Vegan Radish Greens Soup

It's happened.

SOUP MONTH has returned. As it's gotten colder, I've become obsessed with soups again. I forgot how easy and delicious they are.

So, quick Soup 101:

Almost all European-style savory soups begin with what's called a mirepoix (a French word pronounced meer-ah-pwah), which basically means onions, celery, and carrots sauteed with butter or oil (and usually with some combination of spices added). They create this bangin' set of flavors that create the base to most soups, stocks, and sauces. Without them, your soup just won't taste as hearty unless you're making an Asian-style soup or curry, in which case the flavors are going to be coming from other ingredients (like ginger, chili, curry, garlic, etc).

Next, you just add your main ingredients to your mirepoix, add some water or stock, blend it up, and go. Super easy.

So, this next dish isn't 100% from the dumpster because I had the chance to go to a pick-your-own farm near my house. I ended up getting pumpkins for my curried pumpkin and potato soup (and to put out at Halloween for the kiddies), sweet potatoes, beets, broccoli, and a bunch of daikon radishes, which I had never used before.

I ended up using all the daikon radishes (typically used in Asian dishes) for my first experiments with kimchee (a Korean fermented snack/condiment) and pho (a Vietnamese soup)...however, I was left with a bunch of daikon radish greens that I didn't know how to use. I came up with this recipe, which you can actually apply to a lot of different types of greens if you're over-stocked. The radish greens are especially great, though, because they have a nice peppery flavor to them already. Plus, I had all the ingredients for soup that I had recently dumpstered, so this was a perfect solution for using them.

Unfortunately, there's no picture for this soup because I threw it in a container to take to work right after making it...and then promptly ate all of it for dinner with some bread. Several people saw me eating it and asked for the recipe, so I figured it was worth the share. Plus, my boss is really allergic to dairy, so he appreciated the fact that it was vegan (bonus points)!

VEGAN RADISH GREENS SOUP

This soup makes like 5-6 cups with these proportions, so you'd have to double or triple them if you were going to make a lot for a family:

Ingredients:

- 2-3 tbsp olive oil or butter (vegan with oil)
- 1 medium-large potato
- 1 red onion
- 2 long celery stalks
- 1 medium carrot
- 4 cups daikon radish greens (or chard, kale, spinach or some other kind of yummy leafy green - if it's beet or radish greens, there'll be more flavor since both of those are kind of peppery. For other kinds of greens, you'll probably need to adjust the seasoning of the dish)
- 1-2 red or daikon radishes (optional - I didn't use them because I had used them all up in my kimchee)
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 tbsp fresh sage
- 1 tsp fresh parsley
- 1 tsp fresh thyme
- Salt & pepper to taste
- 1 bay leaf (remember to take it out before you blend it up)
- 4 cups chicken or vegetable stock or broth, warmed up (I used 4 cups water with chicken bouillon because I was out of everything else)

On medium-high heat, heat up the onions, celery, carrots for a few minutes. Add the potatoes, radish greens, garlic, and spices.
Warm up the broth in a separate pot while the other stuff is cooking.
Add the broth, then boil everything. Turn to medium-low and simmer for 5-20 minutes.
Remove the bay leaf.
Put everything into a blender. DONE.

Ingredients not dumpstered, donated, or picked/grown myself: Olive oil/butter, bouillon cubes, bay leaf, garlic, salt/pepper

Vegan Red Pepper & Tomato Soup

It snowed. At the end of October. Unfortunately, I was out in it more than I had wanted to be all day (if you know me you know that cold weather is not my cup of tea). So, when I got home after a full day of work I needed something to warm me up - badly.

I ended up starting a cooking session that lasted a few hours (my housemates were at a Halloween party, so I had the quiet, peaceful house to myself). I ended up using almost all the food that was about to go bad in my fridge, prolonging the life of it a little longer.

To warm up, I decided to make a soup I'd never tried before from scratch, using as many ingredients as I could from my fridge. I had a lot of tomatoes, so I decided to go with tomato soup. It turned out I had a red pepper too, so I threw that in there as well.

Soup in general is an awesome dumpster chef's tool because you can freeze most soup for a few weeks up to a few months (depending on if it has dairy, what's in it, etc). This makes it pretty easy to polish off the rest of the dumpstered food in your fridge before it spoils. Plus, reheating your frozen soup in the microwave takes no time at all on days where you just want to eat without any prep work because you're freaking hungry.

RED PEPPER & TOMATO SOUP

Ingredients:

- 1 large tomato
- 3 small roma tomatoes
- 1 medium red pepper
- 2 long stalks celery
- 1/2 large red onion
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 3/4 cup chicken or vegetable stock (bouillon is also fine to use if you don't have any previously frozen or bought stock)
- A large bunch of fresh basil
- 2-3 cloves of garlic
- 1 bay leaf
- Ground cumin (2 dashes), nutmeg (2 dashes), salt (a crap-ton), pepper (a smaller crap-ton), yellow curry powder (very small pinch), cayenne pepper (2-4 dashes), & cinnamon (very small pinch) to taste.

Makes about 2 dinner-sized servings.

Put olive oil in the bottom of a pan. Heat onions, celery, red peppers (you can roast your pepper ahead of time, which can give it extra flavor), tomatoes, and garlic at medium-high heat until they all soften up (you can leave it covered to keep some of the moisture in).
Add the bay leaf and a bit of salt.
Simmer for 20 minutes.
Add basil about 5 minutes before you take the pan off the heat.
Remove bay leaf (it will suck if you don't).

Put it all in a blender. Blend until smooth.
Put the mixture back into a pot and put it on medium-low heat.
Heat up chicken or vegetable stock (if you use vegetable stock, this recipe is vegan). Add it to your pot and thoroughly stir it in.
Add your spices to flavor the soup as you like. I like mine with a BIG punch of flavor (and the spiciness gives a little heat on those cold days), so I added a bunch (quantities delineated above). Garnish your soup with a little sprig of fresh basil and you're set! I also like to eat my soup with a piece of buttered toasty bread so I can dip it in the soup and savor it even longer.

Once everything's finished, it's time to curl up with the cat and savor the soup's warmth before I'm forced back out into the cold again.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, garlic, basil (from garden), stock, all other spices, butter (on bread)

Broccoli Cheddar Bake

So, I've always had this idea in my head from childhood that broccoli and cheddar cheese taste good together. Yet, I usually just steam broccoli, throw some butter and salt on it and call it a day (which is essentially the first step of this recipe, so if you want to do that, you can).

I'm usually very anti-anything-remotely-resembling-casserole since it reminds me of '50s housewives (gross) and overly processed leftovers (double gross). Still, I decided to try my own rendition of one, which turned out pretty tasty. It's not as healthy as I'd like, but I think it's definitely better than the very (surprisingly) popular cheese-whiz/onion powder/frozen broccoli versions I found online. It was kind of an experiment, but for a pretty minimal amount of effort I came out with enough food to last me for a week's worth of lunches. Plus, I was right - broccoli and cheddar do taste great together.

BROCCOLI CHEDDAR BAKE

Ingredients:

- 3 heads of broccoli, cut into small florets (use the stem too) (you can use previously dumpstered and frozen broccoli too, but it may not taste as good as the fresh stuff)
- 1 small white onion, diced
- 2 long stalks celery, chopped
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 2 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary and/or thyme (optional)
- 1 cup mayonaise (bonus if home-made)
- 1 cup sour cream
- 2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
- 2 cups uncooked rice
- 1 stick unsalted butter, melted
- 1.5 cups Italian-spiced bread crumbs (extra points if home-made from dumpstered bread) - you can also use crushed up crackers like ritz crackers, which will give it a different but good flavor.
- 1 can or 2 cups leftover cooked chicken (optional - I didn't use this, but it could add some extra protein)
- Salt & pepper to taste

Normally, people use cream cheese or a can of condensed cream of mushroom (or chicken) soup instead of my sour cream/mayo combination, but they were the only ingredients I had on hand and I was hungry.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Step One: Steam your broccoli

Put a weird thingy that looks like this (called a steamer?) in the bottom of a pot with enough water underneath so it barely shows:
Throw your broccoli on top. Turn the stove to medium-high, then cover the pot (be careful that the water doesn't all evaporate or the bottom of your pot will burn). Steam until broccoli is bright green and a fork goes through pretty easily. If you're lazy, you can just throw your cheddar cheese (or butter with some salt) on top and call it a day. This makes a great side dish by itself.

If you're bold enough to continue into the land of house-wifery, then continue to...

Step Two: Put it all together

While you're waiting for the broccoli to steam, mix the onion, celery, garlic, sour cream, rosemary, and mayonnaise in a bowl.
Once the broccoli is finished, dump it onto the bottom of a glass or pyrex baking pan (9"x12" works well).
Evenly cover it in the sour cream/veggie mixture.
Sprinkle your shredded cheddar over the top.
In a separate bowl, mix your melted butter and bread crumbs into a thicker mixture. Sprinkle this on top as well.

Step Three: Wait and make your rice

Throw it in the oven for 30 minutes while you make some rice (it's pretty easy - just read the side of the bag or box of rice - give yourself about 40-50 minutes for it to turn out well, so maybe start boiling your water around when your broccoli is done steaming so everything is done at the same time).

When it comes out, it'll look kind of like this:
Serve the bake by itself or for some added heartiness, put a few scoops of rice underneath! I used brown rice to make the dish last EVEN LONGER.

Items not donated or dumpstered: Butter, sour cream, mayonnaise, garlic, rosemary (from garden), salt, pepper