Whipped Tofu & Greens Toast

I keep meaning to post recipes. In the time between this post and the last (TWO YEARS!), I've made some delicious things, often followed by "I should post this on my blog!" And yet, here we are. I would love to say that I'll keep posting things here, but my best intentions aren't quite paying off. 

Also since my last post, I've lived a lot of life! Nicole and I have done some amazing travel, I've taken students on a research trip, I've met new friends and said goodbye as other friends have moved elsewhere, lost two kitty cats, I sold my house and Nicole and I bought a new house, and so much more! 

In the process of making our new house a home, we've spent some good time cooking together. However, we've also done a lot of home projects, in addition to our full time jobs, so sometimes we just need a quick and healthy dinner with foods we have on hand. Enter this whipped tofu and greens on toast recipe. We had some greens from CSA that needed to be used soon, but both wanted more than just greens. With a bit of back and forth, we landed on this experiment, which wowed us both and has returned multiple times. It's a surprisingly satisfying dinner, doesn't really heat up the kitchen the summer, and uses things we keep on hand. I hope you'll like it just as much as we do! 

Maggie's All-Cuisines Salad Dressing

Well, we are mid-way through spring with hints of summer in the air. This means that it is time for our CSA again! I was *so* excited to sing our "CSA-day" song on the first week of pick-up. The joy at our CSA starting up again is also set against the backdrop of the global pandemic that rages on. Indiana has slowly begun to open up, but we're still very wary about heading to restaurants and we've only been going to the store every three weeks or so. Our weekly CSA box has dramatically expanded our access to fresh veggies, especially leafy greens! Seriously, we've gotten lettuce mix, heads of lettuce, kale, Swiss chard, arugula, braising greens, and micro-greens, plus turnips, radishes, and the first bit of asparagus; it's magical.

With so many leafy greens to eat, we've been finding new ways to eat them. Shana has been craving tikka masala with regularity, which is fine by me since it is delicious. A leafy green salad is a wonderful companion. When we first confronted the combination of tikka masala and salad, I looked at the dressings in the fridge and didn't love any of the possible taste combinations. So obviously, I made up my own! 

While originally intended as a lovely accompaniment to flavors in Middle-Eastern dishes, this salad dressing works beautifully with every flavor profile we've tried. It's a fast, easy, and tasty dressing for salads with any meal. 

Poured here on a simple salad of spinach and toasted almonds.

NYT Chinese Sesame Cucumbers

It's been quite the whirlwind of a summer, folks. Already we're more than halfway through and I'm wishing I'd been more productive. To be fair, I've been working, but I've also been doing things for me, like reading, visiting family/friends, gardening, and cooking.

Speaking of those last two, this year I decided to grow cucumbers for the first time. Shana loves cucumbers. Our CSA was selling garden plants, so I picked one variety of cucumber to try. The variety I picked, Diva, is amazing! I don't love cucumber, but even I like these ones. I wasn't prepared to like the cucumbers, but I was even less prepared for how well they seem to be doing. I think the vines grew multiple inches per day and I'm pretty sure the cucumbers just magically appear.

Before I started growing them, we'd often receive a cucumber a week in our CSA box, which was just enough to put on a salad or Shana to eat as a snack. However, with the rate that they grow, I needed a recipe that used a lot of cucumber. Shana reminded me of one we'd had at a potluck years ago and it fit the bill perfectly.

This cool summer cucumber salad is a great side dish, snack, or appetizer that doesn't heat up the kitchen when summer temperatures soar. Plus, it's delicious and will keep you coming back for more.

That's part of my garden in the background! 

Maggie's Vegan Zucchini Boats

This year, we doubled the size of the garden. With extra space, I was able to grow a greater variety of veggies and decided to grow zucchini. My zucchini is...prolific. Talk to many folks who grow zucchini and they'll tell you the same thing.

As it turns out, growing a ton of zucchini is a blessing and curse. I've made batches upon double-batches of zucchini bread. We've grilled more zucchini than any summer before. And as much as I love both of those options, we needed something else to do with zucchini. 

Given that zucchini grows well in most gardens, a google search for "things to do with zucchini" brings up list after list of options. A number of these lists included some kind of zucchini boat: a hollowed out zucchini stuffed with ingredients, baked to deliciousness. While I loved the idea, I didn't love any of the recipes I found. Most recipes were filled with cheese and/or meat, while some were nothing more than flavored rice - not what I wanted. 

Instead, I took the idea of zucchini boats and ran. Where I ended up is a delicious and healthy recipe, full of protein and garden-fresh summer flavors. Infinitely customizable, add or remove ingredients to make this into something you'll eat, if only to switch up how you're consuming zucchini. 

Killer Kale Salad

This is the weekend in between the last week of classes and finals week.  I've assigned final papers in two of my classes and an exam in one of them. If the lapse between my last post and this one is any indication, it's safe to say this has been a busy semester for me, as well as for my students. I'm a bit behind on grading, though I think that most faculty members are at this point in the semester. Although I'm behind, I am feeling remarkably okay about it. I know it will all get done, and have the perspective-taking abilities to recognize that this is where I am at the end of every semester. In contrast, for most of my students, this is the point of the semester where their "stuffing begins to show," as one of my colleagues says. I think if my students were eating this kale salad, their stuffing wouldn't be showing at all.

This is another recipe that came from our monthly vegan potlucks, which I mentioned in my last post. Shana and I have eaten it a ton and fed it to numerous friends, including one who has never found a way to eat kale that she's enjoyed. This salad has been a hit with everyone. It's so simple, yet there is something magical about it. In all seriousness, the magic is real enough that we've had this twice in the past three days. Once you eat it, you'll believe in its magic.

Maggie's Grilled Tofu

It's summer. I love summer for a number of reasons: Shana loves summer, the world is full of beautiful colors, and the foods planted in the spring are ripening like magic. Our CSA is in full swing, so we are reaping the bounty of summer foods. This week, we got green beans, a head of lettuce, two cucumbers, a zucchini, fingerling potatoes, onions, garlic, and two kinds of tomatoes.

Here's the problem. I hate humidity paired with any temp much above 70, which pretty much captures midwestern summers perfectly. For me, what ends up happening is that I don't want to eat or cook anything. Combining this tendency with our travels, we haven't eaten anything new or noteworthy in weeks. Feeling ready for something new, tonight's dinner on our weekly meal plan simply said "new." Such dinners work well when I plan what I'd like to cook early in the week, but I neglected to do that this week. Luckily, my lack of planning led to a thrown-together dinner highlighting summer's bounty. We had a simple green salad (CSA lettuce, carrots, celery, and cucumber, with peppers and toasted almonds) with vegan ranch dressing, CSA green beans, sweet corn from another local farm (which we grilled to perfection), and grilled tofu (which is simple enough that I feel silly calling it a recipe). Altogether, this dinner was amazing and the quintessential vegan summer meal.

Maggie's Vegan Cream of Chard Soup

Oh readers, I struggle. It's been over a month since last I posted! I'd like to be able to say that I've been doing amazing things that have kept me away, but the reality is that I've just been living life and cooking the same recipes we already know and love. Even with the CSA, I just  haven't been that creative with foods - with one major exception. This soup.

We got chard in our CSA shares for a couple of weeks and I remembered a soup we'd had years ago. I tried to recreate it after asking about ingredients, but then decided I didn't like the smell of one of the ingredients. Instead, I switched things up a bit and ended up with something delicious. Seriously, this soup is amazing. The richness of it makes it ideal for any season, but using fresh spring/summer chard is a great idea.

Maggie's Spring Carrot Salad

If you read my last post, you'll know that our awesome CSA has been giving us lots of carrots. The past two weeks, we've also gotten some beautiful French breakfast radishes. One of the things I was so excited about with our CSA is that it would force me to explore new (or in this case, new uses) for veggies. Enter this salad. 

Apparently, shredded carrot salads are common in other parts of the world, but Americans don't eat them that often. I don't know why that's the case, because this salad was so easy and delicious. The only thing ingredient I don't keep on hand is the green onions, which is easily remedied. This salad comes together in no time with the aid of a shredding disc for a food processor. As the weather gets warmer, I'm thinking that this will be making an appearance on our menu more frequently and might even go to some warm-weather pot lucks. 

MVK Savory Roasted Carrots

Look - a real CSA post!!! We've been getting some AMAZING veggies from our wonderful CSA out of Christopher Farm. As it's very early in the growing season, we've gotten mostly greens. However, we've also gotten a ton of carrots due to the hoop houses at the farm. We eat carrots in soups and in salads, but that hasn't been enough to eat through the carrots. I was talking to my sister about this the other day and she gave me a great idea.

Recently, my sister started working at a restaurant called Mill Valley Kitchen. She is really enjoying the way the restaurant engages with and thinks about food. When I mentioned all of our carrots, she said that I could try to make something on the menu there: carrots marinated in a savory marinade and then roasted quickly in their wood fired pizza oven. I have never eaten these carrots and I certainly don't have a wood fired pizza oven, but I figured I'd give it a go. I am so glad I did, because these carrots were ridiculously delicious. Even if you don't like cooked carrots, you will like these (says Shana). Seriously, eat them now.

CSA Excitement!

Everybody. We have a CSA this year. An organic CSA.

Don't know what a CSA is? It's awesome! CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture and it basically works by people like me & Shana paying a farmer before the growing season for a share of the crops that are grown. If you want more information, check out Local Harvest or Wiki. Today was the first day that we got our CSA share from Christopher Farm. I am SO EXCITED about it!! Here's a picture of what was in this week's share.

From bottom-left, going clockwise: box choy, kale, spinach, carrots & greens, lettuce, cilantro, garlic, shallots.

I've decided to post our weekly shares and have created a new tag for CSA-related posts. I'm very hopeful that the CSA will force us to explore new veggies. For example, this week I'm going to try a carrot-top pesto, a carrot-top soup, and roasted garlic compound butter. I've been feeling a bit in a cooking rut (as I think I do every spring), so having all of these ideas feels awesome. YAY!

The post "CSA Excitement" originally appeared on Maggie's LesVegan Kitchen.