesting information, and classic chef snobbery. The recipe that caught my attention, Algerian Green Wheat Soup with Meatballs, is a meat-heavy tomato soup with one of my favourite underutilized grains: bulgur (substitute for the original freekeh, but eh).

Converting a recipe like this may look as easy as just replacing all of it with tofu or vegetables, but this uses two very different kinds of meat, and replicating that sort of texture/blend requires a bit of thought. And so...

Tomato Bulgur Soup with Tofu & Crumbles



THere are two aspects of this soup that need to be replaced:

1) The broth is chicken-based.
2) The main chunky parts of the soup are two meats, one grain.

As such, here are the ingredients I used:

1lb firm tofu
7tbsp unsalted butter OR oil
2 medium onions, chopped
2lbs ripe tomatoes, chopped OR 2 cans 14.5oz chopped tomatoes
1tsp cayenne pepper
1tsp salt, if even that (I'm sensitive to the taste of salt)
6 cups vegetable broth OR 6 cups water flavoured to taste with concentrated broth. Or any mixture thereof.
1 cup freekeh or course bulgur
2tbsps tomato paste
1 package Morningstar Farms Grillers Recipe Crumbles (one of the few meat subs I still buy; very versatile and great if you're too lazy to flavour and crumble tofu or tempeh)
Black pepper to taste

The instructions to follow are a shortened version of the original recipe:

1. Add onions, tomatoes, cayenne, and salt to butter or oil and cook, stirring, for 10 minutes. You can add the tofu at this stage as well if you like firmer tofu. Pour in cups of broth and increase heat to a simmer. If you didn't add the tofu to sautee, you can add it here as well, to let it soak up the flavour of the broth.

2. Similar to step 3 in the original recipe, however, don't throw away any of the solids. Also don't grind up your tofu if you added it in the first step at any point. Grind up all of the solids if you like a thicker soup; grind up half if you want a thinner soup and like having vegetable chunks in your soup. Return blended broth and solids to pot, heat until boiling, then add bulgur and tofu. Lower heat to simmer. Halfway through cooking the bulgur, add the recipe crumbles (you can just add these frozen, or you can brown them in a pan first). Cook until bulgur is ready (as the recipe says, tender but chewy).

And there you have it. I didn't make meatballs with the crumbles because I am embarrassingly bad at making meatballs, stuffed rolls, etc; they just fall apart in the broth for me. But if you're more talented than I am, I'm sure they'd come out fine. Also I'm sure freekeh would do just as well as bulgur, especially since freekeh is the original ingredient in the first place.

As for taste? Good! The tofu absorbed the flavour very well, and the crumbles make a good contrast to tofu's texture and flavour. The broth was good if a bit thick. The flavour was nice and hearty. Overall, it's a great comfort food, especially on a cold or dreary day. It stays decent as leftovers as well. And if you replace the butter with oil and sub the crumbles for something else (crumbled tempeh?), pretty sure it's vegan!

8/10 from me. Of course, you're welcome to try out the original meat recipe as well. I'm sure it's as good as the vegetarian recipe, if not better because it's, well, the original.

Tschuess.

Stuffed Acorn Squash

Taking a break from Good & Bad posts, this is a recipe I made back in March. However, it does not really have a true counterpart that I can compare it to; I looked through my photos, but did not see anything that could really stand up as its equal. Thus, back to a more traditional post. And this one, like one or two I've had before, is more BASED on a recipe than actually following it.

Stuffed Sun Island Acorn Squash

Hari linked this recipe and I treated it with some skepticism. First off, I don't even KNOW where you can get a sun island squash around here, and furthermore, squash isn't my favourite thing. But I saved it anyway, since I do love mushrooms, and one day at the hippie grocery store I found some in-season squash. In particular, they had some large acorn squash, perfect for stuffing.

Had I only changed the squash type, we'd be good. But I didn't. This recipe is like that recipe only in that they both involve stuffing squash with vegetables and mushrooms. The rest is drastically different:



As this photo very much shows. So! This will be more of a legitimate recipe post.

Ingredients 1 large acorn squash
A handful of cherry tomatoes (who needs REAL measurements? Just use whatever seems like it'd fit. Any leftovers will be tasty eaten alone).
~1cup or so of raw mushrooms (if you use dried or canned, lower the amount slightly, since raw mushrooms shrink quite a bit.)
1-2 cloves of garlic (whatever suits you. I love garlic so I usually bump it up in recipes.)
Dried hearty herb of your choice (I think I probably used either oregano or basil, since I don't generally have thyme on hand)
Butter and/or olive oil
Crumbled goat cheese of your choice

First, scoop the insides out of your squash, but save the seeds! Rinse the seeds off to get them free of squash tendrils. Then, similar to the recipe linked, preheat your oven to 350F, wipe the inside of the squash with oil, then put it in the oven until the edges brown; this can take a while depending on the size of your squash.

From there, take your butter/oil and heat it in a pan, then add your mushrooms, tomatoes, garlic, and herbs. You only want these to be partially cooked; near the end or separately (whichever you prefer), add the seeds to toast for a couple of minutes. They don't usually pop for me, so just use your best judgement. Mix the goat cheese in after you saute everything, then stuff that squash full of the mixture.

Pop the stuffed squash back in the oven until it is wrinkled or, if your squash is a superhero like mine, until it looks like it is slightly drying out at the edges. Eat leftover filling while waiting for squash to be done. Serve with side of your choice; I chose roasted fingerlings because I needed to use them up anyway.

So how is the taste? Pretty good! The acorn squash can be tricky to eat since the skin is more like plate mail for the fruit, but the filling is tasty and lends itself to many vegetables, spices, etc. I'm not sure how smart an idea it was to stuff a squash with cherry tomatoes -- they take up a lot of room! -- but I didn't have zucchini so I went "Close enough." THe seeds also didn't add as much as I wanted; I think maybe they should be roasted alongside the squash initially, then mixed in. Perhaps that will improve the mouthfeel. Hard to go wrong with goat cheese, though.

I imagine almost any variation of mushrooms would do the job -- shiitake, bella, whatever -- but in terms of vegetables I recommend something with a good water content so it won't dry out. Pretty much ANY sturdy squash that can be squashed could be used.

Perhaps someday I will find sun island squash and legitimately try out the recipe. But until then, this will have to do, and it does just fine to me. 8/10.

Tschuess!

Good & Bad: Pumpkin Cheddar Mac & Cheese vs. Pasta Presto's Red & Yellow Cherry Tomato Saute

I know I've mentioned this before, but I am a huge pastaholic. I attribute it partially to growing up in a very Italian part of Connecticut, which to most parts of the country probably sounds a bit strange (aren't we more known for our Puritan rudeness?). Waterbury, CT is the place I refer to; I grew up in one of its suburbs, and thus grew up in a place where even chain restuarants like Olive Garden and Bertucci's have to step up their game if they want to survive. Let me tell you: the SF Bay Area is woefully lacking in real, GOOD Italian food. The two places I've found are a walk-in-and-order place, and a super-expensive place. No middle ground.

So today's post shall deal with that most wondrous of comfort foods: pasta.

Pumpkin Cheddar Mac & Cheese

Hari, of course, was the one to find this recipe; really, this blog probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for Hari. I am not the biggest fan of pumpkin OR mac & cheese, but this still intrigued me. After all, there's a truly odd list of ingredients in there. Whole wheat pasta! Honey! Pumpkin puree! Allspice! It's like someone tried to turn pumpkin pie into mac & cheese.

Pasta Presto's Red & Yellow Cherry Tomato Saute

I stumbled upon this cute little recipe book when exploring Ithaca, NY's used bookstore on the Commons. It had been marked down from $10 to a mere dollar, so of course, as a pasta lover, I had to snatch it up. It is a series of sauces that you can quickly make and serve over pasta. I've made quite a few of them, including converting some of the meat ones to vegetarian. This one recipe, though, I make often when the summer bumpercrop of cherry tomatoes shows up.

Since this is an older recipe book when the internet was barely a thing, I'll give a quick list of the contents, but not the full recipe for copyright reasons:

Olive Oil
Garlic Cloves, chopped
Red & Yellow cherry tomatoes
Fresh Parsley (I use dried and it's fine)
Fresh Chives (I don't use and it's fine

Pumpkin Cheddar Mac & Cheese vs. Pasta Presto's Red & Yellow Cherry Tomato Saute: GO!


(Fun Fact: I made this a year ago.)


(Fun Fact: This may not be the recipe I think it is, but it looks close enough.)

So as I mentioned, I'm not a big fan of pumpkin or mac & cheese. Furthermore, as I recall, I had to use mozarrella or something like that since I didn't have cheddar. Also pretty sure I had to sub the ground mustard for something else. Basically, the test could very well be my fault. But? It tasted like pumpkin to me. Overwhelmingly so; I didn't taste any of the spice or the cheese, just the faint sweetness of pureed pumpkin. Now, if you love pumpkin, that means this recipe will probably work out fantastically for you! But if I were to make it again, I'd half the amount of pumpkin. Also probably use cheddar instead of mozarrella but that's a whole different story.

As for the tomato saute? I recently discovered that I love cooked cherry tomatoes, especially if they are cooked whole. Then you bite into them and they release hot delicious juice into your mouth... I don't get why I didn't discover the wonders of these guys until... This year, maybe last? So this recipe, which depends entirely on the quality of your tomatoes, gives them a chance to shine. The spices don't matter much here; I've substituted basil, I've not used them at all, etc. What matters is that you use top-quality, fresh cherry tomatoes, or this will be a failure. Use the best olive oil you have as well. A recipe with this few ingredients relies on all of them being top-notch.

So for those of you who live in places with legitimate growth seasons (or really just real seasons), you're going to want to make this during the height of summer. For those of us in places with tomatoes year-round, so long as the crop is good, you can make it.

For what it's worth, I think the pumpkin mac & cheese would pair easily with gluten-free pasta, since most of the flavour is in the sauce. By contrast, you need to either really love the taste of gluten-free pasta or just have some godly stuff for the tomato saute, since that sauce is much lighter.

Pumpkin Cheddar Mac & Cheese: 7/10 (again: everything went fine, just not my cup of tea*)
Pasta Presto's Red & Yellow Cherry Tomato Saute: 10/10

Tschuess!

* This is my cup of tea:

A Very Vegetarian Christmas

I have about five days to try and write five stories for a prompt event, because depression sucks and made me lose a ton of time. I'll be spending today try to get at least one or two of those done, but first, I'm going to make a very quick Dinner Time post.

A Very Vegetarian Christmas

For those who haven't figured it out yet, I'm a vegetarian, and have been for coming on six years now. This means that I can't have the traditional meat that our culture enjoys associating with holidays. For this holiday, my mother and I worked together to make Christmas dinner -- she made the meat and potatoes for my brother, I made the vegetarian options for us.

The pictures are unfortunately quite crappy, as I was in a hurry to take them so we could start eating. But here it goes.

Roasted Vegetable Bisque

This recipe has been on my list for AGES to try out, and I finally chose it for this Christmas. Funny story while I was chopping the vegetables to make it: my sister, who has Down Syndrome and autism (this is an important point for this story to make a bit more sense), was wandering around the kitchen trying to find food. Typical behavior, she loves to eat. She walked over to me chopping vegetables, then reached out and snatched a vegetable from the plate -- again typical behavior; stealing food is a habit we can't seem to break her of. The thing is, she had grabbed 1/8 of a whole raw onion, and she shoved it into her mouth.

She didn't seem to like her choice very much, but she DID eat it, which is more than I could do if I shoved a raw onion into my mouth. I gave her some water after that adventure, and then she left my vegetables alone. XD



Why does my food always look so much more disgusting than the original maker's does? Hers is all red and lovely; mine looks like baby vomit. Good news is, it didn't taste like that.

This soup tasted very light, even with the cream cheese added in. It also is a very sweet flavour, which I think comes from using so much butternut squash in it. It was a bit too sweet for me -- I like my soups to be very rich and savory. However, I also failed at using the pepper shaker, so I imagine with some pepper and salt, this would taste fantastic. For the record, dried herbs work just fine if you don't have fresh, as do canned tomatoes.

So about 7.5/10 for this one, and I'll try to make it again and see if I can improve on it.

Portabello Salad with Maple-Mustard Dressing

Hari knows I'm in love with portabellos and linked this recipe a while back. I decided it would go well with the bisque, and red onions excluded, even followed the recipe near-exactly, despite my dislike for cooking wine.



The pictures don't get better.

So yeah. I don't really like salad dressing, or cooking wine, or vinegar. And you know what? This salad was fantastic. It's given me faith in salads. I feel like salads can be more than just rabbit food now. The mushrooms added a nice meaty texture to the salad, while the dressing turned the leaves from rabbit food to actually edible. The whole family enjoyed it (brother excluded. Vegetables are POISON don't you know?)

I can't say how well avocado goes with though, because our avocado was NOT ripe and I refused to eat it hard as a rock.

So yes. 9/10 is what I'm thinking. I'm not sure why not 10/10, I think maybe because it IS still a salad.

Baked Beans with Mint, Peppers, and Tomatoes

Some recipes you just can't get right. This recipe is one of them. A year ago I tried making it, and the beans were not soft at all, and I had to basically force it into my meals for a few WEEKS. I decided to give it a second shot.



I think it went even WORSE this time around.

Compared to the rich salad and soup? This was bland. No flavours stood out, not even any richness from the tomatoes. The beans were not soft once again, and if it is all because I didn't use mint (mother hates it), then that's stupid because foods should rely on more than one flavour.

There really isn't much to say here. I've given up on this recipe. 3/10.

Bonus picture!



Dinner candle trying to set the house on fire. It LOOKS like it is sitting up straight and tall. Looks are deceiving.

And now to shower and laundry and write. Until next time...

Tschuess.

Spicy Vietnamese Lemongrass Tofu Adapation

So I had plans today. Plans to wash the towels and laundry, scrub the stove, do yoga. PLANS.

Then my stomach suddenly freaked out, shortly followed by my head. These plans are being postponed, and replaced with a post and some videogames.

Spicy Vietnamese Lemongrass Tofu Adapation

I'm calling this an adaptation rather than the actual recipe, because I ended up making so many substitutions that I'm pretty sure this dish is nothing like the original recipe. Here is the original recipe. Now, for what I ended up doing (I'm converting it directly from their recipe, because I can't remember how much exactly I used):

2tbsp Black Bean Sauce
About 1tbsp fresh ginger root
2tbsp curry powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2tbsps plus 1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 pound tofu
1tbsp soy sauce
2tbsp olive oil
3tbsp water
3tbsp peanut oil
1 small onion
1tbsp chili paste, or to taste
Peppers, Tomatoes, or whatever vegetables you like
Brown Rice

From there, I think I recall screwing up royally. First off, I'm not sure I actually MARINATED the tofu in soy sauce like the recipe calls for. I do remember I pressed it to get the water out of it, because tofu is near-impossible to stirfry unless you do so. Then I coated the tofu with the black bean sauce, ginger, curry powder, salt, and 1/2 teaspoon sugar.

Then when making the caramelized sugar, I failed to add the extra water, and the caramel solidified in its container. That was interesting. But then I stirfried everything else and let it simmer and got:



A food that won't photograph well.

But taste-wise? It was pretty amazing. All of my haphazard substitutions somehow blended together very well, and forgetting the lemongrass did nothing noticeable to the flavour. It had a good kick to it, though it wasn't as sweet as you may expect from the caramel, likely because I messed up making it.

Of course, I will need to make this again without substituting half of the recipe, but the fact that I did and it still tasted great? Proves that either I know how flavours work better than I realize, or that the recipe has a solid foundation.

8.5/10 either way. I even enjoyed the leftovers.

Until next time...

Tschuess.

Pasta with Tempeh and Roasted Garlic Sauce

It's a warm day today -- and it has my apartment humid and kind of unpleasant. It probably doesn't help that I just deep cleaned the bathroom, which leaves me wanting to just lay around and be like "See, I did work, I can play Sims the rest of the afternoon right?"

The answer is no.

Pasta with Tempeh and Roasted Garlic Sauce

So this is a bit awkward. I've been meaning to put this recipe up for ages, and now that I'm finally getting to it... the blog is gone :(. So you all can have SOMETHING to check out, I quickly found this recipe which looks very similar... Once I got to the recipe. However, the original recipe was based mostly on just tempeh, tomatoes, and roasted garlic, without the extra veggies.



It also looks pretty unflattering when paired with green pasta.

It's been a while since I made this recipe, but I still recall that I found it kind of meh, at most. It was a bit watery, hence why it doesn't seem to be covering the pasta very well at all, but I've found that true of many homemade sauces. I actually cut back on the amount of tomato used, so perhaps it was partially my fault; the tomatoes I had were huge and I didn't think I needed both of them.

The tempeh itself still retains a lot of the original flavouring that I think is from preservatives or SOMETHING. Basically, it just didn't seem to cook all that well in the sauce. If I recall, the leftovers that I microwaved with some pasta fared a bit better than fresh, which really is just bizarre.

So overall, I think adding some tomato paste could help give the sauce some body, while perhaps cooking the tempeh then adding it to the sauce would help with the flavour. I'm noticing that the recipe I linked as a substitute has you BOIL the tempeh which strikes me as a bit "Huh?". I don't know how the texture of that would be.

Overall rating? 5/10. It wasn't that impressive but it wasn't awful either.

Bonus Rating! The spinach noodles you see up there are Garden Time Fancy Spinach Ribbons, which is really just a ridiculously pretentious name for cut wide spaghetti. They brag about their pasta on the bag, and it's expensive stuff.

It also doesn't taste any better than Target brand. Raw it has a odd texture but I can taste the spinach, but once cooked? Pretty bland flavouring. I'm pretty neutral on recommending it, really. I guess that's another 5/10? 6/10? Something around there.

Until next time...

Tschuess.

Red Quinoa with Mushrooms and Kale

So I've been having nasty insomnia lately, and right now am all happy to finally have talked with people who are up when I am (most of my friends are East Coast), and also possibly wired up from stress. This means, of course, I should write a blog post, right?

Red Quinoa with Mushrooms and Kale

Once again, my boyfriend linked a post that led me to this one. It has everything that drives me nuts about food blogs: long story, moaning about food, and too many pictures. But I love quinoa, and mushrooms, and kale, so I had to try it out.

I used regular quinoa since I do not have red, along with a chopped portobella cap instead of shiitake. I used this No-Chicken broth by Imagine instead of chicken stock because it's a fantastic substitute. I also added a tomato because I need to use them up, and once again pearl onions instead of diced because I have still failed to buy real onions. Followed the same instructions on that blog post though (basically sautee onions in butter, then add quinoa to toast, then add broth and simmer. Then sautee other vegetables, then add kale until wilted).

This is sounding like those annoying comments on recipes that go "LOL it was great I substituted the apples in the pie for blueberries and used cake batter instead of a crust!" Sorry about that.



So enough babbling, here's the food. I added goat cheese after this photo (SERIOUSLY what was I doing).

Overall? This was quite good. The kale was cooked properly unlike the last recipe I had, leaving it quite crunchy while still having a great colour and flavour. Portobella mushrooms worked well here. Once again, though, be careful about tomatoes adding a lot of extra liquid; you may want to consider draining some of the liquid before combining the vegetables to the quinoa if you use them. Otherwise, it shouldn't be a huge problem as mushrooms and kale shouldn't release too much moisture.

Goat cheese was a good addition, but if you're vegan and want to add an extra bit of flavour, I'd recommend dried cranberries. Moosewood has a recipe involving kale and cranberries, and it is EXCELLENT. I imagine cranberries would do well in this recipe as well.

I will note, however, that overall this was more filling than expected. I only ate half of it in one sitting even after halving the recipe. This is probably because 1 cup of dried quinoa makes FOUR cups of cooked quinoa, and two cups of quinoa is apparently just too much for my stomach.

This reminds me: I have a nice, simple lentil/rice recipe I should share sometime.

So basically? This recipe was good, filling, but I'm not sure on its own, without my additions, it would have been amazing. So it's getting a 7.5/10. I like being able to give recipes good ratings; world, MAKE DELICIOUS FOOD.

I'm so sorry for this post.

It appears I forgot to put two recipes up on this blog, since their pictures are on my photobucket. I will try to do those next. Not tonight, though, this insanity has gone on long enough.

Tschuess.