The Queer Hipster Kitchen

I keep seeing photos of friends who are experiencing the first snow of the season.  We aren't there yet - thankfully - but it is definitely crisp outside.  You know, that magical time of year when you don't know what coat to wear, and your skin is furious despite your best attempt at moisturizer, and the static electricity is pure and strong radiating off all your sweaters... I actually like this fall/winter time, despite my grumblings above (and the annoyances of Daylight Savings Time).  As a family that does a lot of batch cooking, it gets easier at this time of year for one simple, delicious, reason: It's soup time. Soup is the ultimate easy, quick meal.  It's endlessly versatile.  Almost any soup can be made in a crock pot or pressure cooker.  And we have dozens and dozens of soup recipes, carefully curated and waiting. (There's also one recipe for a really terrible soup, lurking in one of my cookbooks.  I made it once and we hated it, but ...

This one is literally, actually the easiest soup we make.  It's a never-fail soup that could be hearty enough for lunches or make a fancy starter at some looming holiday meal. The Ingredients: 1 butternut squash, peeled and cubed 6 c. veggie stock 1-2 T spice of your choice: good options include cayenne, chipotle powder, ancho chile powder for the spicier crowd, or milder options like cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg for a sweeter approach 3 cloves garlic black pepper The Process: Put all of it in a crockpot and cook on low for 8 hours or until the squash has gone totally soft. Use an immersion blender to puree the soup.  Adjust both spice and stock to taste: that is, if you need more heat, add it; if it's too thick, add more stock and let simmer a bit. That's literally it.  6-8 servings, depending on how hungry you are. Pro Tips: If this is lunch for the week, we will use 2 squashes, double the stock, and make it in the Great Big Crockpot. You can also add...

So, we've been on a short hiatus, partly because I was away on research.  (Karen did an admirable job of keeping the Queer Hipster Kitchen moving - there were doughnuts and a vegetarian shepherd's pie waiting when I got home!)  But we're back and the kitchen has been busy this week. When we travel, we are able to put a "vacation hold" on our amazing CSA, which lets us schedule a double share for a future week.  (This is an amazing feature and part of why we love this CSA.  Besides, you know, the incredible veggies.)  Due to unexpected travel, we had a forthcoming double.  I *thought* I'd scheduled it for the last week of the fall CSA, before we transition to the winter one.  But it turns out that, nope, I scheduled it for this past week. Surprise!  A double! I love a double, but it does take some planning.  Yes, that is five medium eggplant, two butternut squash, two cauliflower, two bundles of cooking greens, two bundles of kale, tw...

This soup is a house favorite because it's simple, quick, and easy - the kind of fix-it-and-forget-it meal that the slow cooker is designed for.  Ingredients: about 6 cups of chopped butternut squash 4 cups veggie stock 2 cups cooked white beans (cannellini are great - something that will fall apart!) spices to your preference (we like garlic, onion powder, and a dash of cayenne or red pepper flakes) The process: Combine squash, beans, and stock in crock pot.  Cook on low heat for 8 hours - or longer, if need be.  The contents should be easily mashable. Using either an immersion blender or a plain old potato masher, mush up the remaining chunks until soup is at a consistency you find appropriate.  (We tend to use the immersion blender and go smooth.) Add spices to your taste. Dish into bowls and add any toppings you'd like: croutons are always a good option. Pro Tips: This freezes beautifully.  The yield will vary depending on just how ...

School years and semesters are now well under way for folks whose work is most pressing on that September-to-June cycle.  And where have we been?  Well, getting said year under way, of course. Despite the fact that I'm on research leave, we are diligent about our meal planning and about using weekends to do some advance work for the week.  (This means that doing the prep has taken precedence over blogging about it over the past two busy weekends - sorry, friends.) If you've been around food blogs for any length of time, you've seen ten thousand people praising meal prep and telling you it's the secret to your new healthy lifestyle.  I wish this was the moment when I said "but they're wrong!" or "do it like this!" but... meal prep, especially lunch prep, is crucial to our family's ability to eat well and resist the siren calls of ordering a pizza or grabbing something processed. However.  Karen and I can manage most of the prep in about ...

Hers and hers aprons. It is the last weekend of "freedom" - Karen starts her new school year on Monday.  That means that while it's definitely *not* the last week for experimental cooking, we'll have a few weeks of mostly tried-and-true recipes as we truly enter the swing of things.  So we set aside a little time for kitchen adventures today, particularly adventures that let us try things out from scratch. Our style of vegetarian-ish eating involves a lot of recipes where you don't miss the meat because, well, there never was meat.  Loads of cuisines don't use it, or use very little.  However, we like an occasional "faux meat" - crumbles or strips - particularly for some recipes.  And some nights you're just running late, or tired, and you want something quick and easy.  No matter how inventive you are, sometimes you're just not inspired. There's just one challenge: we are a pretty much soy-free household due to food sensitivities...

This one is sort of like a polenta, but seems to be firmer - and, of course, it uses chickpeas.  We've modified our version from Jennifer Schmidt's . The Ingredients: 1 cup chickpea flour 1 tsp salt at least 1/4 spice (we used ground ginger) 3 cups water (divided) Cooking spray or a neutral oil. The Process: Grease a pan or baking dish with the neutral oil.  An 8x8 is about right, but you can go smaller for thicker pieces or larger for thinner ones. Put 1 1/2 cups water in a saucepan and bring to a boil. While your water is getting to its boil, combine chickpea flour, salt, and spice in a bowl.  Mix in 1 1/2 cups water and whisk until smooth. Reduce heat on the saucepan to medium-high.  Add in the chickpea and water mixture, stirring constantly.  Continue stirring until the mixture thickens.  (Schmidt claims this will take 8 minutes.  It took more like 15.  Also, if you stop stirring, your tofu mix will bubble and spit at you....

This recipe is gently modified from the one available at Connoisseurus Veg .  The ingredients: 1 cup vital wheat gluten 1/4 cup chickpea flour  1 cup water 6 cups stock (veggie or otherwise) 1/4 to 1/3 cup soy sauce spices - whatever speaks to you The process: Mix wheat gluten with flour and add 1 cup water.  Stir to form a dough. Turn dough out onto counter and knead for at least 5 minutes.  (More is good, too.  You can let it rest, then come back to kneading.  Definitely give it more if, like me, you are not a super vigorous kneader.) Let dough rest for at least 5 min, then cut into pieces (at least 4). Combine stock, soy sauce, and whatever spices you'd like and bring to a boil.  Reduce to a simmer and add your dough pieces.  Be sure your dough pieces are fully submerged. Simmer your seitan for an hour.  Try not to let it get to a full boil, but be sure it is a hearty simmer. Remove from broth and cook/use as you wo...

Today is a bulk cooking day - we're a few weeks away from the start of new school years and semesters, which means it's time to start rebuilding our usual routines.  This involves setting back the alarm clock (which I hate already), getting our morning walk on, and, perhaps most importantly, picking up the batch cooking in earnest once more. One day of each weekend, our kitchen becomes an epic, delicious mess.  We take a couple of hours and do as much pre-preparing as we can stand.  This is a really crucial part of our ability to prepare healthy meals from minimally processed stuff during the week.  So today was the day to make rice ahead, pressure cook beans, whip up some hummus, make ice cream (a house staple!), and more.  It's a quiet weekend without too many other commitments, so it's also a good week to get our pasta and pizza dough on.  (Both freeze really well.) A few weeks ago, we bought carrots at the co-op that had really substantial greens ...

It's summer.  It's hot outside.  That means it is the perfect time for home made ice cream. I want to begin by saying that we were very fortunate.  We didn't have to buy our own ice cream maker.  The very first Christmas that we were an "us," Kara's dad bought us a Kitchen Aid standing mixer.  He must have coordinated with my mom, because that very same Christmas she bought us a bunch of attachments, including the ice cream bowl. That was many years ago (not actually that many, really) and I've used that ice cream bowl more this month than I have since we got it.  The reason?  Cooking classes. We really enjoy going to cooking classes together and two of our favorites have included ice cream (or gelato) for dessert.  I wish I could take credit for the recipes that I'm going to share, but they are both thanks to the cooking classes. So let's start with equipment.  You will, unfortunately, need an ice cream maker of some sort for these r...

Confession: I love cooking, but I don't always want to cook when I get home at the end of the day.  I don't get people who claim they do.  Believe me when I say that I too come home tired, annoyed, and/or aggravated, and I am as tempted as the next person (if not more) to cry "screw it!" and hop on GrubHub. I was having just such a day today - not that anything bad or annoying occurred, but it was hot, and it's summer, and I just wasn't feeling it.  Karen and I had gone out to do a few errands, and as we drove home, it seemed like every restaurant was taunting us. I could smell Mexican food, and something else delicious, as we made our way homeward through increasingly annoying traffic.  But I knew that there was a fridge of CSA vegetables awaiting us, and something had to be done with them before the next batch arrives on Saturday. So, grumbling, I made my way to said fridge, staring for a bit.  We've started to have lots of "scraps" of ve...

This one is pretty easy to whip up with stuff you have on hand - at least, for us.  Adjust spice to your taste and put it on whatever's in the fridge. Modified from The Cooking Guy . For the rice: 3-4 cups chopped vegetables, whatever's handy 2 cups cooked rice 2 eggs (or stray egg whites) For the sauce: 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 T fresh ginger (or ginger powder) 1 T sesame oil (or any neutral oil + sesame seeds) 2 T rice vinegar 1/4 cup soy sauce 1/4 cup veggie broth 1/2 to 1 T sriracha or other hot sauce (per your taste!) 1 T sugar 1 T corn starch Instructions: Combine all sauce ingredients in a bowl and whisk together. After making sauce, heat a large pan with about 2 T oil or a generous spray of cooking spray. Stir-fry vegetables as appropriate to what you have: harder veggies (carrots, zucchini) take 2-3 minutes.  Greens and softer veggies (cabbage, peppers, etc.) take less than 2 minutes. Remove veggies and put in a bowl.  Toss with s...

... But they are my mama's beets. Cinnamon Pickled Beets have been a family recipe for years.  I talked a little about my mom's beets in a previous post , but they have converted many folks who swear they do not eat beets.  People have been contacting her to ask if there are beets available yet.  (There are not.)  However, if you've got beets, you can have some cinnamon pickled ones from the comfort of your own kitchen! Oddly, I am the holdout.  I love beets, but I'm the only one who's not obsessed with my mom's.  (Don't get me wrong - they're delicious - but I prefer my beets roasted.) Go figure. Ingredients: 4 pounds beets 2 1/2 cups apple cider vinegar 1 1/2 cups water 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups sugar 1 tablespoon mustard seed 1 teaspoon whole allspice (NOT GROUND) 1 teaspoon whole cloves 3 cinnamon sticks, broken The Process: Wash and drain beets.  Leave 2 inches of stems and tap roots. Cover with boiling water and cook until t...

Our adventures in Utah with my parents reminded me that for folks who have been omnivores for their entire lives, the idea of leaving meat out of things can make one feel like meals are missing something.  Cooking for vegetarians, the thinking sometimes goes, is weird and complicated.  What do you make if your meal isn't meat, starch, and veg?  Surely all those strange vegetarian alternatives are expensive?  What kind of casserole doesn't include ground hamburger?  (This last is definitely a mystery to my mom.) So my goal with this post is to convince you that eating vegetarian is a) not weird; b) not expensive; c) not complicated; d) delicious.  The meals for the week are designed as usual - with a range of complexity (but tending toward quick and simple).  There will be a photo of at least one meal each day, so you can see how pretty our food is.  (It's the all-natural beauty of veggies and spices.  Food staging is not a talent to which m...

Have you ever been trying to use up some kitchen scraps and made something so fabulous that you write down everything you did, so you can do it again?  That was my day today. We were rolling egg rolls for our gathering with friends tonight.  The trouble was that we had sort of a lot of egg roll wrappers left - we made a beautiful dozen crispy baked rolls, as per the recipe I shared last week , but then were left scrambling to figure out what to do with the rest of the wrappers.  Once they're open, you really only have a day or two to use them. So I went digging in the fridge: what else can be made into an egg roll?  I found barbecue sauce, some more of our endless CSA cabbage, and an open can of jackfruit. Things weren't looking promising. However, I know that many people like jackfruit for its pulled-pork-like texture.  In fact, I have a can at present because I put some into our lentil sloppy joes for exactly that magical texture.  So, if jackfruit...

We spent a week and a bit on the road, visiting my parents - and now, we're back!  It's good to be home for many reasons, but perhaps the most relevant one here is that it's CSA day.  Yum, veggies. My parents mostly accommodated our semi-vegetarian eating habits, but there was still more meat and more vacation treats than necessary.  Plus I missed my kitchen!  My mom also likes cooking, which means that every time I tried to prepare something, she came to help - or intervened and offered to do it.  It's good to go do things in my kitchen when I want to... and to know where everything is. Hello, veggies! So this morning, it was off to market as usual on a Saturday.  But one unusual thing is the size of our farm share this week.  You see, our farm will allow us to set a "vacation hold" and choose a week later in the season to receive a double share.  Effectively, this means we got last week's box *and* this week's box today.  And what a...

This recipe is modified from one I found on SparkRecipes forever ago.  These are a good use for whatever veggies you've got around - cabbage and carrots are the key ingredients, but you can add in pretty much whatever else you'd like.  (People tell me they're good with chopped mushrooms.) Ingredients: 2 T extra virgin olive oil   16 oz. shredded veggies - cabbage and carrot mix   4 green onions, chopped   1 small can water chestnuts, drained and chopped 1 1/2 cup bean sprouts 1 T ground ginger 1 T garlic powder  2 T fish sauce   2 T soy sauce   1 T cornstarch   20 egg roll wrappers The Process: Preheat oven to 400 F. In a wok or large pan, heat olive oil.  Combine all ingredients except cornstarch and egg roll wrappers and stir-fry for about 2 minutes (until cabbage is wilted). Mix cornstarch with 1 T cold water and add to wok.  Stir for about a minute, until sauce thickens. After cooking, str...

This recipe is modified from this one at Simply Quinoa.  We like the texture, but find the final product overly sweet, so I got creative and came up with some modifications. A note: this recipe makes a TON.  It makes six cup-plus servings.  However, it freezes really well. Ingredients: 1 cup finely chopped carrots 1 cup shredded jackfruit 1/2 cup finely diced onion 2 garlic cloves, minced 1 1/2 cups brown or green lentils 1/2 cup quinoa (uncooked) 8 oz tomato sauce 1/2 cup ketchup 1 T maple syrup (or honey, or other sweetener) 2 T hot sauce of your choice 2 T mustard 1 T chili powder 1 tsp paprika 3-4 cups veggie broth salt and pepper to taste The Process: Put all the ingredients into a slow cooker.  Stir to combine. Cook on high for 2-3 hours or low for 4-6 hours. Eat. Yes, it's that simple. Pro Tips: I like to shred the carrots, but if you want more texture/crunch, just chop them very small. If you like mushrooms, you might use tho...

Confession time: I hate coleslaw.  Well, I hate most coleslaw.  I know it's the quintessential side dish for cookouts, usually paired with fish and chips (my favorite food in the world), and a summertime classic, but to me, most coleslaw is either a crunchy mayonaisse delivery system or a sad soggy cup of vinegar and cabbage. But I do not hate this coleslaw, easily made from scratch.  The big differences here are two: first, using actual veggies instead of a bag of cabbage mix makes all the difference in the world.  Second, control over my coleslaw dressing means that the slaw has flavor, but it doesn't sit and soak in a sad container of slimy mayo mix. This slaw is accompanied today by grilled halloumi cheese with avocado slices and a balsamic drizzle, an experimental lunch that I am going to put into regular meal rotation now.  (Oh my God, yum.) Ingredients: 1 Napa cabbage 2 carrots 2 garlic scapes 2-3 Hakurei salad turnips 1/2 cup mayonaisse 1 ...

This saag is faster than delivery.  I swear.  Eat it with rice or naan.  Though the recipe calls this "saag paneer," the bulk of the recipe is for the sauce: we sometimes make the sauce ahead, freeze it without paneer or other protein, and save it for an "instant dinner" in the future. Ingredients: 1 medium tomato 2 T ghee butter (or a mild-flavored oil) 1/2 medium onion 1 pound greens 5 cloves garlic, chopped 2 tsp minced ginger 2 tsp cumin 1 tsp tumeric 2 tsp garam masala 1 tsp salt 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (or to taste) 1/2 cup water 1 block paneer, chopped into cubes (or a can of chickpeas, or some tofu, or cooked meat) The Process: Put ghee or oil into the base of the Instant Pot and set to saute.  Once ghee is melted (or oil is hot), add garlic, ginger, onion, and tomato and saute for 1-2 minutes. Put greens, spices, and 1/2 cup water into the pot, and combine with garlic and tomato mix. Put the lid on the Instant Pot and be sure it's...