Last night Shawn & I made the Black bean & zucchini soup recipe I got from a week trial of the site VeggieMealMaker.com. This soup was really easy to make & was very tasty! I’m looking forward to the leftovers for dinner tonight!
Recipe:
Description
This black bean soup is so tasty – you would never guess it was so easy to prepare! Try it topped with crunched up tortilla chips.
Ingredients
- 2 cn black beans
- 1 zucchini – chopped
- 1/2 red bell pepper
- 1/2 green bell pepper
- 1 diced tomatoes
- 1/2 onion – chopped
- 2 clv garlic – minced
- 2 c water
- dab oil
- 1/2 t chili powder
- 1 t cumin
- 1/2 t oregano
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
1. Wash and prep veggies.
2. Combine water, tomatoes & black beans in a large pot and bring to a boil.
3. Saute onions, peppers, garlic & seasonings in a dab of oil until onions are clear. Add to pot.
4. Carefully (soup is hot!) blend / puree 2 or more cups of soup mixture. Return blended mixture to pot, mix well & serve hot.
Notes
If you have picky eaters that don’t like “chunks,” blend or puree the whole batch.
We had to ad-lib a couple times, for example, it doesn’t say how to cut the peppers, so I chopped them (also we used both whole peppers instead of half). The other part it doesn’t mention is when to add the zucchini. I added it in step 3 and that worked great.
Here are some photos:
Step 2: 
Step 3: 
combined: 
eat! : 
We ate this soup with a dollop of Tofutti Sour Supreme & some Trader Joe’s Organic tortilla chips. If you make this comment and let us know!
Today we went to Melt and had a wonderful brunch. Shawn got the vegan biscuits & gravy and I got the Rosemary Redskin Mess. Both were delicious and came out very quickly despite being so crowded.
The dining room floor overlooking Fountain Square
We didn’t plan it when a friend of ours invited us downtown to Via Vite but we continued on our vegan pizza vision quest last night. Unsure of what was vegan beyond a side of Bruschetta (which was tasty as well), we had the red-headed Maggie to thank for guiding us through the menu towards one of Via Vite’s wood fired pizzas. All of the pizzas on the menu include meat or cheese (the crust is vegan) so we had to DIY it — again with the unshakable Maggie at our side — with some basil and peperonata.
Even after Maggie’s detailed explanation (did she just give us an insider recipe?) I wasn’t sure what to expect but a stew of red and yellow peppers, onions, vinegar and sugar sure sounded tasty. And tasty it was! A little runny, as I’m sure it normally sits amid cheese, meat and other toppings, but with fork and knife in hand, I dove in. I suppose the next line would be that I dove into the deep end and cracked my skull on the bottom because after being goaded into juuuuust one more piece I was starting to feel a little overstuffed. Overstuffed quickly turned into stomach pain which lasted through the night but I’m not blaming the quality or ingredients, only my stubborn desire to eat delicious pizza.
Honestly, the peperonata pizza was so great that I’m more than willing to put up with some indigestion to have it again, and if that’s not a glowing endorsement (albeit one probably not fit for a slogan) I don’t know what is!
As a vegan, it’s a given that pizza will never be the same again. Pizza without actual cheese is just another entity, which I’m ok getting to know and love. Yes I miss a pizza with a ton of cheese, it was my drug of choice. One thing that has changed for me personally with pizza eating is that eating vegan/vegan-ized pizzas, I want more veggies on it than I used to tolerate. Pizza is a new creature for me without cheese impeding my taste buds.
We have attempted pizzas at home with vegan cheese, but failed because we didn’t change our cooking methods. Next attempt we will cook the pizza without the cheese a majority of the time, then add the cheese and broil it enough to melt a little. Normal method resulted in a soupy mess. It still tasted pretty good, but the mess of it made it hard to eat and left us not feeling so well.
We went to Mac’s Pizza Pub to try their vegan pizza, which was pretty good, but not like a real cheese pizza. It was a bigger bummer when the first pizza they gave us they had accidentally prepared with real cheese. We were eating it thinking “wow, this stuff tastes real…hey wait a minute!” Either way the vegan pizza is a nice option to have in town.
Next try was a Larosa’s pizza without cheese, with the idea that their sauce has an interesting and sweet taste that might carry it. It was good, but needed more taste to it. Next time we will try double sauce. A better selection of vegetables may have helped too. We got onions, roma tomatoes, green peppers and spinach on a thin crust. Here’s the Larosa’s ingredients list in pdf form in case you’re are interested. The thin and hand tossed crusts both do not have dairy/egg, but the pan crust does.
Next I think I will look up Dewey’s pizza ingredients. Their sauce can be a little spicier, which may do well vegan-ized.
If you were a real person and you registered for the site, I apologize, but I deleted all users except Shawn and I. I suspect it was all spammers trying to find a way in.
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