Meatless Monday #5: Roasted vegetables with apples

Today's Meatless Monday is heavily inspired by my favorite blogger, The Glamorous Librarian. It is just simply roasted vegetables with apples, olive oil and some spices.

I have a serious hang up on apples since my neighbor has a garden filled with an excellent variety of them. I know the most usual way of using apples in cooking, is making apple sauce. I will also do that, but this time I just wanted big chunks of warm, tasty apples.

I chopped up good sized chunks of apples, carrots, onions and celery root, threw them in a casserole dish together with some olive oil, salt, pepper and rosemary.

I love the automny colors! 

I would have loved to have grown my own herbs, but I'm not capable of keeping a cactus alive so I'll have to practice a lot before that will be reality. So for now I have to settle with the dried, store bought spices.

I let the veggies bake in the oven for around 45 minutes on 200C (400F) and it turned out great!

Here they are just out of the oven. 

This is another example to show that cooking doesn't have to be complicated in order to be delicious!

I of course made far too much for us, so we had the leftovers as a side later in the week.

Meatless Monday #4: Cheese pizza

We have put a few hectic weeks behind us, so when my husband was away at the beginning of last week I took the chance to relax and not do much at all. Dinner was not on my list of things to put any thought in. But with my husband back and the weekend approaching, I decided on a Meatless Friday.

I love cheese so much. I have a theory that almost anything can be made better with adding some cheese (and some garlic). I was in a weight loss program a little while back and felt like the strangest person on the planet when all the people in the program were talking about the problems with resisting chocolate and potato chips, where as all I could think of was all the delicious cheese I had to stop eating. Given the choice between chocolate and cheese, I would always choose the cheese. But now I'm rambling. Back to the meatless dinner: 3 cheeses pizza.

I'm seriously challenged when it comes to baking, so I buy pizza dough at the store.

Typically I'm either too hungry or too tired to really think when I go to the store, so chances are I forget some vital ingredient to anything I make. I thought I had some tomato sauce at home, but I didn't. Improvising is something I often do in the kitchen. Mixing pesto rosso and ketchup worked wonderfully - it turned out to be better than most tomato sauces I've used before.

Mozarella, blue cheese, and standard yellow grated cheese. 

So pasta sauce, a good amount of chopped garlic and then the 3 cheeses evenly dispersed on my pizza.

Say "Cheeeeeeeeese!"

I guess a lot of you are skeptical when it comes to blue cheese, but seriously - give it a try! It is so good! If blue cheese is not your thing, try making cheese pizza with cheeses you don't usually use, like a sharp cheddar.

Yes, it was as good as it looks. 

I don't think this is a dinner that would go well with my weight loss class, but I believe in enjoying good food with people you love, and this was an excellent dinner I shared with the person I love the most.

Meatless Monday #3: A meatless day in Glasgow

Last Monday we were still in Glasgow after the wonderful Christening on the day before. Not being home to cook just meant I had a reason to test out some vegetarian alternatives in restaurants.

I started with ordering the vegetarian breakfast at the hotel.

Potato scone, fried mushroom and tomato, baked beans, poached egg and
a vegetarian sausage. 

This was actually so good that I ended up having it every morning. I'm not a huge fan of English bacon and black pudding, so that worked out well. 

We had lunch in a cute, little Italian restaurant nearby our hotel. The restaurant had a wonderful lunch deal where you go a starter and a main course for only £10. 

Crostini with mushrooms and blue cheese. 

I don't know why I have the habit of always ordering meat dishes in restaurants. Most places you get really wonderful vegetarian dishes made with just as much care as any other dish, and just as tasteful. This is a habit I will have to break!

Mushroom and spinach lasagna that tasted much better than it looks. 

The lunch was wonderful and I was really looking forward to see what I would have for dinner. 

Mixed bean & harissa burger with hand-cut chips and tzatziki.
I added some Stilton, mushrooms and onions as toppings. 

The burger was the only slightly disappointing meal that day. The meal overall was very good, but the burger itself was a little dry and bland. I blame this on the chef, not on the concept of a bean & harissa burger, so I will see if I can find a better one somewhere else! 

Meatless Monday #2: Spicy tomato soup

I have a notebook called "A random log of the things we eat"

No system at all in it. But I still like it! 

I like to make a note of it when I make something especially good, I have my staple grocery list in there, and I use it to keep track of what we actually manage to make during an "Eat-What-We-Have-In-Our-Fridge" week. Today's recipe is from this book.

This is how I like tomato soup; spicy and creamy without containing cream. This recipe is my own, which is not something I can say very often.The amount is fitting for 2 people.

I threw in a couple of tomatoes I had. 

Spicy tomato soup à la Marit 
1 big or 2 small onions
10 garlic cloves
2 tbsp olive oil                                          
2 tsp minced chili
2 tsp pesto rosso
4 tbsp ketchup
2 tsp soup bullion
400 g (1 can) crushed tomatoes (or the same amount in fresh tomatoes)
1 dl red wine
2 tbsp balsamico vinegar
water


Keep the dry skin on the garlic cloves, drizzle them with 1 tbsp olive oil and some salt, and bake them in the oven on 200C (ca. 400F) for 20 mins.

Chop the onion in big chunks (and the tomatoes if you use fresh ones). Sauté it in a big pot with 1 tbsp olive oil. When the onion is glaced, add the garlic (without skin), chili, pesto, and ketchup. When this is heated up, add the bullion, the tomatoes (if you use crushed tomatoes), the red wine, and the balsamic vinegar. Let this simmer for around 30 mins. If it gets too thick, add some water.

Some wine for the soup and some wine for the chef. 

Take the soup off the heat and run it smooth in the blender or with a hand mixer. Add as much water as you need to get the thickness you like. Put the soup back on the heat and let it boil for another few minutes.

We really like our soup thick. 

We had our soup with some bread and an egg.

This recipe is based on what I always have in my fridge and will be adopted to whatever I have available. 

What is your favorite soup?

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For other posts in this series, please look here.

Meatless Monday #1: Chickpea casserole

There wasn't any special thought behind my choice of the first Meatless Monday dish. I looked in my cupboard and saw two cans of chickpeas I didn't know what to do with, and then did a quick search to see if I could find a recipe for them. This was the first one to pop up and looking through the recipe, I realized I basically had everything it called for already, so I decided to go for it. I did, however, lack the parsley and the yogurt. I opted for skipping the parsley and substituting the yogurt with low fat sour cream. 

The shallots turned into a red onion, the Parmesan is hiding and the two garlic cloves turned into three. 

The prep work was easy and fast. I used a slow cooking brown rice, so I had more than enough time to finish up everything else while waiting the 45 minutes it took the rice to finish.

Prep, mixing, the Parmesan came out of hiding and the casserole is ready for the oven. 

Reading the comments on the recipe, I knew beforehand that the dish has a tendency of being a little dry. I decided to follow the recipe this first time, and then find ways to tweak it to my liking later. I baked it on 175 Celcius (350 Fahrenheit) for 40 minutes. I then turned it up to 210 Celcius and put on the grill for a couple of minutes in order to get a crispier topping.

Trying to find a way to shot both topping and the casserole itself. 

It did turn out a little dry and the onions were a little under cooked. The topping was also not as crisp as I would have liked it. The next time I will sauté the garlic and onion lightly before mixing it with the chickpeas. I will also add 1/2 cup water, stock or white wine (depending on what I have on hand). To make the topping crispier, I will mix the bread crumbs and the Parmesan with an egg. Still we really enjoyed the taste of the dish and will try it again later.

Not only was this my first vegetarian meal (ok, not strictly vegetarian since the Parmesan probably was made with animal rennet), it was also the first time I've photographed my cooking. I have a lot to learn and I think I need a better light source for photography in my kitchen. 

PS. We had a lot of leftovers which we ate the next day. I decided to heat it in a pan together with more water and some sour cream. With all the breadcrumbs the consistency was something between porridge and stew. I think I will try to make a chickpea stew at some point. 

Project Meat Loss: Intro

I am your average person. Maybe a little above average interested in food, maybe a little below average interested in healthy food (I cannot say no to cheese). Maybe a little above average interested in having an electric car instead of a regular car, maybe a little below average when it comes to paper recycling (there just isn't enough space in my kitchen for that box).

Here I should have a picture of me in a Tesla eating cheese, but since don't have a Tesla (yet),
you'll have to settle with this picture of a cheese dish I ate the other day. 

I like meat. I love Parma ham on my sandwich and on my pizza. I appreciate a nice steak the way my husband cooks them (very red). Philly cheese steak might be my favorite dish ever.  

Philly cheese steak. Taken by Terence Ong in June 2006.

But here's the thing. I know that both from a health and from an environmental standpoint that it would be beneficial to reduce the amount of meat we are eating. I don't think I will ever go completely vegetarian, but I want to substantially reduce the amount of meat I am eating. I don't think this is something I will be able to do over night, but I want to share the process of doing this with you. 

My first steps in this process will be to implement Meatless Monday. Stay tuned for updates on how this is working out! And if you have tips for good vegetarian dishes, please share them with me!