Solar-baked stuffed peppers

Solar-baked stuffed peppers
Originally uploaded by wbajzek

And, the final assembly! Two green bell peppers stuffed with spanish rice and refried beans, topped with some colby uncheese, and cooked in the solar cooker for about 4 hours. See how the uncheese browned? Nice! I wish it had melted a bit, but you can't win them all.

Spanish rice, black beans, peppers & seitan, cilantro "pesto"

Spanish rice, black beans, peppers & seitan, cilantro "pesto"
Originally uploaded by wbajzek

A multi-part preparation... Something I am not always motivated enough to do.

Item one: Spanish rice, made with brown rice, vegetable stock, and a can of stewed tomatoes, the contents of which had been run through the food processor.

Item two: black beans. soaked overnight and then cooked in the pressure cooker.

Item three: Seitan with red, yellow, and green bell peppers, all sauteed with a bit of olive oil, salt, and adobo seasoning. The adobo smelled quite strong, but the flavor was subtle. It's on the old side, so I don't think I can consider that a "rule."

Last but not least, the cilantro "pesto" that I made last night.

We assembled these things artistically into our bowls and had another nice meal on the porch, in the lovely spring cupertino weather. The leftovers were all mixed together for the sake of reducing dish usage. I think it'd make really nice burritos, but I don't think buying bunch of tortillas when we'd realistically only need two or three makes sense, because at the moment I don't expect that any of our other leftovers would make particularly appetizing burritos. 

A bit of cleaning up along the way, and the kitchen is a lot less of a disaster than it could have been considering all the dishes, tools, etc involved. If only I were always so disciplined. 

recent soups

So far we've been dealing with the Two Small Farms deliveries by making stock with everything that we don't understand, and then using that stock to make soup with the rest. Unfortunately, I don't remember the details of the second stock, plus it contained at least a few items that I'd never heard of anyway. 

The first soup contained turnip, onion, leeks, squash, and escarole. This was very good, which surprised me because I felt that the stock didn't turn out so well. A bit of salt and nutritional yeast did wonders with it. I know you think I'm weird for using the stuff, but it's pretty good. The second was a coconut curry with squash and fennel. I was rather fond of that one; it was pretty simple but came out very well. 

The third is in progress now; squash, golden beets, onions, bell peppers, oyster mushrooms, and possibly some escarole as well but it's might crowded in the pot as it is. 

Update, 9:43pm: This soup is excellent!

Pressure cooker madness

I bought an old pressure cooker a month or so ago and have been using it primarily to make rice and beans. The other day, I made some saffron rice in it and then stirred in some ginger, spices, mixed veggies, and raisins to make a pulau kind of dish. It was pretty good. I attempted the same thing today, this time with a chopped up onion added to the rice and some of Angeline's veggie stock instead of water. I also threw in some bell peppers, star anise, fennel and cumin seeds. At that point, it looked like there wasn't enough water, so I added more, perhaps totally 3.5 cups of liquid. It was WAY too much to produce the intended dish, I'm afraid, as the rice was fully cooked while the whole thing was still swimming in liquid. I tasted it and it was pretty good as it was, so I added salt and pan-roasted cashews and served myself a dish of it. Wow! It turned out very tasty in a subtle and complex sort of way. I like it enough that I will probably try to make it this way again sometime.

Angeline made a vegan lasagna, some of which I am also having for lunch. It's pretty great, too, hopefully she will write about it.