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The Kitchen Recessionista

So, here we are, in a recession. Let's eat!

Crock-Pot Thursday: Vegan Taco Soup.

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tacoooo-soup

All right, all right, today it’s been made perfectly clear: Autumn is coming, y’all. Today started out hot and humid here in the DC area and has ended up with just a touch of crisp and cool air blowing in. Autumn is COMING! It’s about time to bust out the pumpkin plates.

But first: A Crock-Pot full of our favorite taco soup will ease the way from season to season quite nicely. Topped with a few tortilla chips, it’s the perfectly complete and filling meal for any time of the year!

I’ve gone on and on about taco soup (I even filmed a Tiny Kitchen video about it!) for years, I recognize. My friend Jessica gave me this recipe eons ago, and I’ve tweaked it and customized and made it my own as the years have gone by. It’s easily become one of our favorite meals here at Chez Recessionista, and it makes leftovers that can last for days. What’s not to love?

So tonight, I breathed a sigh of relief when I arrived home to find the soup cooking merrily away in the slow cooker, the house fragrant with the smells of diced tomatoes and Mexican spices. The 10 minutes it took to put everything together was certainly worth the final result of not having to whip up a full meal after a long day at work and at the animal shelter afterward!

Over Labor Day weekend, I resisted the onslaught of autumn, I admit. But now I think I’m ready for the changing of the season. Summer’s been a blast. But fall has some wonderful characteristics, too. Apple-picking, college football, long-sleeved shirts – these are a few of my favorite things. And if taco soup can stay in the mix, I think we’ll be OK.

:)

Tomato-Basil Quiche.

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tomato-basil-quiche

Tonight was supposed to be a Crock-Pot night, but to be perfectly honest I just couldn’t get my act together this morning in time to put together the soup I’d planned to make! (Not to worry – it’ll keep for later this week.) So tonight, as I drove home from enjoying coffee with a friend, I rang up LeeLee, who was working at home.

“Would you reach into the freezer and pull out what looks like a foil-wrapped pie in a plastic bag?” I asked.

LeeLee’s always up for an adventure. “Sure. What is it?”

“Quiche!”

So as I made the half-hour trek home, LeeLee put the quiche in the oven (sans foil and plastic bag) at 375 and let it bake until I arrived. I put together a quick salad after entering the scene and just like that, dinner was ready!

I’ve made this quiche recipe dozens of times, and it never fails. The most beautiful thing about it is precisely what we experienced tonight – it makes enough for two quiches, which means we can eat one and freeze the other! As it happens, I made this particular quiche just a week or so ago (but neglected to blog about it – shame on me!) and froze it while we ate the other one. I knew it wouldn’t be long until we called it into service, and tonight was just the night!

We used fresh tomatoes in these quiches rather than canned, and lots of fresh basil from the backyard garden. Such are the benefits of the summertime bounty! And our side salad consisted of lettuce from yesterday’s fajita fixins, plus some cherry tomatoes from our friends at Great Country Farms, and an avocado from … the grocery store. Ah, well.

This quiche held up just beautifully after a stint in the freezer, and the salad was the perfect accompaniment. It’s nights like tonight that I am SO glad we’ve got these little dinnertime hacks hanging around – the meal was a snap and was ready in a jiffy! Now, all that’s left is to replace the quiche in the freezer with another of its ilk. All in due time!

:)

Weekend Cookouts: Fajitas and Veggie Dogs (on Two Different Nights).

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veggie-fajitas

Happy Labor Day, friends!

LeeLee and I have spent the weekend primarily relaxing (with a bit of labor here and there, but not much), whether said relaxation was fueled by a Florida State football win, or a shopping spree at our local Goodwill, or padding around the back yard cooking out.

We did the latter twice this weekend! Yesterday, I whipped up some veggie dogs accompanied by some panko-crusted zucchini and baked beans:

veggie-dog-panko-zucchini

And tonight we enjoyed some hearty vegetable fajitas (supplemented with some leftover vegetables, veggie patties, and chik’n strips from Saturday night’s pregame pizza party – photos of which are noticeably absent because I was so busy entertaining, I neglected to tae pictures!) and yellow rice.

We had so much in the way of fajita fillings that it took two – count ’em, two! – grill pans to cook everything.

fajita-fixins

I can think of worse problems. And to add to our victory lap, we’ve now got both veggie dogs and fajita fixins left over for lunch this week! Makes returning to labor tomorrow just a little bit easier.

:)

Crock-Pot Thursday: Vegan Pizza Soup.

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vegan-pizza-soup

Happy College Football Day, friends! This may as well be a national holiday in our home, so I’ll keep it brief now (and get back to watching TCU vs. Minnesota), but suffice it to say we enjoyed several hearty helpings of pizza soup when we got home from work tonight. We chowed down in front of our TV trays so as not to miss a moment of the evening’s first game, and a great time was (and is) had by all!

:)

Old Faithful.

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old-faithful-september

Good ol’ Old Faithful (aka vegan black beans and rice) has been spending the summer on vacation, seemingly! We haven’t seen much of him around Chez Recessionista in awhile, but tonight he made a comeback.

See, the past six weeks or so have been quite crazy at work, and last week was the first in quite awhile that I felt like I could just come home and take a breath. So I did – a good old-fashioned breather, in fact! I lounged, I cooked, I petted the cat, I read; and I didn’t do very much cleaning, save for the evening dishes, all the week long. Neither did LeeLee, as he was luxuriating in the evenings in solidarity. And it didn’t take long for things to fall into disarray! So this week we have been putting everything back in its rightful place, and then some, giving the house a good old-fashioned deep clean. Call it autumn cleaning, if you will. And I will.

So tonight I knew I didn’t want anything difficult and time-consuming to make. Enter: Old Faithful!

As per usual, I cooked up a cup of rice in the rice cooker, adding a packet of Goya seasoning to the mix. And then I heated up a pot of canned black beans, topping them off with some adobo seasoning to give them some flair. Within half an hour, dinner was on the table, and we were feasting with an old friend! Topped with diced onion, halved cherry tomatoes, vegan sour cream, salsa, and hot sauce, tonight’s rendition of Old Faithful was a wonderful treat indeed.

No leftovers, sadly, but that’s the price one pays for a quick and easy dinner! I’ll take that tradeoff nearly any day of the week.

:)

Beer Chaser Chili With Tater Tots.

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beer-chaser-chili

Now, I know it’s a rarity around here to cook a chili that’s not in the Crock-Pot, but tonight we did just that (though not to worry, a Crock-Pot creation is coming near the end of the week!). Truth be told, I’ve had the ingredients for Robin Robertson’s Beer Chaser Chili, fresh out of her One-Dish Vegan cookbook, available for a couple of weeks and haven’t done a thing with them. Tonight, that was going to change!

Once I got home from work, I pulled out my trusty workhorse Le Creuset and diced up half of a huge onion from Mr. Lopez’s farm stand, then pulled both a green bell pepper and a jalapeno from the back yard and added them into the French oven as well with a bit of oil. After the veggies were translucent, I added in some spices (Mrs. Robertson has a book to sell, so I won’t get into all the whys and wherefores), two cans of pinto beans, some crushed tomatoes, some veggie “beef,” and a bottle of Dixie Blackened Voodoo (a favorite around here). Then I set the chili to boil, turned the heat to Low, and covered it to cook for more than half an hour.

Within the last 20 minutes of cooking time, I put a pan of tater tots in the oven to bake. “Chili Taters” is a perennial favorite dish of ours from our local chili joint, Hard Times Café, and tonight inspiration struck to try it at home for the first time. Why, pray tell, haven’t we done this for years? The blend of starchy potatoes and chewy protein is a wonderful marriage indeed.

And that marriage lasted throughout this meal, that’s for sure! First of all, we loved the flavor of this chili – it’s the first time I’ve made this particular variation before – and secondarily we loved the merger between the tater tots and the chili itself. As per usual, I put my tater tots on the bottom of the bowl and topped them with the chili (as Hard Times does); LeeLee put his chili on the bottom and topped it off with the tots. It takes all kinds, doesn’t it?

At any rate, we’ve got a ton of chili left over for tomorrow’s lunch, which is always a beautiful thing. Time to bust out the Thermos and get to work!

:)

Sunday Cookout: Grilled Vegetable Calzones.

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grilled-calzone

Tonight, we tried something we’d always wanted to attempt on the backyard grill: Calzones!

Grilled pizzas are, of course, a summertime mainstay for us here at Chez Recessionista. Generally, we go for the personal-pie size since it’s easier to handle on the grill. And no matter the size, the heat of the coals crisps the dough up like nothing else, giving us a makeshift wood-fired oven right in the back yard!

I’ve always wanted to give other pizza-like concoctions a try over the charcoal, and tonight, I decided to take the plunge. So I whipped up a batch of my usual pizza dough and got straight to work.

First, I heated up the grill as per usual (which is to say, as hot as it’ll go – we only know one temperature here in the Recessionista Back Yard), and prepared my calzones as the fire died down. I decided to make two chunky calzones rather than one uber one or several smaller ones, reasoning that the size of these would give me some wiggle room (i.e. room for error). This resulted in some touch-and-go plate-to-grill-to-plate transitions later, but largely worked out OK.

At any rate, I flattened the dough out as thinly as I could manage and then painted a strip of pizza sauce on the lower portion of the crust. Then I added in several hearty dollops of a ricotta mixture I’d whipped up on a whim – a medium-sized container of ricotta cheese, about a cup of frozen kale I’d preserved from this spring, and a can of sliced mushrooms, mixed together with salt and pepper.

Now, this is the first point in the process when things got dicey. On the first calzone, I made a rookie mistake and put the sauce and cheese too close to the edge, which meant I had a hard time getting a good seal. So I gingerly pushed everything up the dough a bit (leaving a wake of sauce, but who cares) and then pulled the top of the dough over the bottom and crimped the whole thing shut with a fork.

On the second calzone, I learned a thing or two from the first try and compiled it largely without incident.

Once the coals were charred and the grate was piping-hot, it was time to transfer the calzones over to the grill. This required me to remove my glasses and make two failed attempts and picking the calzones up off the pizza pan, then request LeeLee’s help and then think better of it (because if I managed to drop one as he stood there holding the pan, he’d never hear the end of it – that’s a burden best carried out by myself!), then pull a wooden chair over, place the pizza pan on it as a steadying table, and then take said pan back off the chair, whisk the spatula under the calzone, and before I had time to shout “Faccia Bella!” transfer each calzone to the grill without incident.

calzones-on-grill

Whew.

The cooking process doesn’t take but a few minutes – 10 minutes, tops, on the first side, and then about 5-7 minutes on the second side. And I’ll have you know that the flipping motion wasn’t difficult at all to do once the dough had firmed up with the heat! There was one last panic when taking the calzones off the grill at the end, but this time LeeLee stood resolutely by holding the pizza pan and all went according to plan.

Then, it was time to eat.

Ooh, whee! Why haven’t we been doing this for ages? These calzones were some of the best I’ve ever made at home, and that’s in large part due to the cooking method. They never crisp up enough in the oven, no matter what I do, but on the grill they were perfectly brown and crispy on the outside while still being soft and bubbly and piping-hot on the inside. Success!

The calzones were so large that we only split one and ate it, safe in the knowledge that we needn’t fight over the other one tomorrow for lunch; we’ll just split it again and call it a day. I can hardly wait!

:)