Roasted Cauli-Garlic Soup - VEGAN

It was a bit cold yesterday, and grey and rainy - a cool, wet, spring day. I'm not complaining, everything looked very green and I was a bit chilled so the weather made the perfect excuse for a spring soup.

I had saved a recipe on pinterest that looked interesting so I hunted it down to determine if I had the ingredients required and it looked makeable for a big, warm pot of dinner.  Here is the original pin from the recipe that inspired my version of this soup.  I had a bit of a time pulling up the original recipe on mobile as the blog has so many ads and I kept accidentally clicking on them.  It made the original recipe on the phone an annoying experience - watch out.

What caught my attention when I found the recipe was that the soup called for the addition of hummus - that to me seemed wonderfully odd and I liked it!  I have a vegan lasagna recipe that uses garlic hummus mixed with tofu to create the "ricotta cheese" filling and it works really well so I felt good about trying hummus in soup.

Ingredients for Roasted Cauli-Garlic Soup

(I prefer to use all organic ingredients)
1 large onion (white yellow or red)
1 large or 2 small heads of garlic
1 small head of cauliflower
1/2 cup smooth and creamy hummus
1/2 cup quinoa
1/2 cup raw cashews
32-48 oz vegetable broth
1/2 lemon or 1/4t dried lemon peel
1/4 c fresh chopped cilantro
olive oil
salt and pepper

Photo directions -- here goes.

Set a 1/2 cup (mine was heaping) of raw cashews in a bowl and cover with boiling water.  Since I had to set the kettle to boil, I went ahead and enjoyed a cup of tea.  I left the cashews soaking about one hour 15 minutes.

 
Start the quinoa cooking according to package directions.  I used tri-color quinoa.

Prepare veggies for roasting.  I managed to get them all on one pan, lined with baking paper.  For the garlic heads I just cut off the very top of each.  Drizzle the veggies with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.  I roasted the veggies on convection roast at 425F for about 30 mins.  The most important thing is that the cauliflower be soft enough to stab a dinner fork into.

I usually turn the veggies half way through the cooking to get them browned on all sides.  This was half way.

I pulled asided some of the smaller cauliflower pieces to add back into the soup whole for a bit of bite to the pureed finale.

Into the blend went the big chunks of cauliflower and all of the onions.  I also added enough broth to each blender batch so that the blender could do its thing without the mixture being too thick.  My broth was room temperature so the batch wasn't very hot.  If you are blending hot ingredients and especially pureeing a soup - remember to remove the center section from your blender top so that the steam doesn't make the blending dangerous.

I ended up using about 1.5 of these containers by the time the soup was done.  How much broth you use will depend on how thick you want your final product or how much help your blender needs to smooth and blend your ingredients.

Here is the blended cauliflower and onion.

Next, pop the roasted garlic cloves into the blender.  Then add a heaping half cup of hummus.  The original recipe creator called specifically for Sabra hummus because maybe they sponsor her? But I don't use Sabra since their soybean oil and other ingredients are GMO and I avoid all GMO products.

 

I think the original recipe called for garlic hummus but I didn't have that - mine was original which is why I used two small heads of roasted garlic in my recipe.

 

It was a bit smoother and thinner and I did add more broth.

 

 

 



Next in - the cashews and quinoa!  Crazy but awesome - love the inventiveness of this recipe by the original creator.

I have a large blender so the entire recipe filled it to the top but it did fit.  Add the blended ingredients all at once or in batches to a soup pot.  Once in the pot, I added more broth until I had the consistency I was looking for and then added in the reserved pieces of cauliflower.

Taste the soup and season.

I added quite a bit more salt but the soup tasted like it needed a bit of brightening up.  I felt like half a lemon squeezed in would have done the trick but I was plum out of lemons.  However, on my last trip to Mom's Organic Market, I had picked up some dried lemon peel from their bulk spice section.  I used about 1/4 teaspoon, maybe a bit more... I didn't measure.  That definitely brightened things up but I thought the soup still needed something herb-y.  Cilantro seemed like the right thing.  I had frozen some freshly chopped cilantro about a week earlier so I grabbed it from the freezer and dumped in the whole bit.

I stirred it in (about 1/4 cup in total).  I tasted again, added a bit more salt, thinned the soup a tad bit more and claimed it ready for dinner.

The original recipe calls this soup a chowder.  It uses a potato and miso paste.  I didn't have either so my recipe differed that way as well.  Also - the original doesn't use the roasted onion but since I wasn't going to use Miso paste I thought I needed the added flavor of the onion.  This soup didn't say chowder to me, it was more like a nice thick bowl of soup puree.  It was delish.  Enjoy. Cheers. Sher.

Fresh Flowers, Crochet Tins and Roasted Soup

Until this morning, I had a bunch of dead daffodils staring at me from the mantel - no worries, I didn't not photograph that.  Usually that means I haven't been grocery shopping - and yep, we were out of just about EVERYTHING... I do the bulk of my shopping at Trader Joe's and each time I'm there, I freshen the flowers around my space.

What did I get today?

Something called WAX flowers.  They are tall and have greenery that looks something like fresh rosemary.  At their tippy tops are little purple flowers.  They don't look SUPER like spring - they look like the perfect flower for a winter that just won't end and so are perfect for my house right now (yes, we had another snow day two days ago).

Each week, I also stuff some tulips (2 colors if I dare to afford them both) and some unbloomed daffodils - I like to buy them all tight and closed and watch them open day by day until they reach their full bloom.  The daffodils usually come from England or Ireland - so thanks to all my UK friends for sending your lovely yellow flowers to brighten my day.

Last week I got a few potted bulbs.  One is a light purple hyacinth which I can smell as soon as I walk in the front door.  It's trying very hard to droop over so I've tied it to a chop stick.  I also got some really tiny daffodils in a pot which haven't yet reared their pretty heads.  I put the potted plants each into a crab meat tin I had saved some months ago.  AND... earlier this week I crocheted some bright and happy little tin covers for them.  All the color on the mantle is helping to counter the drab colors and constant white blanket of snow covering any such green on the ground.

I took down the very dried roses but I thought they still looked pretty.

I hopped up and grabbed some yarn to make the tin covers after perusing the blog Color & Cream.  I love the colors she puts together - some people just have such a knack for colors and their color schemes seem to really define them and they utilize their particular colors so well - all the time.  I seem to be a scatterbrain with color - I can't decide what my scheme is.  I apparently have a bunch of different things I like in the color world.  But, putting colors together myself is not a skill I possess... I really have a defunct color building skill. Therefore, I copy color a lot.  Ah well - you can't be good in all areas, I'll have to settle for being a copy cat.  I didn't use any patterns to make the tins, just kind of dreamed them up as I went.

Tonight I'm teaching crochet class #2 of 8.  I teach one class each Wednesday night.  This class is the perfect size with 9 students.  The class is taught to beginners and intermediates alike.  Three of the students have taken my class before but 6 of them are learning to crochet for the first time.  The first session I taught of crochet there were 12 people - all beginners... a bit tough at that size.  The next time there were SEVENTEEN!!! I had panic attacks before every class.  The third time there were 6 students and that was a bit small.  I think 8-12 is a good number especially when it's folks at different skill levels.  I teach the class Montessouri style so that crocheters may progress at their own speed.  But generally, I'm teaching a pretty big group the same skills at the same time so it works.

Raw veggies, squished on tray with olive oil, salt and peper

Veggies about 30 mins later, roasted at 400F

Roasted Veggies cut small to add to soup

I head out the door for class before 6:30pm which makes dinner tight.  So... I planned to have some vegetable soup tongiht - to get full flavor in my soup I'm trying to make the soup with pre-roasted veggies.  I never use recipes - esp. not for soup - so in my usual flair - I'm winging this.  Here are the veggies I'm roasting in the over to prepare for the soup - what do you think? will it work? have you made soup this way before?  Well, I guess we will see.

Success!  It tastes GOOD! And, I tried the juice of one lemon squeezed in - man that did the trick.

Paper Rose Frames, Snow Soup & Lilyhammer

Crafty Update:

I'm not the only one in the family who makes stuff!  For Christmas, my daughter made three frames for me. Her card said, "Crafty Frames for you Crafty Room."  I knew right away I wanted photos of all four of my kids in these frames.  So a few days ago, I designed some 5X7 photos using my Panstoria Artisan software.

I uploaded the photos to Walmart (because I wanted them fast!!!) and an hour later, picked them up.  Interestingly, I ordered 5X7 flat full photo cards because they cost 68cents each and included an envelope whereas a 5X7 photo (same paper, same finish) cost $1.49 each minus the envelopes.

Here are the 3 photos I designed for the frames:

Here are the frames my daughter made by rolling and twisting fabric (the green roses) and newspaper into paper roses (maybe a pinterest find)?

AND... my son gets into the design action too.  He works for a company that designs and sells apparel and other items using the Maryland state flag.  He designed these earrings.  I got the prototype as a gift from him.  Aren't they cute?

I figure heart earrings and rose flowers are both great craft projects for February aka LOVE MONTH!

And by the way - "It's Always sunny SNOWY in Philadelphia!"  Here's what we got yesterday to the tune of another 6+ inches of very heavy snow and another day of NO SCHOOL for the kiddos!  Fun.  Hubby worked from home and I of course spent time shoveling.

The snow was so heavy that the bushes started leaning towards the sidewalk!

When I came inside from all the snow clearing work, I had a bowl of this MOST delicious soup I made: potato, cannelloni beans and kale.  Super yum.  If you want to know how I made it just ask.  I never use recipes but I think I can remember how!

And - if you are snowed in where you live, or even just looking for something to watch on the tele while you crochet... check out THIS series.  I found it on my netflix instant streaming account.  I've watched the whole first season and I'm on to the second.  Pretty funny.  I was feeling right at home watching the Norway snow.

 ta ta for today - Sher