Sunday, September 29, 2013

Leftover Taco Filling Nachos (10/16)


Earlier this week, my other and I made vegetarian tacos. I like making them using Quorn grounds (a mycoprotein meat substitute that you can treat like meat), but since the pack is the equivalent of a pound of ground beef, it makes more than two people can eat by themselves. For the filling, I used the following recipe:

1 pkg. Quorn grounds
2 Poblano peppers, sliced thin
1 Med-large onion, sliced thin
1 pkg. Lawry's taco seasoning
1T Canola oil
1 can Ranch Style black beans
Some black pepper

The tacos were quite good, and we served them on toasted flour tortillas with melted sharp cheddar cheese. Since there was plenty left over, my other had the idea that we make nachos using the filling--it was a great idea. I started by lining the bottom of a 13"x9" baking dish with some pretty flat Tostitos tortilla chips and covered each with a generous spoon-full of filling. I covered the nachos with a decent blob of finely shredded cheddar cheese and a sprinklings of black pepper, coarse sel gris and chipotle chili powder, and baked it all at 300F for 15 minutes. They were pretty great, but we could have stood to have had a few more. If I had a large, flat, brimmed baking tray instead, I could have used less filling per nacho and extended the recipe a little.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Introductions and Pumpkin Bisque

I'm your documentarian. I'm mostly vegetarian, though I will and do occasionally eat fish. I like cooking for myself and my other, and I figured it would be helpful to document my various undertakings if for no other reason than to be able to revisit days of food past. I feel like I'm a decently creative cook for someone that does this as just a hobby, and I'm thinking it could be fun to document some of what I've done.

I'm going to try to include full product descriptions any time I talk about something prepackaged I cook with. Feel free to suggest better replacements or that I'm a worthless corporate lemming for using whatever Big Ag products I'm inevitably going to use (some in this post). Also feel free to congratulate or criticize my waffling commitment to my non-ethically substantiated predominant vegetarianism or my cooking skills, or whatever. I reserve the right to delete basically any posts I don't like or just see fit to remove, so say basically whatever you want.

Now that all of that has been said, I made a pumpkin bisque the other night using a recipe I changed to make it mostly vegetarian. The recipe didn't seem too terribly dependent on its meat ingredients, as you'll see down below.

Instead of bacon grease, I used 2 tablespoons of butter, assuming it would be an acceptable compromise. Also, I heated up 6 strips of Morningstar Farms vegetarian bacon to cut up into bits. While I don't think it's probably going to fare too well in a taste test against real bacon, especially good bacon, it's better than something like bac-os (than which everything is better, imho) and adds a good smokiness with a decent texture.

Instead of chicken stock I used 6 cups of water with two Knorr brand vegetable stock concentrate tubs dissolved into it, which is better than (some) other bouillon in my experience. I used the Knorr stock instead of another fancy tub of vegetable stock concentrate that I bought, made by some company that makes demi-glace concentrate and other similar concentrated stocks. When I looked at the ingredients after I got back to the kitchen to cook, I realized that the stock's first ingredient was wine. I like wine in stocks, especially for French and savory/soupish foods--and especially especially in a white wine onion soup I had in France years ago at some very family touristy casual gourmet restaurant in Strassbourg, one of a very few businesses open on New Year's Day--and I'm totally going to use it at some point, but the recipe for the pumpkin bisque didn't include wine in the chicken broth it called for.

Regarding the above stock-related parenthetical, I say "some" other bouillon because there are other bouillons and bases I like. For example, I very much so like the not-meat bouillons from Edward and Sons, which do a good job of approximating the essential characteristics of whatever meat it is that they're replacing, though the veggie bouillons are good, too. While I'm on it, and while it's not actually bouillon but premade broth, I don't like Swanson's vegetable broth, though, and nothing I've done to it has done anything to take it past tasting terrible to me.

Other than the noted substitutions, the preparation was identical. The picture above is actually the soup after being reheated. Since the original called for smoked Gouda which was all used in the original recipe, I added some smokehouse pepper and some decent shredded Parmesan. The soup was great when I first had it, and it was great reheated. Still having smoked Gouda in it, I don't think the parmesan really made much of a difference besides extra salt and maybe a little savory, though I loved the smokiness from the smokehouse pepper. I also added  some summer savory and chives on reheating, just for grins, and they were basically imperceptible. I'd like to try it with some extra summer savory, though, because I think it could be at least interesting.