Tag Archives: recipes

Veggie chili

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My favourite comfort food, especially in winter when it’s cold and grey and miserable, is veggie chili. I have created and adapted my own recipe over the years and got it just how I like it. I thought I would share it so you can enjoy it too. It’s quick and easy and hot and yummy and easy to adapt to suit your tastes or whatever you have in the fridge.

You will need:

  • 1 tbsp olive oil (or other cooking oil)
  • 1 onion
  • 1 red pepper
  • 1 green pepper
  • Mushrooms, as many as you like
  • 1 can black beans (or 1 cup dried, soaked and cooked)
  • 1 can kidney beans (or 1 cup dried, soaked and cooked)
  • 1 jar passata (or 1 tin chopped tomato if you prefer it chunkier)
  • 1 tsp chili powder (or more to taste)
  • 1 tsp ground cumin
  • a handful of fresh coriander
  • black pepper to taste
  • rice to serve

Fry the onion in oil until soft. Add peppers and mushrooms and fry until soft. Add beans, tomato and spices. Bring to the boil then simmer for 20 minutes.

Cook your rice.

Stir coriander into chili just before serving, and season with black pepper. I like to stir the rice into the chili too, but you can serve it on top of the rice, or in a jacket potato, or however you like. Enjoy!

Recipe Organiser

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I previously described a system I had created to decide what to cook for dinner. I was using a combination of a recipe managing software and a rather clunky spreadsheet, which functioned reasonably well but was tedious to use. I suggested to my other half that he build me a web based tool to replace the two bits of software I was using and combine the functionality of both into one easy to use solution.

He reluctantly coded up a very basic web tool for me to use. Initially he thought of it as just another one of my crazy organising systems that would take up a lot of his time and not be very useful, but as he started to understand why I wanted him to make it for me, he began to see it’s potential. He has started working on creating a website that others will be able to use to help them decide what to eat, encourage them to cook from scratch using recipes and help them to eat a more varied diet.

The site is in the very early stages of production and is not yet available for you to join, but I am very excited about getting it started and I thought I would share the news and see if anyone out there is interested. The basic idea is that you input your recipes (there are plans for a recipe search so you can find new ones to try as well), then select what you plan to make. The list of recipes is organised so that recipes containing ingredients you haven’t used for a while are near the top of the list and those with ingredients you have used more recently are pushed down to the bottom.

Recipes you have selected are placed in your shopping basket, and a shopping list is generated, showing the amounts of each ingredient you will need to make your recipes. You will be able to mark which ingredients you already have in your kitchen, and print a list to take with you to the store. You can leave the recipes in your shopping basket for as long as you want so you can easily find the ones that you have chosen to make. When you have made them, remove them from the basket.

The system will keep track of when you last used each ingredient. If you add a recipe containing an ingredient you haven’t used before this will be given greater priority, encouraging you to try new things and increase the variety of your meals. You will be able to add an unlimited number of recipes.

Does this sound like something that would be useful to you? Do you want to be notified when it is ready to try out? Please let me know your thoughts!

Cooking experiments

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I mentioned in a previous post that I was taking steps to improve my health, and one of those steps is to eat a more varied diet based on home cooked meals made from scratch rather than relying on preprepared convenience food.

I have always had trouble with deciding what to make for dinner, and have a tendency to stick to a small selection of very similar meals using a small range of ingredients that I feel comfortable cooking. Although I really like the meals, it’s not very balanced and it gets a bit repetitive. I have a couple of recipe books and some recipes I have collected from the internet to try out, but there never seemed to be a convenient time to dig them out and try something new. We were in a routine of getting the usual ingredients from the grocery store and trying something new would require a lot of effort and a change to the routine.

So I made a change to our routine.

I have collected the all my recipes together into a recipe management tool on my computer (krecipes). This allows me to store my recipes in one easy place, select the ones I wish to use and generate a shopping list, excluding items I already have in my cupboard. I also set up a spreadsheet linking each meal to its ingredients, and giving each ingredient a score based on the length of time since it was last used. This gives me a score for each meal in my list, the higher the score, the more ingredients that meal contains that I haven’t used in a while. Each day I check my spreadsheet and use my recipe manager to generate a grocery list for the meals (lunch and dinner) with the highest score, mark which ingredients I’ll be using for those recipes, and send a grocery list to my other half who happens to pass a grocery store on his way home from work.

This shakeup to our routine has been very beneficial in many ways. We have broken away from our standard meals and stopped buying so much convenience food. We are eating a variety of meals using a wide range of fresh ingredients. We are trying new foods that we would never have considered buying before, including asparagus, avocado, tabbouleh and barley. I am really enjoying cooking different things each day rather than the same old thing day in day out. We are saving fuel making extra trips to the store that he passes every day anyway. My children are learning about new and different foods that they may not have come across otherwise. Food has become interesting again.

The recipe manager and spreadsheet combination is a little bit clunky and time consuming to use, but the concept of the system is working well for us. Those who know me know how much I love having complex systems for managing day to day things. I hope at some point to create a more simple way of doing the same thing, possibly as a website based application, but my web guy is already overworked, especially now he has to pick up groceries on his way home from work every day, so that may be a long way in the future.

Today I am having rice noodles with chili vegetable sauce for lunch, and I will be making mushroom barley soup with whole grain bread for dinner. If anyone has any tasty vegan recipes, please pass them along!