Sunday, March 21, 2010

Perfect Hominy White Bean Chili

1.15.10
Hominy is always a strange bean/corn/veggie to me. Although it got really soft after cooking all day long, this dish wasn't all that great. It was super easy to get together, was spicy, but just okay. Maybe it needed more cilantro. Or cheese on top. It called for white beans, but it might be better with kidneys.

Lentil Soup with Ribbons of Kale

1.12.10
This was the first recipe I tried out from my new vegetarian slow cooker cookbook. It was turning into a pretty rainy January and it was time for soup. This recipe needed the basic soup veggies -onion, celery, carrot - to be cooked before starting the pot, so I chopped the veggies the night before. I thought that you would just be able to throw everything right in to the crockpot and press start, but sometime you have to pre-cook. It's not really a big deal, just have to be ready to use the stove in the morning. This soup was definitely worth it - very filling and went well with garlic bread.

Slow Cookin It - an intro

The crockpot was one of the last gifts to arrive. It was a few weeks, maybe a month or so after the wedding when it appeared on the front steps. I'd almost forgotten that it was on our list. And after seeing how big was and that it didn't have a timer you could set in advance, I was almost disappointed we gotten it. ALMOST.

Then my family came to town for the holidays and we went to Pt Reyes for a day hike and came home to a hot pot of red beans and rice. No waiting around for dinner to cook. No prepping. While maybe some guacamole prepping, but that's it. All we had to do was set the table. There was enough to fill the 10 hungry hikers. And it was pretty good. It was one of the only vegetarian recipes in the small cookbook that came in the box from crockpot. But that soon changed.

I ordered Robin Robertson's Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. I had borrowed her Vegan Planet cookbook from a friend and loved the few recipes I had tried. It's been a long time since I got a new book and immediately read through the introduction and then continued to look over each section & recipe. I guess I was excited. Her book in hand, along with a few other slow cooker recipes and a little bit of experimenting, my house was going to venture in slow cooking.