Baked vegetables with mediterranean herbs

Don´t you just love the smell of vegetables roasting in the oven after being infused with a marinade containing fragrant mediterranean herbs? I certainly adore that smell…

Here I cut up onion, pumpkin, carrot and red beet and marinated them for a couple hours in olive oil (just enough to coat), some sea salt and a generous amount of dried oregano, basil, thyme and rosemary. Then I baked them in the oven until they got cooked through and browned a bit, stirring at times to allow them to bake evenly.

I had also some lentils cooked with bayleaf and salt and the grain was a rice/amaranth mixture with nori flakes to top.

A quick lunch of leftovers!

Sometimes there just is a fridge full of leftovers and a lunch that needs to be quickly assembled…it´s great to have some extra cooked grain and beans, and a few fresh veggies to liven up the meal!

Here I had leftover rice and hato mugi which I sprinkled generously with freshly toasted sunflower seeds (toast on a dry pan until they start getting golden and fragrant).

I had leftover cooked lentils, so I mixed them with cubes of hokkaido pumpkin, organic corn kernels from a glass jar and water to barely cover, cooking the meal until the pumpkin got soft. I seasoned this with some shoyu soy sauce and ground coriander.

Very quick and tasty!

Lentil burdock soup

I love lentil soup, it brings this comforting feeling of a cold day, when you can enjoy being inside with a warm bowl of filling hearty soup instead of having to be freezing outside… 😀

For the soup I sauteed some onion half moons on oil and when the onion browned a bit, I added sliced carrot and burdock (best is to make rather thin diagonals that align with the growth pattern of the roots) and sauteed for a while longer. Then I added already cooked dark green French Le Puy lentils. To make the lentils, I soaked them overnight, drained and rinsed. Then I cooked them until soft with a bayleaf and about one teaspoon of cumin powder, and seasoned them with ume plum vinegar when they were already cooked.  To finish the soup I poured enough water into the soup pot  to cover all and cooked for a few minutes, at the end checking the taste and adjusting with ume plum vinegar and salt.

Last macro meals before my move…

In the beginning of March we were busy with relocating to Slovenia, and we are still settling in…Here I have some meals which I cooked still before our departure but didn´t manage to post them until now…so with a bit of delay… 😀

Rice pressure cooked together with barley with a sprinkle of shiso powder – shiso is a plant with red leaves, the sprinkle also contains seasalt and ume plum vinegar so it has a pleasant salty-sour taste. Kinpira made of dried burdock, carrot, stems of kolrabi and tamari. Steamed pointed cabbage and kolrabi leaves. Arame seaweed cooked together with onion halfmoons, sesame seeds, seasoned with tamari. And of course miso soup…

A couple of days later I cooked rice together with amaranth and millet (with gomasio on top). Accompanied by brown lentils flavoured with ume plum vinegar (I love the combination of legumes and ume plum). And a lovely sautee of fennel, onion, leek, butternut squash, zucchini, green beans and cauliflower, on some olive oil with a mediterranean herb mixture…Usually I don´t make such “southern” dishes, but from time to time I like something with a touch of the south…

7.12. Oats with pumpkin and lentil stew

Today I reused the oats from yesterday and cooked them for about 20 minutes with chunks of hokkaido pumpkin, which is my favourite way of eating grains 😀 It´s a good thing about oats that the longer you cook them, the nicer and creamier they get, so don´t worry about leftover oats and how to use them – they are a great recycling grain!

With the oats I made a stew of lentils (“berglinsen”, a reddish-brown variety) cooked together with dried thyme, bayleaf and a few chunks of carrot and celery root. It´s really nice to use root veggies with beans I think! At the end you can season the lentils with tamari or miso.