tomato soup for the soul

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Let’s talk the ultimate in lazy vegan fare, shall we? I’m talking about a product that is warm, filling, flavorful, and ready in less than five minutes: Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup. As a lazy cook, this stuff is perfectly geared towards me: you just pop open the can, pour into a bowl, add some water and nuke it, and you’ve got a meal in minutes.

Campbell's Soup Cans, Andy Warhol

I grew up eating tomato soup: at home, and in the school cafeteria (every other Wednesday, specifically). It wasn’t until I was in my early 20s and had Panera Bread’s tomato soup for the first time that the lightbulb went on in my head. I realized that maybe tomato soup wasn’t meant to be thin and watery enough to drink through a straw. Epiphany aside, I still loved my Campbell’s. Blasphemy, considering that I’m such a fiend for real tomatoes…shouldn’t this tinned garbage be like my kryptonite? Short answer: yes.

Long answer: hell yes. Besides being devoid of any real nutrition besides sugar, it’s also ridiculously high in sodium (nearly 500 mg for one serving!) and has High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). When I first went vegan, my main concern was making sure everything was meat and dairy free, but that opened up a whole new set of concerns for me: what else was I ignorant about? So I began learning about processed foods and their additives like HFCS, and decided to make a concerted effort to eat a lot less of it. It was kind of like being back at square one of veganism, with the label checking, but I felt like it was an important change to make. Unfortunately this put my precious tomato soup into exile.

It didn’t occur to me to try making my own soup until Friday night, when I was having dinner with Adrienne and Nate. Can I just say how thankful I am to have such a wonderful, caring friend, whose food and company not only feeds my tummy but also my heart and soul? If you haven’t seen the amazing dishes she creates, go check out her blog post haste! We feasted upon mashed potatoes, a spinach and field green salad with vinagrette, and Scottish Broth (and my lovely hostess gave me the last of the Shells n’ Cheeze–be jealous). As Adrienne prepared the meal, I flipped through a cookbook from The Grit. As if it was divine intervention (seriously, there was a mysterious breeze and ray of sunlight that fell upon the book, even though it was nighttime), one of the first pages I landed on was for tomato soup. It was meant to be.

Now, let me let y’all in on a little secret: not only am I a lazy cook, I’m also an easily intimidated cook. Having never made soup from scratch before, I was kind of terrified of how this would turn out. Alas, the weather the past few days has been blissfully cool and autumn like, so what better time to try? Spoiler alert: it was AWESOME.

Tomato Soup (Adapted from The Grit Cookbook)
Serves 8-10

You’ll Need:
3 1/2 cups water
1/3 cup soy sauce
1 tsp onion powder
2 tbsp vegan margarine
1 small yellow onion, finely chopped
2 stalks celery, finely chopped
1 tsp minced garlic
1/2 cup all purpose flour

1 tsp salt*
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp ground mustard
1  tiny pinch of ground nutmeg
1 can crushed tomatoes (28 oz.), undrained
1 can diced tomatoes (15 oz.), undrained
1 1/2 cup soy milk**
*The recipe calls for 2 tsp salt, but I found the final product to be a bit salty for me. Start with 1 tsp, and add more if you’d like.
**Almond milk is my preferred alternative (and what I had); just make sure whatever you have is unsweetened!

Directions:

Combine water, soy sauce, and onion powder, and set aside.

In a large stock pot, melt margarine over medium heat. Add onion, celery, and garlic. Sautée over medium heat until onions are translucent, celery is tender, and garlic is soft, about 5 minutes.

Reduce heat and add salt, pepper, ground mustard, nutmeg, and flour, stirring regularly over gentle heat.
Pause the recipe for a minute: do any of y’all read the Sookie Stackhouse books? They’re the ones True Blood is (loosely) based on, and while they’re not Pulitzer prize winning literature, they did give me one of my favorite expressions: OSM, or Oh, shit! moment. This? The adding of flour to hardly any liquid? Total Oh shit! moment. I had no idea what was supposed to happen, but I was pretty sure this wasn’t it. It was thick and chunky, and I couldn’t see this ending well, but it was too late to turn back now.

We now resume your regularly scheduled recipe: Add soy sauce mixture, gradually increasing heat, stirring vigorously until mix is smooth.

Add tomatoes, stir well, and simmer for 20 minutes. Stir in soy milk and allow soup to return to simmer for a few more minutes, before removing from heat and puree in a blender or food processor. Reheat and serve immediately.

Unless your monitor is scratch-n-sniff, you can't understand just how amazing this smells.

Next up on my list:

  • Obtain a nicer storage system, so colors show up better. Any recommendations? I’m eyeballing some Pyrex glassware on Amazon.
  • Write up my post on The Chicago Diner…I’m still mourning the loss of that gravy.

ALSO! If you’re in the Atlanta area, come out to ATL Vegan Drinks Monday night! It promises to be a fantastic time–plus, vegan pho!

southern essential: tomato sandwich

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Every May, the small town of McDonough, Georgia prepares for its annual arts and craft show that overtakes the square and surrounding streets: the Geranium Festival. If y’all aren’t familiar with these cheerful flowers, I suggest you seek them out on your next trip to the local greenhouse, because they’re extremely tough (as in even I haven’t killed one yet) and the bright red that I’ve always associated with them (though they come in a wide variety of colors!) can help attract hummingbirds to your yard.

While the Geranium Festival features purveyors of food you’d typically find at a fair, there is one stand you simply cannot miss: the tomato sandwiches. It was easy to find them when I was younger; they were right in the middle of the square, next to the United Methodist Women’s bake sale, and always the busiest table around. It’s a sandwich that is so simple to create, it almost seems like a joke. Does a post really need to be written about it? Kat Kinsman over at CNN’s Eatocracy thinks so, and I definitely agree…but my tomato sandwiches have a secret ingredient.
That’s right, I always opted for onions on my tomato sandwiches. My grandmother (who still hasn’t forgiven me for the “I’m having seitan for dinner!” joke) always had onion on the dinner table, and I grew up loving it too…so while the dedicated workers of the tomato sandwich booth always asked before putting onion on, my answer was always a resounding yes.

"They only make you cry when they're gone!"

If you’ve never had a Vidalia onion, I truly am sorry for you. These are the sweetest, best tasting onions ever. I could, quite literally, eat these onions raw and be ecstatic about it. Here’s the skinny on Vidalias: a Vidalia onion is to Georgia what Champagne is to France, as it can only be grown in a specific area of southeast Georgia. They’re also the official vegetable of Georgia, with a non-credible source on Wiki saying that as of ten years ago, Georgia was producing more than 2,000,000,000 pounds of Vidalias annually.

Ahem, back to the sandwich. Obviously, I’m vegan, and two out of four key ingredients are not vegan friendly. Most white breads I’ve found (though remember, I’m admittedly lazy) have milk products in them, and mayo most definitely has eggs, so it’s back to the drawing board for me. I’m particularly fond of Publix’s 5 Grain Italian bread, so that’s what you’ll see here. Part of what makes tomato sandwiches so awesome is the juice that soaks into the bread, which becomes heartbreakingly messy for someone who eats as slow as I do. I’ve remedied this problem by toasting the bread first:
I recently discovered that my toaster oven has a bagel setting, which toasts only one side of the bread (or more appropriately, bagel), leaving the other side soft and perfect for maximum juice absorption. I’ll leave you to figure which is which:
Technical aspects of juice absorption aside, next comes the mayo. I’ve heard excellent things about Veganaise, but hadn’t seen it in regular grocery stores until recently, after I bought the Spectrum Eggless Mayonnaise. I’m not a big mayo eater in general, but this definitely does the trick. A successful tomato sandwich requires liberal mayo application, so I suggest that if at any point you have to ask yourself, “hmm, is this enough?” you add more. There should be no question.
As an official sandwich artist (no, really: I worked at Subway for 2 months when I was 16. I had the official “Sandwich Artist” apron and everything!), I take pride in slicing my ingredients thin, so I can enjoy the visual of them layered. I don’t always do a great job maintaining thickness, but oh well. Here, I did onions/tomato/onion/tomato.
Now for the most important part: the juice. If you’ve got the perfect tomato, it will have left juice on your cutting board deeper than a Georgia mud puddle in July. Thought about just rinsing it down the drain? Perish the thought! It’s absolutely crucial that you take it and dribble it onto the other side of the bread. This is where having one side toasted becomes so useful!
You’re ready to close up shop now. Cut in half, so you can fully appreciate the awesome view the layers provide!

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

-Robert Frost

Now, if you’ll excuse me…there is a tomato sandwich with my name on it. Bye y’all!

adventures with seitan!

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I have a confession to make: I am a lazy cook. I eat a fair amount of raw, a) because I don’t wind up having a sink full of dishes, b) way less prep time, and c) because I have some serious aversions to certain cooked vegetables–mainly the one that loosely rhymes with “Kucinich” (who is also vegan). That confession comes hand-in-hand with the admittance that I very rarely use meat “substitutes” like tofu, tempeh, or seitan, mainly because of the effort they require. In fact, it would be entirely accurate to consider me a total rookie when it comes to preparing any of the aforementioned. But, I love both a challenge, and anything sweet and sour, so finding this recipe for Sweet and Sour Seitan was lucky indeed.

Now, last post, I claimed that I typically followed recipes to the letter, but I’m so not making a strong case for that here, since I was missing a couple of key ingredients, had fiddled around with the flavor, and was using pre-cooked seitan. However, as this Darlin’ knows, we belles make do!

Sweet and Sour Seitan (originally from AllRecipes)
You’ll need:
2 teaspoons canola oil
1 pound chicken style seitan
1 large onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, cut into strips (ahem, which I didn’t have)
2 cloves minced garlic (er, whoops?)
1 (20 ounce) can pineapple chunks, 1/2 cup juice reserved
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup cider vinegar
2 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 1/2 tablespoons ketchup
Directions:
The original recipe says to start cooking the seitan in the oil until brown. Since mine was precooked, I opted to start sauteing the onion (green peppers and garlic would get tossed in now too, if I wasn’t an unprepared slacker) over medium heat, until it was tender, but still crisp. Throw in the seitan and stir, allowing it to warm while you get the rest of your ingredients together.

Add your pineapple, the juice, brown sugar, vinegar, soy, and cornstarch, and reduce to a simmer while stirring well. I would suggest using a deeper pan than mine, because mine got a little full. Now, it should look a little something like this:

Now, I don’t know if I’m in the minority, but most sweet and sours I’ve had are usually reddish, not plain like the picture above. I’ve tried another sweet and sour sauce (just with veggies) that I liked, so I decided to meld them, and added some good ol’ fashioned ketchup to the mix. It wasn’t quite the vivid red I had been accustomed to, but it was close enough:

Let it simmer until the cornstarch has done its magic and thickened the sauce up, then serve!! I used brown rice (lazy alternative: boil-in-bag), but it’s totally up to your taste!

As far as taste, I was very pleasantly surprised with how close this approximated the sweet and sour I remembered as an omni. In the recipe I presented here, I cut the pineapple juice in half, because it was just a tad too much for me, but if you like your sauce particularly pineapple-y, go for it!

Hope y’all enjoy!

PS: if you really want a laugh at someone’s expression, try telling your 93 year old strict Methodist grandmother that you’re having seitan for dinner. She’ll have her prayer circle alerted and a candlelit vigil called within the hour. Sorry, Grandmother!

welcome, y’all!

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Hippocrates once said, “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine thy food.” Now, while I agree about food being an obvious cure for many diseases, I’m also a born-and-raised southern belle, and food isn’t only for medicine. Growing up, and even now, food was the answer to everything: births, deaths, holidays, graduations, birthdays, celebrations, and more. If it was conceivable to meet up around meal time, there would certainly be a feast to mark the occasion.

And y’all, I’m not talking about steamed veggies and fresh fruit, I’m talking about food that would make Paula Deen’s arteries cry. Are you getting some idea of just how ridiculously decadent the typical southern diet is, yet?

Now, imagine waking up one day, after twenty years of southern fare, and deciding to go vegetarian–and eventually, vegan. Hopefully the extreme looks of skepticism are well implied at this point; it’s safe to say, no one expected me to last more than a week. That week turned into a month, however, and that month into six, then so on and so forth until I’ve gone 2½ years without consuming meat, and 8 months completely animal free.

I can’t say I’ve been very adventurous with my food choices up until this point; it’s not that my diet is limited, it’s that I’m a creature of habit (and secretly an Italian reincarnate, but don’t tell the Daughters of the Confederacy!) that could happily eat some form of pasta every single day. I’m excited to be using this blog to branch out and explore–with that, let’s move on to my first “experiment”! I’m all about following recipes, but sometimes, I kind of fly by the seat of my pants and do as I please. In this case, I accidentally opened pinto beans instead of black beans, didn’t have all of the recommended stuff, and am, like the great Julia Child, anti-cilantro. Did you know that it might be genetic? Fascinating! On to the recipe:

Bean Salsa
Adapted from Good Life Eats

I used:
1 can black beans, rinsed
1 can pinto beans, rinsed
1/2 cucumber, chopped
2 jalapenos, seeded and diced
3 green onions, sliced
1 Vidalia onion, chopped
2 tomatoes, chopped
1 orange pepper, chopped
Juice of 1 lime
Chili powder to taste

Directions:
Toss all ingredients into a bowl and mix well! Refrigerate until and after serving.