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)

Sweet and Savory Kale

I took this dish to a pot-luck a few months ago at my buddy Dan's house, and a few people asked for the recipe, so I figured I'd post it here (since I just made a new batch with collard greens instead of kale).

I got the recipe from a friend originally, although I now forget who...


SWEET AND SAVORY KALE

Ingredients:

- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 bunch of kale (about 4-6 cups once you de-stem it) (or a bag of collard greens)
- 1 small onion, diced
- Portabella or shitake mushrooms (optional)
- 2 tsp sugar
- 1 tbsp dijon or brown mustard
- 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
- 3-6 cloves of garlic (depending on how garlicy you want it)
- 1.5-2 cups of stock (chicken or vegetable)
- 0.5 cups craisins (dried cranberries)
- Sliced almonds (optional)
- Salt & pepper to taste

Heat oil on medium heat. Throw in garlic and onion until the onion's translucent. If you want to use mushrooms, throw them in at this point too.
Stir in the mustard, sugar, vinegar, and stock. Turn heat to high and bring to a boil.
Put in the kale or collards and cover for 5 minutes until the leaves are thoroughly wilted.
Stir in the craisins and keep cooking uncovered for about 15 min until the liquid in the pan reduces and the craisins soften up.
Add salt & pepper to taste.
Sprinkle with sliced almonds before serving (optional).

Here's the collard greens rendition with shitake mushrooms (whoever cut and bagged the collards didn't de-stem them, which was kinda sad):



Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, garlic, cider vinegar, mustard