Monthly Archives: October 2010

German Style Cabbage Soup

by tofuhead

We decided to eat soup yesterday without any plans what kind of soup it would be. So we just bought carrots, cabbage and celeriac and thought they’d make a good soup with some sort of protein source, like seitan or beans. Nomad did some research in the Internet and found a German ham and potato soup recipe and we made a vegan version of it.

I made double batch of basic seitan, but used less soy sauce and no vinegar in cooking broth. Then we used the same broth to make the soup. But I think broth from bouillon cubes would be just as good, especially if you have premade seitan or don’t want to make 8 balls.

Red Cabbage Soup with Seitan
serves 8

2,5-3 l vegetable broth + bay leaf + some pepper corns (or use seitan cooking broth)
1 tbsp dried parsley
2 balls basic seitan
3 carrots
6-8 potatoes
about 200g piece of celeriac
1 big onion
half red cabbage head (quarter of a big one)
(salt if needed)

Put the broth (with bay leaf and pepper corns) and parsley into a large pot and bring to boil. Meanwhile cube the seitan, carrots, potatoes and celeriac, chop the onion and cut the cabbage into 5 cm strips. Put everything to the pot and simmer covered 20-30 minutes or until vegetables are soft. Add more water if needed.

Forest Mushrooms

by tofuhead

Me and my sisters were visiting our mum this weekend and on Saturday we all went to forest to pick mushrooms. It hadn’t been raining lately, so many mushrooms were too dry, but we still got a nice loot. We picked a big basket full of mixed mushrooms, mostly gypsy mushrooms, rufous milk-caps and other milk-caps.

The big basket wasn’t big enough. Luckily we had a smaller basket too.

We also found fairly good amount of funnel chanterelles. 8 litres or so.

We were all very hungry when we came back from the forest and we made bean and vegetable curry for lunch. When we had our stomachs full, we started working with the mushrooms. We decided to dehydrate all the funnel chanterelles, salt the milk caps and eat the rest. When we had filled two dehydrators (my mum has one and I had brought mine with me) with mushrooms and cleaned and cut in smaller pieces one third of other mushrooms I went to kitchen to boil the milk-caps and bake us a mushroom pie. Meanwhile my sisters cleaned the rest of the mushrooms. I didn’t measure everything and I don’t know how long I baked the pie, but here’s the recipe anyway. Our pie was made of mixed mushrooms, but you can use only one variety too.



Mushroom Pie

crust:
100g margarine + little more to grease the dish
1 dl graham flour
2 dl wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp cold water

filling:
1,5 l musrooms
2 tbsp margarine or oil
1 small/medium onion, chopped
2 dl oat (or soy) cream
pinch of salt and white pepper

Make the crust first. Put the margarine, graham and wheat flour and baking powder into a bowl and crumble with your hand. Add enough water to form a dough, mix well but don’t knead. Grease a pie dish and spread the dough in it. Prebake in 200 Celsius degrees for 10 minutes.

Put the mushrooms into a large pan and heat until the liquid comes out from the mushrooms. You can either discard the liquid or continue heating until it’s evaporated. Add the margarine, let it melt and add the chopped onion. Fry until the onion is soft and translucent. Add oat cram and season with salt and pepper. Spread the filling on the prebaked crust and bake until the surface has nice brown colour (20-30 minutes maybe?). Let cool a little before serving.

The dried funnel chanterelles fitted in 6 glass jars, so each of us got 2 jars. Our mum didn’t get any, because she can’t eat mushrooms. But she did pick some inedible mushrooms for her, because she uses them to dye wool yarn.