recipes and ride reports

One of these started life as a very old family recipe (well, comparatively speaking), one is brand-new. Both are vegan.

Vegetarian Chili
This is based on a Bon Appetit recipe that vastly predates URLs.

For the chili purists: this has beans and tomatoes in it by default, and the option of adding hominy. So it's not a pure meat-and-chiles chili. It is, however, much more traditional than a lot of things that get passed off as chili, does not have anything bizarre outside of tomatoes and beans, and is completely vegan.

( Chili!" )

Parsnip-Celeriac Thanksgiving Soup

This recipe was a new adventure for Thanksgiving -- it was based on several online recipes, but most importantly Warm Almond Garlic Parsnip Soup by Green Kitchen Stories. I already had an idea of what I wanted when I went looking, I just needed a sanity check on ratios of stock/vegetables/nuts.
( Souuuuuup! )

No charming photo, because even plating on fancy china for Thanksgiving I was a) not going to stop in the middle of getting dinner on the table to photograph my creation and b) had made something that roughly looked like the outcome of the following process: record a frou-frou cooking show soup episode with fancy plating. Show this episode to an overly enthusiastic five-year-old, and give them appropriately-colored play-dough and finger paint. Laugh. But it tasted fantastic. Sweet without cloying, buttery smooth even without a fancy youtube-video-star-blender. The toppings are important, both for flavor and texture, but you could swap in lots of things -- different root veg, different nuts, different herbs/spices, etc.

( Chestnut-Mushroom Stuffing )

The next can be made with an almond crust for Passover as well. Use potato starch in place of the flour. ( Goat Cheese Cheesecake )

Cranberry sauce Cranberry sauce was simple and an amalgam of recipes: the only note is that 2 12oz bags of cranberries took way longer to deal with 2 cups of liquid than the recipes state; use less or cook longer. Spicing was about right -- 10 cardamom pods, 20 cloves, 1 long cinnamon stick, 20 peppercorns, 5 allspice berries or so, in a tea bell.