Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup

I was going to make chickpea cutlets tonight, to celebrate the new food processor. But J is sick, so I decided to cook something for him so maybe he might feel a bit better. I had ordered some teese over the weekend so I could try it, and it was supposed to get here today, so he asked for tomato soup and grilled cheese (even though he's not vegan at all, he was excited to try a new vegan cheese). Sadly, the teese didn't come in today*, but I still made some grilled daiya sandwiches and soup.

Ingredients for tonight's dinner: tomato soup, grilled cheese, and roasted broccoli.

Ingredients for the tomato soup. I loosely followed a food network recipe (I've never made normal tomato soup before, okay?), but I deviated heavily.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup olive oil (though it wouldn't hurt to reduce this to a couple of tablespoons)
1 onion, chopped
5-6 cloves garlic, minced
2 carrots
2-3 stalks of celery
28oz canned tomatoes
1 ts basil
2 bay leaves
2 tb earth balance
2 cups vegetable stock
1 cup nondairy cream
16 oz white beans

Heat up the oil, then dump all the onions, garlic, carrots, and celery in it. Saute for about 10 minutes.

At the end of ten minutes, dump in the tomatoes, earth balance, basil, bay leaves, and vegetable stock.

Stir it all up, let it simmer for about 10 or 15 minutes. 

Puree it, either with an immersion blender, a normal blender (be careful with the steam! cover the top with a towel and take out the center plug of the top if it has one), or puree the solids in a food processor, like me. The blender or immersion blender would probably do a better job getting it silky-smooth, but this worked well enough.

It was a bit redder in person. Still, I might add some tomato paste if I make it again, or leave out the cream.

While the soup was simmer, I made some grilled cheese sandwiches. Two pieces of bread, daiya on one slice, butter the outside.

No oil or anything in the pan. Just heat it until the cheese makes the sides stick together, then flip it. Make sure the butter the top side! (I forgot... twice in a row). 

I also roasted a bit of broccoli. Take a head or two of broccoli, cut it up, toss it with some oil and salt, bake at 425 or 450 degrees for about 15-20 minutes.

Overall, pretty good. I'd puree it a bit more next time, but I liked it. (also, grilled cheese! oh man, I haven't had that stuff in years! SO GOOD). J liked it, too, and made a point to eat all of the soup before he had to go.

*That's bad, because I didn't order an ice pack with it. Hopefully it's really cold wherever my teese is.

Chicken and Dumpling Soup

I found a recipe for chicken and dumpling soup at cause i eats me spinach the other day that looked so good that I had to make it tonight. I used to eat chicken and dumpling soup a lot as a kid, though I don't really know when I stopped. I feel like I hadn't had it in a long time, even before I went veggie and vegan.

Prepping didn't take to long. Just some garlic, carrots, and kale.

Step one was to brown some faux chicken. Normally, I would make my own, but I was on a bit of a time crunch, so I used some storebought that's been pretty good in the paste. Despite appearances, I didn't brown it enough here; little crumbles of it that were sticking were browning, but the hunks themselves didn't. I should've used more oil and gone at it a few minutes longer, but it still worked out.

To the side, I mixed some flour, baking powder, olive oil, and soymilk in a bowl.

Stirred it all up to get a gloopy, delicious dumpling batter.

Sauteed the garlic and carrots in a bit of olive oil for a few minutes. My friend was also using the oven to make a stirfry, so the first few minutes were filled with oil flying everywhere.

Added flour to the oil and vegetables to make a roux. I haven't done it this way before; I always made the roux before I added other things. It seemed to come out okay, though.

Added the water and 2 bouillon cubes, alongside about a half of a teaspoon of each the recommended spices. I forgot to add the salt, which confused me a bit at the end, but was easy to fix.

Dumped in the kale at this point. It cooked down pretty fast. Meanwhile, my stir-frying friend put in some cabbage here, which took the better part of 20 minutes to cook down.

As the kale cooked down, I dumped in the seitan on top of it, then stirred it all together.

I added the dumplings, oversized-teaspoon-by-oversized-teaspoon.

It looks like I have too much dumpling going on here, but everything floats in this soup.

Ladled out into a bowl. Pretty good. The changes I would make are browning the seitan a bit more, and maybe using EB instead of olive oil, but those aren't big things. J also had a bowl, and despite protests that I gave him "more than enough", ate the whole thing (down to the oh-so-classy drinking the broth*).

I still have about three or four bowls left of it, which I'll probably eat tomorrow. Definitely, this recipe is on my 'make-again' list.

*I also did that