Slow Cooker Vegetarian Vindaloo

I was served this delicious, super healthy vegan curry at a friend’s house and was thrilled to find out how incredibly easy it is to make. All you do is dump chopped vegetables into a slow cooker and let it simmer away. You can also make this on the stove top, which is what I did when I recreated it at my house. With some brown rice, it is a complete meal.

Slow Cooker Vegetarian Vindalo
Adapted from Vegetarian Times Everything Vegan.

Dump everything in a crock pot or a large pot:
1 medium cauliflower, cut into florets
(4-5 red skinned potatoes, peeled and diced, optional)
29 ounces canned chick peas, drained
2 large leeks, white and light green part sliced
1-2 cups tomato sauce
1 Tbl. vinegar
2 Tbl. fresh ginger, minced
2 Tbl. curry powder
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. cinnamon or a cinnamon stick
1 tsp. hot sauce
1/4-1/2 cup water

Cook for 3 hours on high in a crock pot or 1 1/2 hours on a medium simmer in a stove top pot. Can add 3 Tbl. cilantro before serving. Serve over basmati rice.

Roasted Butternut Squash and Carrots with Dried Cranberries

This is a fusion of a recipe from Ina Garten for roasted butternut squash and one from The New Elegant but Easy Cookbook for Agata and Valentina’s Sicilian Carrots (see the Agata and Valentina website for a picture of the recipe made with sliced carrots and this post at The Wash Family Cookbook for a picture of the recipe made with baby carrots).

No Cook Corn and Tomato Salad

This summery salad is made with raw corn and grape tomatoes. It might seem a bit unusual to use the corn raw instead of cooked, but corn served this way has an unusually fresh and deliciously sweet taste. Slicing corn off the cob sounds like a lot of trouble, but you can get a nice sized bowl of kernels from just three ears of corn (at least I did). This salad serves 6-8, so it ends up being less work than shucking and boiling corn for the same number of people. On top of everything else, you avoid heating up the kitchen.

Rainbow Swiss Chard with Rum Raisins and Toasted Almonds

Chard, with raisins and nuts might sound a bit odd, but it is a traditional combination. Mirielle Johnston’s Cusine of the Sun: Classical French Cooking from Nice and Provence gives a a recipe for Tourte de Blettes, a pie which combines spinach or Swiss chard with rum raisins, pine nuts and apples (if you want to see a variation on this particular recipe, take a look here at Saveur). This is served as dessert!

Melissa Clark’s Cook This Now has a recipe for red Swiss Chard with golden raisins and pine nuts which is meant to be a side dish. Here is what you do: in a very large skillet or big pot, heat sliced garlic with oil just until the garlic is fragrant, about 30 second. Add handfuls of sliced Swiss chard and cook down until wilted, add salt and pepper, plus some golden raisins that have been soaked in rum, plus some toasted pine nuts.

Sweet Chili Lime Mushrooms with Collards and Quinoa

I had collards that I needed to use up. Originally, I was thinking of making a recipe from Food52 for kale and quinoa, and then I saw this recipe at VeganYumYum for Sweet Chili Lime Tofu with Wok Steamed Collards and Quinoa. The only problem was that I had no tofu and I needed to use up a box of cremini mushrooms and some portobellas.

It occurred to me that the tofu marinade (sugar, lime, soy, garlic, red chili flakes) would work perfectly with grilled mushrooms. The resulting mushrooms were spicy, sweet, hot and tangy. A nice change from the usual grilled portobellas.

The mushrooms are worth making separately from the collards and the quinoa if you are looking for a side dish instead of a vegetarian main course.

Butternut Squash, Chick Pea and Spinach Melange

This was inspired by Brina Gonzalez’s recipe for Chick Pea and Spinach Skillet. It is quick, easy, healthy and delicious.

Swiss Chard Chips

Note: this is a very healthy way to use olive oil to make something crispy to snack on on Chanukah!

My husband loves “chips” made by roasting kale. I got a little confused in the supermarket and bought Swiss chard instead of kale.

Hmm . . .  Could I make the recipe with Swiss chard instead of kale? Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I googled and found out that, yes, I could.

Macheesmo’s approach was the one I went with.

Homemade Green Bean Casserole (Dairy Free)

I made this on Thanksgiving and my husband loved it so much I think it is going into the regular rotation. Basically, what you do is blanch some green beans, fry some shallots, and then make a mushroom sauce with cremini mushrooms, garlic, and sherry. After all that, you cook the whole thing until the flavors all meld and fuse and it is a creamy, unctuous, fragrant melange of earthy mushrooms, meltingly soft green beans, crispy shallots, and savory sauce.

Latke-Palooza: Oven Fried Sweet Potato Latkes

It was about an hour before Shabbos and I got the idea into my head that I would make vegetable latkes. Not such a practical idea at that point in the day, but there was a recipe on the bottle of safflower oil for sweet potato zucchini pancake that sounded really good.

I wasn’t delusional enough to think that I could fry up individual fritters. Instead, I quickly mixed up the batter, slapped eight large patties onto a well oiled pan and threw the whole thing into a 500 degree oven. After a few minutes, when the laktes seemed to gotten firm enough to flip, I pulled the pan out of the oven and turned each pancake over and threw the pan back in the oven until they looked golden.

The results surprised me. First of all, the latkes tasted as if they were fried (with no mess!). Second of all, they had a delicate, sweet flavor and texture. The zucchini and sweet potato complemented each other in a way I didn’t expect. My husband said they reminded him of Ratner’s vegetable cutlets, but I thought they were much lighter.

Latke-Palooza: Potato Pancakes and Matzoh Ball Mix (with Oven Fried Option)

What do latkes have to do with matzoh ball mix? Well, once I wanted some latkes and matzoh ball mix was the only kind of matzoh meal I had in the house. It made fabulous latkes. Maybe it had something to do with the seasoning and the baking powder. You can use regular matzoh meal to make these and add your own seasonings.