Category: Cooking

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Cooking Recipe

Easy Vegan Chili with TVP

This chili is easy to make, healthy, and my kids all like it, so I cook it frequently in the colder months. It’s also vegan and gluten-free.

The recipe evolved over the years (from a mediocre starting point) and I typically just cook it from memory. But a couple of people have asked for this recipe and I’d probably be more consistent if I cooked it to spec each time. I recently took notes as I made a particularly good batch and behold, a recipe.

There’s one lesser-known ingredient: TVP, which stands for textured vegetable protein. This recipe works fine without it but the TVP takes it to the next level. I keep TVP in the pantry but acknowledge it’s a divisive ingredient that some people dislike. Wikipedia notes, “Because of its relatively low cost, high protein content, and long shelf life, TVP is often used in prisons and schools, as well as for disaster preparedness.”

Without further ado, chili. It’s not spicy (unless your chili powder is powerful) so that everyone in my family can enjoy it. I like it hot so I just add hot sauce or chipotle powder to my bowl. This makes a big batch, around 8 servings. It’s good leftover and freezes well.

In short, saute the vegetables and cook a bit longer in tomatoes with spices until everything is soft. Then add beans and broth, cook a while, add TVP, cook a little more. Serve over thick, crumbled-up corn chips (Ann Arbor Tortilla Factory is the best, Fritos is fine too).

As in my lentil soup, smoke gestures at the meat that some might be expecting. Feel free to increase or modify the spices, this is a starting point.

Easy Vegan Chili with TVP

Serves about 8. I’m separating the ingredients and cooking steps so that my recipe software can parse this post correctly.

Ingredients

  • 3 tbsp vegetable oil
  • 1 red onion, diced
  • 1 yellow onion, diced
  • 4 cloves of garlic, diced
  • 2 bell peppers, chopped
  • 1 can (14 oz.) diced tomatoes
  • 1/2 tsp chili powder
  • 1/2 tsp smoked paprika –
  • 1 tsp dried oregano
  • 1 tsp ground coriander
  • 2 tsp ground cumin
  • 4 oz or less tomato paste. If I have an open jar of tomato sauce in the fridge, I use it up here instead of the paste. An entire 6 oz. can will make it too tomato-ey.
  • 5 cups cooked or canned beans. I use a mix of black, kidney, white, and/or pinto beans depending on what’s on hand.
  • 2 quarts vegetable broth
  • 1 cup textured vegetable protein (TVP)

Directions

  • Dice the onions and garlic and saute in oil.
  • Add the peppers and saute another minute or two.
  • Add the can of tomatoes and cook until peppers are soft, between 5-10 minutes.
  • Add the spices and tomato paste, stir.
  • Immediately add the beans and broth, stir.
  • Cook until beans are about done. If they’re already soft, this can be as little as couple minutes after it comes to a boil. Adjust seasoning as needed – it will probably need salt.
  • Add the TVP. TVP sponges up liquid, which makes it a good hack for drying out a too-watery dish. Here that means you may need to add more water or broth if the TVP has soaked up too much liquid after cooking for a few minutes.
  • Check seasoning and acid one last time. It may need a teaspoon of vinegar for brightness.

This is all tolerant to variation. Use different kinds of onions, beans, spices, add bay leaves, etc. Just get the overall consistency and spicing right.

I was recently tempted into making the Serious Eats Chili Paste and I have some cubes of it frozen. I added some to the latest batch of this chili and it turned out very nice. I don’t often have time for such fanciful cooking but if this recipe is too simple for you and you want to work harder for more flavor, that would be a good twist.

Long live the bean soup project!

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Climate change Cooking Imagine A World

Upgrading from a Gas Stove to Electric Induction

I saw that “gas stove ban” is the topic of this 24-hour news cycle (Terrain has a good recap and analysis) and I realized I hadn’t blogged about ditching my gas stove. It’s an opportunity for to drop some timely #content.

In March 2022 we had a bunch of electrical work done on our house. It was built in 1914 and had knob-and-tube wiring in the walls. Which meant we couldn’t blow insulation into the walls due to the fire risk and paid too much for homeowners insurance. So we got new wiring and insulation, increasing comfort and peace-of-mind and saving money each month on heating/cooling and insurance.

We took advantage of the timing to get a 240V line run to the kitchen and upgraded our stove from a Viking gas range & oven to an electric induction unit. It’s been great. Here are some pros/cons of the change for me. I’m skipping the obvious ones you’d find in general comparisons like, it’s good that my cooking doesn’t involve fossil fuels and the indoor air is cleaner and it was bad to have to buy some new cookware.

Pros

  • Spills/boilovers are easy to clean up. I boiled over oil (!) while deep-frying corn dogs and it was no big deal.
  • My kids can take a more involved role cooking since there’s no flame and less heat.
  • In general there’s less cooking heat in the kitchen. Whereas excess heat from the Viking oven once melted a salad spinner that was sitting nearby.
  • More precise temperature control and more powerful output. I benchmarked flame vs. induction for time to boil 1 quart of water, that could be its own post but induction won.
  • More digital controls in general. Maybe a fancier gas range would have had automated stop-baking times, I dunno, but mine was Viking brand and it didn’t even have a temperature readout on the oven.
  • Visual indicators make it less likely that I leave a burner on low and forget about it.

Cons

  • A bit of a learning curve.
    • On a gas stove I’d turn off a pot of rice or hard-boiled eggs and leave the residual heat to finish the job. I’ve learned that on the induction, I need to leave it on low.
    • And I had perfected stovetop popcorn in my old stockpot, which wasn’t induction-compatible. Now I’m learning the nuances of cooking popcorn in a stainless steel pot.
  • I liked my old range better as a pot-drying rack at the end of the night. There were more nooks and crannies to wedge the pans in and water drops didn’t pool.

Overall, the induction range has been an improvement and I am pleased to be rid of my old stove. Some of the changes involved in decarbonizing our lives and society are uncomfortable, e.g., facing a reduction in air travel. But this one has been a simple upgrade for our kitchen and our lives.

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Cooking Recipe

Simplest split pea soup

This is the simplest main dish I know. Two dry ingredients, that’s all. And it has all the benefits of bean soup: extremely healthy, my kids love it, vegan & gluten-free, easy to make, etc. Here’s my recipe.

Time: 60 minutes. Serves: the quantity I have below feeds about 8, but you could cut that in half – just keep the 1:3 ratio of the two ingredients. While this cooks, prepare some rice to add at the table. Add a vegetable and you have your meal (plus leftovers for another).

Ingredients

  • 1 qt split peas, rinsed if you feel like it
  • 3 qt vegetable broth (or 3 qt water + 4 bouillon cubes, added directly to the pot)
  • (optional) Hint of smoke (smoked salt or smoked paprika, to taste)

No chopping. No fresh ingredients. This can be underway in five minutes or less. Bring to a boil (if you have the lid on, this will make a mess), stir the foam back in, cover and simmer until split peas are soft (~45 minutes).

At this point I puree it, either with an immersion blender (easier) or in a blender. (If you have never pureed boiling soup in a blender, read up on it and take safety precautions). You could probably eat it unblended or just whisk it.

Serve with a scoop of rice in each bowl as a main dish. Based on the recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. Tip to Ann Arbor friends: Argus Farm Stop sells locally-grown split peas.

One weird thing to know if you’ve never cooked split pea soup: the leftovers thicken as they cool. To the consistency of Jello. You can carve it with a knife. It’s not a problem, though. When warming up leftovers, just scoop some into a soup bowl, add water to thin it out, microwave it, and stir it to a uniform consistency.

Categories
Cooking Recipe

The essential lentil stew

This is the recipe I’ve cooked the most times in my life and my comfort food. It is the perfect bean soup, which is the perfect food. I’m amazed how flavorful this dish is despite being virtually unspiced.

Time: 55 minutes. Serves 8.

Ingredients

  • Olive oil
  • 1 medium onion, diced
  • 2 carrots, chopped
  • 2 stalks celery (optional), chopped
  • 1 can diced tomatoes, 14.5 oz, including the juice
  • 1 lb regular brown lentils
  • 8 cups vegetable stock. For me, that’s 2.5 bouillon cubes from Edwards & Sons + 8 cups of water, thrown directly in the pot.
  • A dash or two of smoked paprika or smoked salt (optional)

Saute the onions in ~4 tbsp (1/4 cup) olive oil for a few minutes. Add carrots and celery, cook for a few minutes. Add the can of tomatoes, cook for a few minutes. Add the lentils, stir, add the stock, add the smoke if desired. Cook until the lentils are soft, check around ~30 minutes but it may take more like 40-45. Adjust levels of salt, pepper, smoke. The smoke is optional, skip it or keep it very light – it’s just providing a faint background note.

Optional additions that work well at the table are parmesan cheese and lots of black pepper. Freeze the leftovers.

Notes & Tips

This was a standby of my mother’s. She got it from Marcella Hazan and when I first lived on my own she photocopied the recipe for me:

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Cooking Parenting

An Ode to Bean Soup

Fall in Michigan means it’s soup weather! I make a lot of bean soups (and related soups). I think I’ll write some of them up on this blog. It’ll be a reference for me, at least, when I can’t decide what to cook next. Maybe others will find it useful, perhaps even my kids someday.

Bean soup is the best genre of food. It’s not close. It checks every box:

  • Tasty. My reasons below are practical, but they would be for naught if the soups weren’t delicious.
  • Easy. They usually involve little or no chopping, few ingredients, and a single big pot. Add an easy carb like bread/rice/ pasta and a vegetable side and it’s a meal.
  • Kid-friendly. My kids like or love most of my bean soups and they make a great early food for babies.
  • Scales up. Because there’s little chopping, it’s as easy to make 2, 3, or 4x as much at once. That gives you 1, 2, or 3 bonus nights where dinner is already in the fridge, ready to go. And it…
  • Keeps well. It’s as good days later as fresh, and freezes perfectly. When I want to bring a meal on short notice to someone ill or grieving or celebrating, I grab a couple of quarts of frozen soup.
  • Healthy. They’re low in fat and carbs and high in fiber and protein, which is nice because they’re also..
  • Vegetarian or vegan. These are protein-heavy, savory, rich dishes that won’t leave omnivores feeling like the meat is missing.
  • Gluten-free. If you’re serving a crowd whose dietary preferences you don’t know, like at a potluck, it’s inclusive to make a dish that is vegan and gluten-free without compromising.
  • Made from nonperishable ingredients. Most soups are made from things that last indefinitely in the pantry. And when you don’t have something, they’re..
  • Forgiving. You can skip a vegetable, use powder instead of fresh onions, and change spices or even the legume. And the cooking techniques are hard to mess up – it’s hard to burn a soup, even if you’re not paying attention (though I’ll tell that story when I get to that soup).
  • Cheap. About as cheap as good healthy food gets.
  • Local. I can get Michigan-grown beans and lentils. And even if beans aren’t local to you, growing and transporting dried beans is very climate-friendly.

Bean soup may be the best class of food, but even it has a few limited downsides:

  • Not great in summer. People don’t want to eat hot soup when it’s sweltering out. Summer is the off-season for me, when I cook solid food. Fortunately, I live in Michigan, where it’s soup season from September until May.
  • People sometimes want solid food. I can eat soup every night when it’s cold, but I find that I can only cook soup so many consecutive days before someone in my family says they miss the sensation of using a fork and chewing their food. So I take care to throw some non-soups in the mix regularly.

Even in writing this I remembered more soups I’ve not cooked recently. Let’s see how many I can catalog as I cook my way through another busy soup season…

Categories
Cooking

Traditional & Vegan Herbed Potato Latkes

This Hanukkah I locked in my favorite latke recipe, cooking it over and over and taking notes. I’m resharing it here, if nothing else so I can easily find it next December.

I was lucky to celebrate with my brother, who is vegan. We cooked together and over several nights made eight batches of latkes, half traditional and half vegan. We nailed the vegan version: side-by-side, they were nearly indistinguishable.

They were excellent. Pureeing some, but not all, of the potatoes yields a latke with distinguishable strands that is also firmly bound. And they are herbed, which gives them flavors beyond oil and salt. There was no point at which I suddenly felt ugh, that’s enough.

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