Looking in the fridge, I see some frozen spinach water (water used to boil spinach, then frozen for use later as a broth). I had been looking through my current favorite cookbook earlier, Vegetarian (Homestyle)
, and it had a recipe for lentil soup with spinach. While I didn't have any spinach, I did have lentils. And now I had spinach broth. I defrosted the spinach broth, threw in the lentils. Rummaged around the fridge some more and remember the arugala (rocket) - that's close to spinach! This is not very heavy on the spices, but being lentil soup it is roughly Indian.1/2 cup red lentils (any color will work)
about 4 cups spinach broth
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1 handful golden raisins
Mix the above ingredients together, bring to a boil, then simmer 20 minutes or so.
Arugala/rocket
Jarred crushed garlic
Salt
Add a handful of arugala (or spinach), and a small teaspoon or less of jarred crushed garlic, and a few dashes of salt, simmer another 5 minutes, then turn off and leave covered.
French Egg Rolls
In the same cookbook, I saw a recipe for something that looked delicious, but was made with filo dough. I hate filo dough because it's really time consuming; I always use puff pastry instead. I had some puff pastry left over from a dinner party a few weeks back, so I took it out of the freezer to thaw. In the mean time, I had to make up the rest of this dish. I had very few of the ingredients that the recipe actually called for (celery, carrots, etc). But I did have peppers, which it called for. The recipe was originally roughly French or Italian, but since I had so few of those ingredients, I decided to go with Asian. I wanted to add tofu. I had three kinds of tofu in the fridge: plain, baked savory, and baked teriyaki. The teriyaki looked the most flavorful, and fit with the Asian theme.
2 orange peppers
2 green peppers (I actually cut all 3 of the green peppers I had; I figured I could use the others on top of one of my salads, sprinkled on the soup, etc.)
1 package baked tofu - teriyaki flavor (mine was from Trader Joe's)
1/2 box puff pastry
Teriyaki sauce (I used "Soy Vay" brand)
Sesame oil for cooking in a pan (any oil will do)
You have to thaw the puff pastry!!! This takes at least 40 minutes, but it's really important. The good news is all you do is throw it on the counter and wait. But there's no cheating either - you can't run it under hot water to speed it up. You also need to preheat the oven (this takes about 10 minutes).
Cut up the peppers really small. Cut up the tofu the same size. By really small I never mean as small as a chef - that would take too long. Something close to the size of thumbtack will work. Add a couple spoonfuls of teriyaki sauce and mix it all up. Heat up a pan with some oil and then cook the peppers & tofu for 10-20 minutes, just until the liquid is mostly gone and the peppers are a little softer than when you started.
Once the puff pastry is thawed, cut one sheet into 6 pieces. If it's not thawed it will break when you unfold it. Mine did this, which is why I decided to cut the puff pastry into the shape that I did, and is how fate guided me to invent french egg rolls! Take a spoonful of peppers & tofu and sprinkle it in longways, then wrap the edges up and press together along the top, leaving the ends open (you can fit more filling in this way). On a whim, I sprinkled/pressed some sesame seeds along the top edge. You can do this if you want to.
Put the french egg rolls on a cookie sheet. I lined it with parchment paper first - it works WAY better than oil! And I recently found out you can reuse parchment paper! Bake for 15-20 minutes. I served mine with some habenero-mango sauce I had in the fridge. They were also delicious plain. And of course you could serve them with any other sauce you might have: more teriyaki sauce, or some hot pepper suace diluted in vinegar and sugar.
Spinach Arugala Salad
You might be wondering how I managed to have spinach for the salad, but not the soup. Well, I had already mixed together the end of a bag of spinach and the end of a bag of arugala (both still fresh, just almost gone) to make a salad for work. Three salads, to be exact, in three containers. But I didn't really mix them; the spinach was on bottom. So I just pulled some arugala off the top for the soup. But I took one of the containers of salad for dinner. It's really easy to make more than one salad at a time, so I had used the same mix of two kinds of greens, but mixed in different toppings. Most toppings will last several days; avoid adding cut up fruits more than one day before eating. I chose this one:
2 handfuls baby spinach
2 handfuls arugala/rocker
1 handful golden raisins
1 handful cashews
cilantro dressing (mine was from Trader Joe's)
Mix in a very large bowl, or shake in a bowl with a tight-fitting lid. It was a little risky, since the toppings were kind-of trendy/Californian, but the dressing was Mexican. I think because it was simple (only 2 toppings), it all came together well. I made this early and let it sit with the dressing, so the dressing kind of marinated and "deflated" the spinach, softening it up (the way I like it). If you prefer crispier/crunchier spinach, add the dressing just before serving.
All this was served with 2 slices of orange and a glass of sparkling water with lime. Yum! Marshall approved of everything. He wanted me to write down the French Egg Roll recipe, which is actually why I decided to re-visit this blog with a new theme. I plan to write down everything I cook for at least a week, maybe more. I even promise to take a few photos.
Serves: 2
Total time: maybe 90 minutes or possibly 2 hours...sorry - decided to write this up after I'd already cooked!
Leftovers: The other two salads and one small bowl of lentil soup. Plus I had at least 1 cup of the pepper-tofu filling. Stay tuned for how I re-use this later in the week!
(I had planned to have 2 of the 6 French Egg Rolls for lunch, but Marshall ate 4 instead of 2.)
