Marinated vegetable oven fries

Since I try to avoid potatoes for their weakening effect and alkaloid content, I like to make oven fries from all kinds of vegetables, of course, not all of them are suited for this purpose. What works great are pretty much any root vegetables, especially carrot and parsnip. Also sweet potatoes, naturally, because they resemble standard potatoes so much. Also pumpkin, because it´s so high in starch. That´s actually the main criteria: it has to be starchy! 😀

Here I cut up carrot, pumpkin and sweet potato into the shape of french fries and marinated them for a few hours in some oil with salt and ground cumin, lovely, trust me! 🙂 Then I baked them on a tray in the oven, using a parchment paper, and turning them every 10 or 15 minutes to bake evenly. About 180-200°C and 30-50 minutes should work – but every oven is different.

I had the fries with millet cooked together with some already cooked dried chestnuts (yeah, they really were somewhere there!) and gomasio.

Kohlrabi sautee with mustard and Spicy sweet potato fries

Just a tiny inspirational post…

Coarsely grated giant kohlrabi sauteed together with sliced onion on some pumpkinseed oil, with a pinch of salt and mustard mixed in at the end

Sweet potato cut into fries, drizzled with oil, salt and cumin, baked in the oven until crispy, turning at times

Rice pressure cooked with amaranth and sprinkled with gomasio

Store-bought seasoned tempeh baked together with the fries

🙂

Tempeh in a maple glaze and Sweet potato french fries

Tempeh is such a great material for further use – on its own it doesn´t have a pleasant flavour at all, and it frankly even cannot be eaten as is, just steamed or baked, but it is great material for further additions of flavour. Try this one…

First cut plain tempeh into cubes and deep-fry them in quality oil until they are light golden and slightly crispy. Drain the pieces on a paper towel. Then place in a saucepan with 2 TBSP of shoyu soy sauce, 2 TBSP of apple cider vinegar, 1 TBSP of maple syrup (you could use brown rice syrup or barley malt instead, but the maple syrup gives an extra lovely taste), a small pinch of chilli powder and enough water to barely cover. Simmer on a low flame with a lid until the water evaporates and the coating gets a bit sticky, don´t let it burn though!

As a little side I also deep-fried sweet potato cut up into “french fries”. It replicated the real thing pretty closely, especially when I added a gentle sprinkling of sea salt. Normally I never serve two deep-fried food items at one meal, but this is still a post from our Christmas holiday cooking! 😀

I also had some steamed cabbage to balance the richness a bit, and brown rice with nori flakes.

Angela´s vegan sweet potato and pear holiday soup

This is the last recipe from Angela´s blog that I am featuring for now, and I dare say it is the yummiest of them all! You can find the original recipe here. Again, I made some minor tweaks. I also halved the recipe in most ingredients, so I used:

1/2 tbsp olive oil (instead of margarine)

1 small onion, diced

about 1/4 cup chopped carrot

about 1/4 cup chopped celery stalk

1 medium sized sweet potato, chopped

1 pear, chopped

1/4 tsp dried thyme

1/2 tsp paprika powder

2 1/2 cups of water (instead of broth)

1/4 cup spelt cream from Lima (instead of coconut milk)

1 tsp rice malt (instead of maple syrup)

1 tsp or more of lemon juice (instead of lime juice)

salt to taste

 

In a pot I heated 1/2 tbsp of oil and first sauteed onion, carrot and celery, then I added sweet potato, pear and thyme and sauteed for a few minutes more, on medium to low fire. Then I added the paprika powder and water, brought the soup to boil and simmered for about 15 minutes until the sweet potato softened up. I blended the soup in a blender (dividing it into 2 batches – important, otherwise the blender might explode!). I returned the soup to the pot and added spelt cream (you could use any grain-based or soy cream), lemon juice, rice malt and salt (it needs quite some salt, otherwise it will turn out too sweet). Simmer a bit more. Soooo soothing and relaxing!!

Angela´s Cinnamon sweet potato chickpea salad with Miso rice

The last few days I´m testing (and adjusting) some recipes from Angela from Oh she glows – the first one to try was Cinnamon sweet potato chickpea salad. I made it more macro-friendly by substituting the coconut oil with sesame oil and only using a tiny bit of it – from a spray.

First I chopped up one medium sized sweet potato into cubes, diced a small onion and mixed these two ingredients in a bowl with about a cup of cooked chickpeas, 1/2 tsp sea salt, 1/2 tsp  cinnamon and a sprinkle of sesame oil. I placed the mixture on a baking tray lined with a silicone baking mat and baked it in a preheated oven on 220 °C for about 40 minutes. Unfortunately, the temperature was too high or the time too long (or I used too little oil), because it came out a bit burnt (especially the onions) and too dry – next time I will need to watch it closer! 😀 Nevertheless, it was a really yummy recipe!

I served the “salad” with pressure cooked brown rice which I cooked in water with diluted brown rice miso (about 1 cup grain to 1 1/2 cup water, and using 2 tsp of miso). I wonder if anybody before had the crazy idea of cooking rice in miso broth, but it tastes surprisingly like risotto 😀

28.11.

For grain I pressure cooked a mixture of brown calasparra rice, sweet rice and hato mugi (my favourite combination as of late!). I quick-sauteed, just on water,  sliced fresh lotus root, daikon, carrot and kohlrabi, and at the end sprinkled on top some dried parsley (of course, fresh would be way better, but even the dried one gave quite a strong and pleasant parsley flavour). The most interesting part of this lunch was long cooked sweet potato (just in enough water to cover it, cook roughly 15-20 minutes), which I mashed in the end with a fork and mixed in ginger powder – take it easy with the ginger, but it´s otherwise a really nice combo!

For dinner that day I made some really tasty soup – I sauteed a large amount of sliced onions on olive oil, together with dried oregano and basil. I added small florets of cauliflower, enough water to cover the veggies, and threw in one block of cubed mugwort mochi (I think I already wrote about mochi – pounded and then dried sweet brown rice, formed into firm blocks, this one was flavoured with mugwort, a wild herb). The mochi totally melts in the soup if you add it in the beginning of the boiling process and it gives your soup this soothing creaminess. In the end I just mixed in some diluted shiro miso (young white miso) and perhaps some salt, as this miso is not too salty on its own. Success!!

28.10.

 

For lunch I cooked millet with mung beans and green/grey hokkaido pumpkin chunks – all in my new lovely pressure cooker! So easy, just put it all in, add water (3 parts of water to one part of grain in this case), bring to pressure on high flame, then put on a lower flame (possibly together with using a flame deflector) and cook for half an hour, done! Just wait 5-10 minutes for the pressure to come down on its own. And you actually have grain, vegetable and bean 3 in 1! 😀

But anyway, I made some quick extra greens – shortly blanched kale and cabbage. You just bring a pot of water to boil (enough water to have the veggies covered later on) and when it starts boiling, transfer the vegetables inside and let them cook for just about a minute or two (they should get a deep green yet bright colour and become softer yet firm and crispy – a bit of a challenge, yes! 😀 trial and error!).

 

For dinner I had the leftover grain from lunch (with new and not burnt!! self-made gomasio) plus I made a quick miso soup with carrot and tofu cubes. In a wok I sauteed (with no oil) paksoi, carrot and leek, seasoned with tamari and mirin. And I had to try out my newly purchased tempura pan and made a glutenfree deep-fried tempura: sweet potato slices dipped in a batter of brown rice flour+kuzu starch+water (you have to experiment with the consistency, that´s the hard part!) and deep-fried until golden. It was a great success, I really liked it!