Meatless Monday - Vegetable and Mushroom Soup

Well, it's well and truly Winter now, so I thought I would make a nice creamy vegetable soup. The soup I made is completely vegan and the wonderful creamy texture comes from the vegetables themselves.

To me, the best part of vegetable soup is, you can put literally any vegetables in it. Even if you don't like some of them, when you blend it up, it will probably taste just fine. Generic soup taste!

To start, I like to get some onion and celery frying off in the bottom of the saucepan with a little vegetable oil. This time I used one brown onion, one red onion, and about four stems of celery. I put most of the leaves in as well, since my stems were a little thin, being home grown. Sometimes I'll pop about a teaspoon of minced garlic in at this stage as well, but honestly, I forgot...

You can leave the onion and celery (and garlic and carrot if you want to add those) to do their thing for a few minutes, and just come poke it with a wooden spoon every so often to make sure it's not sticking to the pot. When you're home, clothing, hopes and dreams start smelling of onion and it looks sort of like this:

It's time to move on to the next step. You can add either one litre of vegetable stock, or one litre of boiling water and a stock powder or vegetable soup base of your choice. I really like to add a sachet of spring vegetable simmer soup mix.

Give it a little stir through, then add literally any vegetables in the whole world. If you're going to blend it up and make it creamy, you'll need to use some pumpkin, sweet potato or potato. I used pumpkin and sweet potato in mine. When it comes back to the boil, turn the burner down to a simmer.

Gentle stirring should be enough to push all the pieces of vegetable under the water:

Now if you want to, you can add some flavour enhancements, such as herbs and spices. Since the base of my soup is pumpkin, I added some herbs from my garden that go well with pumpkin. I chose rosemary and curry plant leaf. I was going to add a little parsley as well, except I forgot.

Basically now, it's just waiting and occasionally stirring. I let mine simmer at this stage for about twenty minutes. It's ready for the next stage when the vegetables are soft.

I have a stick blender, so I stuck it in and got pulping while it was on the stove. If you have a jug blender, you may need to wait for the soup mix to cool down before you blend it.

Now, if you just want a smooth, creamy soup you can drink, you could put mushrooms in with the other vegetables. I wanted little chewy chunks, so I sliced my mushrooms up and dropped them into my warm pot of soup. 

Stick blender away, I brought the soup back to the boil then down to a simmer as I stirred the mushrooms through. I let it infuse together for another fifteen minutes before I got some for myself!

I never claimed to be a food blogger. I can't do the pictures. But here's some in a soup cup, on my lap, when I was wearing a onesie that looks like a fox.

I hope you have a wonderful, soupy adventure!

Happy Cooking!

Cassandra Louise.

I am linking up this week with Meatless Monday at Confessions of a Mother Runner and A Whisk and Two Wands.

Meatless Monday: Spaghetti and Meatless Balls

This Meatless Monday I'm sharing a recipe I only made for the first time last week, so rather than tell you exactly what to do I'll tell you what I did. This recipe uses Quorn Meat-Style Balls which are vegetarian but not vegan.

You will need:

One tin of diced tomato (mine had basil and oregano so I didn't have to add those as they're not in my garden at the moment)

Two medium - large tomatoes

One carrot (grated, even though this one clearly isn't)

One small - medium zucchini

Roughly 200g of sliced mushrooms

Minced or crushed garlic

Half an onion. This one is red, but I think a brown one would be more suitable

Spaghetti

One bag of Quorn Meat-Style Balls

One large-ish bunch of chopped parsley and cooking oil. which there are no pictures of because I'm slack

In a large pot, add the onion and 1 teaspoonful of garlic, along with a good splash of cooking oil

When everything starts to smell delicious and dinner-y, add the mushrooms and enough water to just cover them, and pop the lid on the pot.

Let that simmer (low heat) for about fifteen (15) minutes. You should have something like this, probably:

Add the grated carrot and chopped tomato and zucchini, along with the parsley and a little more water.

Stir, and cover for another ten - fifteen (10 - 15) minutes on low to medium heat. You now have the sauce:

Add the balls and turn the heat up slightly. Leave it uncovered for this bit. Check back and stir periodically.

This was taken at about twenty (20) minutes after adding the balls. I decided it was time to put the spaghetti on.

I took the rather controversial step of cooking the spaghetti in the sauce, because that's what my Nana always did when she made "Skeddi and rissoles" and that turned out fine.

I ended up with this very delicious meal. 

I was actually having an off day and I was surprised it turned out so well. By "well", I mean it was nice enough to make my whole day better. Yay! :-)

Happy Nibbling!

Cassandra Louise

Meatless Monday - Breakfast Spread

This is an avocado-based recipe, and I'm going to spill the truth tea: I don't like avocado. I don't like the texture, it feels like oily flour. I don't like the taste, it tastes like green oily flour. So why am I blogging an avocado-based recipe? Because I really like this spread, I like it a lot.
I try to eat avocados, I hide them from myself in pasta sauces and mix them with cheese because they have a lot of good stuff in them and I should eat them. This recipe was my latest attempt to disguise the texture and taste and I believe it went well. The first batch of this spread I made did five slices of toast, but I think I could have made it go further.
You will need:

One avocado

Coconut oil

Ground cinnamon

Cut the avocado into little pieces and put them in a small bowl. Add to that one big heaped teaspoon of coconut oil, or two level teaspoons if it's hot and your coconut oil is runny.

Sprinkle with cinnamon. This is the yummy part and also very good for you, which you can read about here.

Give the whole thing a good mashing with a fork until it's smooth, creamy and spread-like.

Put the spread in an airtight container in the fridge overnight or at least for half an hour or so, which will cause the coconut oil to solidify and make the whole thing more... spready.

I've had this spread on toast with a fried egg on top and that was excellent, but obviously the spread itself is completely vegan. I think it would go quite nicely with some chopped hot tomato on top, too!

Happy Mashing!

Cassandra Louise.

Follow-up to that thing I asked you about...

In my last post here I was asking for gardening advice.  Some of you had some great suggestions!  I think I've worked out what the problem was, and I hope I've fixed it.
The soil was very sense and tough, which is a common problem in pots; it needed to be dug over and aerated.  Unfortunately it would have been very difficult to do that with the tiny little plants in the pot.  I did manage to save the largest silverbeet plant, which hopefully will take off now.  One silverbeet plant that I had to dig out and add to my compost (never easy for me!  I love all my plants!) was only two centimetres tall but had roots close to thirty centimetres long, so obviously the plants in that pot were trying very hard, they just couldn't take hold.  I've since planted some radishes and calendula seeds in the tub.  The radishes have already sprouted and seem to be growing a little every day so I think I have solved the problem.  The tub now looks like this:

And my darling little radishes look like this:

The main problem I had with my last lot of seedlings was transplant shock, so to avoid that I've decided to put my Autumn nursery in peat pots and egg cartons.

That egg carton at the front there has lettuce seeds in it.  I've put them in an egg carton and not a peat pot so I will have to do less thinning out later; when the little lettuces appear, I will simply plant the entire egg carton in one of my garden tubs, just as I would a peat pot, but longer.
That big round plastic pot there has/had a potato plant in it that I found in my compost bin.  Having had a dig around, I have my suspicions that the plant rotted in the rain.  I would still quite like to grow potatoes, please, so just in case I planted some more.
I checked the one potato in my pantry for eyes.  One eye!  Plenty!  I cut a small slice of potato with the eye on it and planted that in the pot.  It should be sufficient to grow a new plant.

Worst thing that can happen is I'm no worse off than I am now.
The other plants in my garden are all doing quite well.  Here's pictures of all of them which I expect you to look at and enjoy as if I were showing you a cute thing my baby did...

For those playing along at home, that's two kinds of tomatoes, chillis and strawberries.  No fruit on the strawberries yet, but since I thought it was dead for a while there that's ok.  The first few years are always rubbish for a strawberry plant, anyhow.
The herb garden is also going well but looks a bit stragly, so I'm not going to show you any pictures of it, much like it's my baby and it just farted or something.

Happy gardening!
Love to you all,
Cassandra Louise.

News from my garden

You guys remember these lovely surprise potato shoots?

Well I'm actually not sure if the only thing that came up in that pot is a potato plant or not.  I'll be certain to keep you posted.
 

I know a lot of things in my garden are going quite well, others, not so much.  So much rain recently.  Rain is very good, and I am ever grateful for rain, but it was too much for some of my less-established bean plants, and they buckled under the weight of their own drenched leaves.  My more established bean plants, however, really took off in the rain.  They have gotten to the stage where the flowers are starting to fall away, revealing tiny little green bean pods, full of life and vitality yet to be realised.  These beans are purple king beans and the pods, when fully grown, are vibrant purple.

These are climbing vines, and they have wound their way right up to the top of the fence and beyond!  This is a picture of the tops of the plants up above my head.

Quite beautiful, really.  And the end result of this beauty will be something my family can eat.  Bonus!

Signed with love,
Cassandra Louise.

Surprise Plants! Perhaps More Potatoes?

Potatoes may never stop surprising me.  I'm now on a quest of sorts to see exactly how little of a potato needs to be planted to grow a potato plant.  My first surprise potato plant today came when I opened the lid of the puple bin (the purple bin where my surprise potatoes had grown the first time).  After harvesting the potatoes, I had put the soil back in the bin until there was space in my compost bin for it.  I opened the lid to put the soil in the compost bin, but found this potato plant.

When I opened the compost bin, I was attacked by spiders as usual, but as I dug down, I found several long white stems.  I thought they were roots from the old cabbages I'd put in there a few weeks back, but I soon worked out they were actually potato plants.  I planted them in a pot and covered them over.  I will let you know how they all grow!

These are the little white potato plants.  They'll green up when they sprout properly.  I don't have a picture of them in the pot, as they're covered over to protect them from the sun and encourage growth, so it just looks like a really big pot of dirt.

Signed with love,

Cassandra Louise.

Where Do Your Vegetables Come From?

One thing a lot of people don't think about when buying food is the transport involved in getting the food to the shop/market/stall, and then to their home.  Just in brief, your vegetables (and fruit) are picked and packed, they then have a truck ride (which of course uses fuel and makes pollution) and sometimes even a plane ride (which of course also uses fuel and means another truck ride to the final destination) and then after you buy your fruit and veggies, you transport them too, and unless you can carry all your groceries walking or on a bicycle, you're using fuel and making pollution, too.  Often it is impractical or impossible to completely eliminate this part of your carbon footprint, but there are things you can do to minimise your impact.
If a product has come from another country, that's obviously needed more transportation than something grown in your own country; over and above this, you can buy food from your local farmer's market or fruit and veg shop which is grown in your own state, and quite often your own town - even better!  Remember that it's always ok to ask questions about the origins of what you eat, and local produce will be fresher, too.
But what can be fresher than food from your own backyard?  Not much! 
If you

• don't have a backyard
• can't dig in your yard
• can't bend down to garden and/or
• have very little money

the following may help you.
What follows here is the wonderful visual cacophony which is the story of my beloved.
This is the what, why and how of my home veggie garden.  It may even have pictures.  I don't know yet because I don't make drafts, I just sit here and type whatever comes into my head.  You'll notice if it has pictures because it'll have pictures in it.
My family has a reasonably big backyard, but we can't plant anything in the part where our dogs run around, as they are gigantic eating machines, and will eat anything in the yard with them, including onions and other things which are bad for dogs.  Our dogs have a very good run, so our yard is reduced a lot.
We can't dig in most of the remaining yard, as lots of important pipes and things that affect the whole entire city run through the yard, and if the council needed to get to them they'd just rip out our garden.  I didn't really want a garden all that way down, anyhow, as I have back and joint pain and it's difficult for me to bend down.
The solution Mum and I came up with was to make an edible garden in tubs and pots, but this posed one problem: tubs and pots cost money.  We worked out that while tubs and pots do cost money, we could make them cost less money.  Mum and I asked our friends for any old, disused flower pots they had; Dad scoured the local tip and second-hand shops, not just for pots but for barrels, wine tubs, big buckets, laundry tubs and anything else we could drill some holes in and fill with potting mix.
Here's a picture of an assortment of our pots and "pots":

We also thought we'd get a little compost going.  One day I opened the lid and found these potatoes growing:

A lot of our first seeds came from vegetables we'd bought from the supermarket, we simply saved the seeds from what we ate, or kept a potato that'd grown eyes.  Seed packets for other plants were sourced from friends and relatives, found on the covers of magazines we were going to buy anyhow (hooray!) and picked up very cheaply from the bargain bin at the hardware store (sometimes $1 or less!).  Dad wondered how we'd (ok, how he'd) get the lawnmower in around the pots to mow the lawn, which is when my fabulous mother had the idea of laying weed mat against the fence line, and placing the pots of veggie seeds on the mat.  The pots and "pots" were placed on the mat and prepared with potting mix and fertilizer.  Mum and I both decided we wanted to keep the garden as organic as possible, so our fertilizer consisted largely of plant matter, animal manure and a dead goldfish who'd lived a wonderful long life and gotten very big; we figured feeding our garden would be a good use for our loved pet now departed.
I planned out which seeds would go in what pot, and got to planting.  Everyday, like an eager child waiting for Christmas, I would run out into the garden and peer into every pot to see if anything had grown, yet.
After a few weeks, we found we needed to buy less food; some of the money we saved went into buying some more "exotic" seeds and seedlings, like yellow zucchini and purple carrot amongst others.
Below is a photo of our pumpkin vine.  The pumpkins were one of the easiest things we grew; we just threw some pumpkin seeds in potting mix in an old wheelbarrow tray with no wheels on it.  We're not sure what kind of pumpkin it is, but it's either JAP or Kent, as that's the kinds we would buy from the supermarket.

Another very easy thing to grow is of course the potatoes, and we start some more when we find one with eyes in the cupboard. Growing them in tubs means harvest is as simple as tipping the tub up on a tarp.  Potatoes do attract one unique garden pest, the "28-spot ladybird".  These ladybirds don't eat aphids like all the others, they just make lattice work out of potato leaves.  Personally I don't worry too much about them, since we can't eat the leaves of the potato, anyhow.  Here's a picture of one and what they do:

And here's a picture of a "good" ladybird on some catnip, so you can compare:

Having the plants in large pots means most of them can be tended from sitting in a chair; some smaller pots we have set up on an old table.
Here's a picture of a pineapple in a tub on the table:

That's some clover growing in the same tub.  It's not bothering the pineapple, so we just leave it.  It's really surprising how many different things you can put in the one tub:

If you want to start your own edible garden from seeds, most seeds are quite straight forward to collect, just take the seeds out the fruit and plant them.  Tomato seeds are a bit tricky to collect, but you can collect and grow the seeds from any tomato like this.  Pineapples are especially easy, just cut the top off a pineapple and plant the top, but they do take about two years to bear their first fruit.  If you have any other questions about starting your own garden in tubs and pots, please comment them on this post, and I'll try to answer them on the next post.
Lots of lovely love and peaceful peace to you all,
Cassandra Louise.
PS- I just really wanted to show off the carrots I'm growing in an old garbage bin, so here's a picture of them.