Warming red beet soup with horseradish

This soup looks so amazing, don´t you think?!? It also tastes amazing…so soothing, warming and energizing! Too bad pumpkin season is long over here, I miss the pumpkins dearly 😦

To make the soup, first sautee some sliced onion in a pot with a small amount of sesame oil and a pinch of salt. Add chopped up carrot, hokkaido pumpkin, parsley root, red beet and a small piece of apple – you have to play with the ratios and each time you will end up with a different soup depending on which vegetable you decide to emphasize! 😀 Sautee together for a while, add a bit more salt and cover with hot water so that all the veggies are submerged. At this point you can add bayleaf, allspice and whole cloves (adds great depth of flavour). Boil slowly with a lid on for 15-20 minutes until the vegetables become soft. Season with ume plum vinegar. Blend the soup in a blender or use an immersion blender (I think that´s the easier way to puree soups, because you don´t need to transfer it anywhere!).  Don´t forget to take out the spices before blending…After blending, let the soup simmer for a while longer and then turn off the flame and mix in some finely grated horseradish – the amount depends on how spicy you want your soup to be… You can still season the soup with some lemon juice and add a nice green garnish, such as chopped fresh parsley.

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.

Anise flavoured vegetable stew with hiziki

Yep, you got it right – I DID mix seaweed and anise! Together with a load of sweet vegetables and miso! 😀 Sounds maybe a bit odd but it´s a lovely comforting stew which is pretty warming in spite of the cooling seaweed featured. Anise definitely adds extra warmth to the long cooked winter vegetables…

I cut up carrot, parsley root, parsnip, turnip, hokkaido pumpkin, red beet, curly cabbage and onion into medium-sized pieces, placed them into a thick-bottom pot and covered the vegetables with water. They don´t have to be fully submerged, you can just add some water accordingly during the cooking time. I mixed in a handful of presoaked and rinsed hiziki seaweed (it needs to soak for about an hour). I also added a generous sprinkle of anise seeds and a pinch of salt.

Cover the pot with a lid, bring to boil and afterwards just simmer on a low flame, keeping the lid on and watching that the vegetables don´t get too dry. At the end you can add a tablespoon of brown rice miso diluted in some warm water and let it gently simmer with a lid off. The stew should not end up being too watery, you can also always thicken it with corn starch, arrowroot or kuzu…

I served it with a rice/barley mixture with gomasio.

Macro Borshch

This is a twist on the traditional Russian soup called “borshch” which is usually heavy on cream and meat and potatoes, but here you have a lighter macro version which still comes quite close and is very satisfying on a cold autumn day 🙂

Sautee some diced onion and finely chopped garlic on a bit of oil with a pinch of salt, until soft. Add similar-sized cubes of carrot, parsnip, parsley root, celery root and red beet and sautee for a while longer until the veggies get shiny. Then add hot water according to how many bowls you will need in the end. Sprinkle in some dried marjoram, caraway seeds, smoked paprika powder and add also a bayleaf or two. Cook the soup until the red beet is soft enough – it´s the vegetable that will take longest. Adjust taste using tamari and/or salt for saltiness and lemon juice and/or vinegar of choice (I had apple cider vinegar) for a sour taste.

I had the soup with some vegetable pancakes but I can imagine it would taste great with a big slice of sourdough bread!

Roasted beets, pumpkin and cauliflower and Hiziki with almonds

The title says it all:

I sliced up a  medium-sized and peeled red beet, took apart some cauliflower florets and made big chunks of hokkaido pumpkin. I sprinkled the veggies with olive oil and tamari (the best is to use a spray to get an even light sprinkle, totally worth the money!) and with some dried rosemary. I placed them in a baking dish with a bit of water on the bottom, covered the dish with tin foil and baked for about 45 minutes until tender. The last 10-15 minutes you can bake them uncovered so they get less soggy. In the end it looked like this:

 

Meanwhile I soaked hiziki (half an hour should do the trick), discarded the water (the flavour can be a bit overpowering), added (overnight soaked and peeled) almonds and cooked the meal for 30-45 minutes on a low flame with some water and tamari. Don´t go too light on the tamari – seaweed needs strong flavouring, otherwise it tastes just like a…well, seaweed 😀 Normally I add some vegetables to the seaweed but this time I left it plain, just hiziki-almonds-seasoning.

I served the dinner with rice and amaranth with some shiso leaf powder.

 

Roasted red beet, zucchini and tempeh with quick “sauerkraut”

I don´t often make meals with red beet as beets contain some oxalic acid, nevertheless I do like a roasted beet from time to time. I find they take very long to become soft when just baked in the oven…so it´s best to first steam your beet chunks for some time until they´re semi-soft. Then toss the chunks with similar-size chunks of zucchini (I had yellow one) and tempeh (I used marinated, so better cook yours with some soy sauce first to give it flavour) in a bowl. Stir in olive oil to coat and then some salt, dried basil, oregano and thyme. Transfer into a baking dish and bake for about 45 minutes on 200°C, stirring at times and checking that the veggies don´t burn.

Meanwhile finely shred cabbage (I used both white and red cabbage) and cook in a pot with a lid and a small amount of water, on a low to medium flame. Don´t forget a pinch of salt. You might need to use a flame tamer and stir at times so the cabbage cooks evenly. Halfway add a splash of vinegar (I had apple cider vinegar) and caraway seeds if you like them – in the traditional Czech sauerkraut they are mandatory 😀 Cook long until almost completely soft, and near the end add a splash of mirin. After this step your “sauerkraut” will become done quickly.

I served these dishes with millet and gomasio.