Brussels Sprouts with mustard sauce

Lately my husband has been enamored with mustard. There is a tang and a depth added to a dish with just the right amount of mustard in addition to the usual ingredients. Yes, there are patterns and habits in making vegan meals every day, and mustard quite simply adds a bit of spice to life! So when I was planning a fairly common combination of brussels sprouts, onion and mushrooms as a major side dish, I chose to add a stone ground mustard to the Bragg Liquid Amino, water and dash of black pepper. It was well worth it, and turned this one-pan dish into an instant favorite.






BRUSSELS SPROUTS WITH MUSTARD SAUCE

2 torpedo (or other pungent red) onions
10-12 medium button mushrooms
2-3 cups or 1.5 pounds Brussels sprouts
2 tsp Bragg Liquid Amino
2 TBLSP stone ground mustard of your choice
1/2 c water
dash freshly ground black pepper

Slice the onions in thin slices, separating the rings in the bottom of a wide non-stick pan.
Clean the Brussels sprouts (cut off the tough stem ends and peel away any yucky leaves, washing off any dirt), and slice them in half vertically - cutting through from the stem end through the floret.
Brush the mushrooms and cut in quarters if large enough, or in half if smaller (use more of them if they are small).

Layer the Brussels Sprouts over the onion layer, putting the mushrooms on top. Pour 1/2 c water, Bragg's, and mustard over all of this and cover with lid. Simmer for about 10-15 minutes, stirring once or twice. Then turn off and leave covered, allowing the Brussels sprouts to steam and soften further, while not overcooking the mushrooms.

You can serve just like this, or cook a couple minutes without the lid to further reduce the mustard sauce onto the veggies.

Brussels Sprout Balls

We bought a stalk of first of the season Brussels sprouts. When I steamed them to turn them into the main beautiful course for a dinner plan, it turned out that they just didn't have the flavor I hoped they would. They were immature, a little bitter, and quite plainly, not up to being the star of the show. I cooled them, put them in a bag in the fridge and regrouped dinner around spiced tempeh and quinoa. That all went fine but I was left contemplating what to do with a stalk's worth of young not-so-interesting Brussels sprouts. Today I came home from teaching and decided to just throw them in the blender, chop them into bits and turn them into something yummy. It would take lots of other ingredients with flavor to offset them, but they could definitely provide a texture that could make an interesting dinner. These are nice with any kind of sauce you like. They are good with both applesauce and kimchi!

Not expecting greatness, I didn't photograph the process -- but you can imagine how it looked.

BRUSSELS SPROUT BALLS (makes a dozen golf-ball sized crisp balls)

2 dozen (at least) small sprouts - a stalk's worth,
  chopped in a blender to make about 5 cups
3 small potatoes, grated
1 good sized carrot grated
1 small onion chopped fine (or several Vidalia slices)
3-4 sundried tomatoes chopped fine
3-4 garlic cloves smashed and chopped fine
2 tsp Bragg Liquid Aminos
1 tsp white Miso
1/3 cup buckwheat groats, ground fine
1/2 cup chick pea flour
1/8 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp sage
1/2 tsp cumin
salt to taste

1. Grate and chop all the veggies putting them all together in a good sized bowl.
2. Put the flour-like materials together with the spices and add to the bowl, mixing in the Bragg's and miso and combining until it is mostly uniformly mixed.
3. Heat oven to 375F, put a sheet of parchment paper in a baking pan (or use a silicone sheet).
4. Form 12 golf ball sized balls with your hands, and lay them out on the paper, lightly salting them. Bake for 30-40 minutes or until just as crisp and nice as you like!

Quick 2 Dish Spring Meal: Asparagus, Mushrooms & More

When the asparagus begins to come in it seems that it appears at every meal for a while. I had been thinking about cabbage rolls, but the weather turned cooler for a spring day and a hot meal felt right. So the asparagus went together with the leftover cannelloni beans and tang of tomatillos, not a common combination but delicious. Then the cold temperatures prompted me to impulse-buy Brussels sprouts, and so the sauté evolved to round out the plate.

ASPARAGUS CANNELLINI TOMATILLO CABBAGE ROLLS with Bean Threads!
4-5 large unfurled cabbage leaves
2-3 cups asparagus cut in 2-3 inch lengths
1/2-2/3 cup canned Cannelini beans ( or other beans)
4-5 sliced tomatillos
Mung Bean Threads
3 cloves garlic crushed & diced
Tblsp Bragg's Liquid Aminos
Tsp oregano

1. Start by steaming the cabbage leaves and set them aside. Don't worry if they aren't intact, you can use 2-3 for each serving to form an informal wrap. This is not finger food after all is said and done. You can soak the bean threads in the cabbage leaf water OR you can use the Brussels sprouts steaming water (I used the same water for everything). After the bean threads soften, put them in a strainer and run cool water on them to keep them separated. They will heat again when you throw them all together in the next step.
2. In a good sized sauté pan, put asparagus, garlic, beans, and sliced tomatillos with a little water and the Bragg's Liquid Aminos, cover and steam (about 6 minutes). Add the bean threads and stir all together.
3. Lay out overlapping leaves, fill with veggies, and gently roll up, pouring any pan sauce over them. This could also have some heat if you add some red pepper flakes.

BRUSSELS SPROUT MUSHROOM SAUTÉ
4 large white mushrooms
2-3 cups Brussels sprouts, halved
1 cup rough chopped onion (I used Vidalia)
Water for sauté (1/4 cup)
5-8 pitted black olives
2-3 cloves garlic, diced
Tsp thyme
Tsp rosemary
1/4 tsp salt
Pepper if desired

1. Lightly steam the cut Brussels sprouts in the cabbage water.
2. Saute the sliced mushrooms, garlic and onions in a bit of water with the thyme and rosemary and salt.
3. Combine the Sprouts into the saute, adding the black olives chopped into big pieces.
4. Stir together and add salt and pepper as desired.

SERVE -- with some rough chopped fresh tomatoes drizzled with Balsamic Vinegar ... What a beautiful quick meal!

Planning Meals: Beautiful & Bountiful Dinners with Grains & Veggies

I haven't been blogging our food lately, but there have been many delicious meals made with whatever looked good at the co-op and what I had time to fix between teaching and other commitments. The beauty of the plate is one thing that I continue to enjoy immensely about our meals.  The colors and textures definitely influence my meal planning. I think of the plate, the textures, the flavors. Any of these elements can run the show when it comes to planning a meal based on what I have in the house, or what I am buying in order to have in the house.  Weather can influence me too -- is it a "comfort food" day or a cool temperature meal we need to heal the day's energies and seal in the benefits of nurturing ourselves?

So I thought I'd put up a few photos of how things come together, even though I haven't blogged the recipes for these meals. Most of them are very simple sequences of cutting, cooking and putting together... and I'll try to give enough information so that you could give it a go... or let me know that you really want directions and I'll blog 'em out.

As an experimental, temperamental, spontaneous and intuitive cook, I find it amusing that I am now trying to routinize anything about my kitchen activities and write things down, document what works, and imagine that anyone is following along.  The idea of the eat2thrive blog is truly to inspire you to go ahead and explore this marvelous feast of possibilities. If these meal ideas spark something -- light it and go with it! I'd love to know if your results thrilled you and would be happy to put them up on the blog for others if they are replicable.

A blend of vegetables, joined with a flavorful sauce or spice, and served on a plain grain can be a marvelous anchor for a meal. These medleys of flavors can be combinations. Here I combined in a water saute with bits of ginger and garlic:  carrots, onions, olives, Cremini mushrooms, and fennel on plain millet. The  sides are fresh spinach cooked with small bites of tofu and garlic, and a salad of enoki, Asian watermelon radishes, arugula and grape tomatoes treated with a splash of Mirin.









This blend is slivered lacinato (dinosaur) kale sauteed with bits of onion, and then mixed together with the white quinoa that I cooked separately in the gingery water I used to steam the carrots, sweet potatoes, and parsnips that make up the side dish finalized with roasted sunflower seeds and a tablespoon of dried currants. The salad is a simple chopped endive, radicchio, cucumber and quartered red grapes with a splash of pomegranate balsamic vinegar.  The sriracha hot sauce turned the quinoa into a wonderful complement to the sweet of the root veggies and slightly bittersweet crunch of salad.

Here is a stir-fry model (in water of course, not oil), with sugar snap peas, shiitakes and pea shoots thrown in at the end. The binder is tamari with a splash of ume plum vinegar plus water. Plain long-grain brown basmati rice was the base under it, and then the fun started with the sliced steamed zucchini cooked with fresh cilantro, a little salt and lemon! This added a flavor bite to the salty familiarity of the stir fry.

 Here the rice is the border keeper to separate the veggie medley of sauteed snow peas, carrots, broccoli, and garlic with a light peanut sauce, and the pressed, soaked, and then broiled tofu slabs ... soaked in ginger/tamari/tomatillo/sesame seed. I'm still working on how to get that crispness without oil... and this was a pretty good outcome, broiled on tin foil, and reserving a little of the sauce to continue putting a little moisture on as the tofu began crisping.

Here the rice is transformed into Asian rice noodles, soaked in boiling hot water, and then rinsed. The black eyed peas were cooked with garlic, salt, pepper and lemon, and snuggled up to steamed fresh spinach with a dash of seaweed gomasio. I wanted a distinctly different texture/shape and went for the fresh green beans, steamed plain and served with a squeeze of lemon.  Using the noodles changes the nature of the meal and makes today's dinner vastly different from the rice-based meal of yesterday or tomorrow.

Another way to totally change the rice experience is to play with special heirloom rice grains now available in so many places. This black rice is packed with nutrition, stays a beautiful deep color and has a nutty marvelous flavor. So all I did was add bits of chopped mushroom and garlic to the rice as it cooked, served it with plain steamed broccoli, a leafy salad with scallions, pea shoots and sliced strawberries treated with tarragon vinegar, and then I experimented with the side dish.  This one was a delicious surprise of black grapes, jicama, fresh tomatillo chopped up like tomatoes, bits of scallion and a splash of mirin.





Pasta! I use brown rice pasta to avoid gluten, and because it can be served either soft or al dente.  This variation was served at room temperature on the first hot day... partly because I had no time to cook dinner at dinner time, and made this in its parts before heading out to teach an evening yoga class. Steamed Brussels sprouts were rinsed in cool water and quartered, then mixed together with quartered grape tomatoes, sliced parsnip, bits of green and black olives, and two beautiful fresh scallions chopped. The glue was a red miso sauce -- a heaping tablespoon of red miso mixed with about 1 cup of hot water, a splash of balsamic vinegar and stirred well. I poured this over the whole thing, cooked noodles and all, and let it sit out until I got home later. Simple salad - radicchio, chopped romaine, last of the endive and a little pomegranate balsamic, salt and garlic.



Another quick meal using brown rice pasta and a side salad! This one was garlic sauteed chard with bits of sun dried tomatoes, stirred into the brown rice spirals, and then a quick steam of fresh asparagus spears to cut and toss on top. Beautiful and tasty! Boston lettuce with cucumber, red pepper, bits of chopped celery and tarragon vinegar with garlic to dress it up.

None of these meals were planned ahead more than the day-of. The most important aspect of all these meals was having beautiful fresh ingredients on hand, and a stock of grains/pasta to put in place to round things out.

Desserts are usually sharing a cut up apple, perhaps a perfect pear, a naval orange ... or when the mood strikes, a little container of soy yogurt with granola and fresh strawberries!

Give it a try -- play around with these ideas ... and let me know if you find something marvelous to share or want a more detailed instruction about how to make any of these.  One thing is for sure you will be eating well!

Portobello Cannellini Boats

Planning to be out in the early evening, I knew I needed a plan that could be ready beforehand. There was a jar of leftover cannellini beans in the fridge, and I had recently bought two Portobello mushrooms. Thinking I might have a guest for dinner, I thought better of cooking the mushrooms as 2 mushrooms... This would make my guest feel they were intruding on our dinner-for-two. So here's what happened. I got to thinking about ports, and canals and Italian painters and well...  These turn out to be an amazingly good source of fiber and protein for just a wee bit of calories if that matters to you!

Portobello Cannellini Boats

233 g Cannellini beans (about a cup)
33 g fresh parsley (1.5 c chopped)
5 cloves garlic
14 grape tomates (more if you want)
35 g sweet red pepper (one lobe)
2 good sized Portobello mushroom caps
4 teaspoons Miso (I love the adzuki bean miso for this)
2 crushed rye-sesame crackers

1. Mash beans in a good sized bowl. Cut Portobello caps in half. Chop parsley finely, along with garlic, and red pepper. Cut grape tomatoes in half through their diameters. Crush the 2 rye crackers.
2. Peel off 4 leaves of savoy cabbage and place in oven pan with tin foil, putting the mushroom halves inside the curl. Mix together all the other ingredients with the miso - I used a teaspoon for each serving, so 4 teaspoons. Use a spoon and take care not to crush the tomatoes.

3. Plop the ingredients in a large cohesive blob onto the mushroom. This can sit, covered and wait until you are ready to bake it at 375F, covered for 10 minutes and uncovered for 30-35 minutes. Construction takes less than half an hour.

Portobello Cannellini Boats Nutrition Facts Serving Size: 1 Boat (714g) Amount Per Serving % Daily Value* Calories 248 12% Total Fat 1g 2% Saturated Fat 0g 1% Trans Fat 0g Cholesterol 0% Sodium 384mg 16% Total Carbohydrate 52g 17% Dietary Fiber 22g 87% Sugars 15g 0% Protein 16g 32% Vitamin A 24% • Vitamin C 338% Calcium 24% • Iron 22% * Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calories needs. courtesy of cronomieter.com using my data.

The whole dinner was a lovely combination with Brussels sprouts served in a blood orange and onion sauce made with tahini, agave and a drop of ume plum vinegar, and a side salad of sliced beets, watermelon radish, chopped enoki mushrooms, cucumber, almonds and nicoise olives with a light dressing of tarragon balsamic vinegar with water and a drop of tamari.

Sun Dried Tomatoes & Polenta - Twice

It is wonderful to imagine a meal and then try to construct it. I had never made polenta from scratch before, and had a vision of a sun dried tomato concoction atop a platform of polenta. So I bought sun dried tomatoes from my food coop (www.foodcoop.com). They are imported from Italy and come dried with salt, not in olive oil. I began by soaking about 20 tomatoes, cut into long strips, in a wide saucepan with probably two cups of water. The water became pretty salty, but I added cremini mushrooms, (about 2.5 cups) to that, cut in quarters and simmered it for a while. This is when I added about a half a cup to 2/3 of a cup of plain organic canned chick peas.


The water turned into an amazing broth, and I poured a good bit of it off to save for later, adding more fresh water so that it wouldn't be so salty, but still had time to deepen the flavors.

Then I let that sit and made the polenta, boiling about 4 cups of lightly salted water and then slowing pouring in not quite a cup of coarse stone ground corn meal, whisking it as I poured. It took about 15 minutes of stirring and simmering for this to turn into a heavy glop, thickening and looking as though the corn meal had totally softened. I poured that out into a flat dish and let it cool. It was about 3/4 of an inch thick and maybe 9 inches square.


Then I boiled up the brussels sprouts until they were soft.

That's all the parts. Final construction was 10 minutes in a 400F oven for the polenta, then putting the Brussels sprouts over that in the oven for another 5 minutes so they got a little hotter and crisped up a bit. Finally I spread the tomato/mushroom/chick peas over the top with the juice from the pan. (I used the reserved broth in a mushroom soup the next day. Recipe to come on that.)

The second time I made this dish, I was cooking for 4 people instead of two. I made more polenta, 6 cups of water and 1.25 cup of corn meal so that it would be thicker (a full inch thick) and there would be leftover for the next day's lunch. I used a big pile of mushrooms, maybe 5 cups, and did not add in enough more sun dried tomatoes to have the same flavor impact. I'm going to try it a third time in another week or so and see if I can get the proportions right. My goodness it's good anyway!

Totally estimated nutrition facts: serving 325 g polenta & 250 g topping offers around 200 calories, 3 g fat, 186 g sodium, 37 g carbs, 9 g fiber, 13 g sugar, 14 g protein, 3% vita A, 126% C, 7% Calcium, 20% iron (RDAs) sourced through cronometer.com  Remember, the thickness of the polenta and the quantities of each ingredient will change these numbers. All in all, a great no meat, no dairy, no oil, whole grain, vegetable main dish!

And then there's the leftover recycled for Sunday lunch by adding regular sliced mushrooms, a couple more slivered sun dried tomatoes and what was left of a bag of organic frozen spinach.  Delicious. We even extended a bit of leftover salad with some chopped red leaf lettuce and the leftover lemon green beans!