Tag Archives: Vegetarian

Avocado, Carrots, Lunch, Quick, Vegetarian

California veggie melt sandwich

California veggie melt sandwich on alickofsalt.com

Veggie melt sandwich with crushed avocado, handcrushed pesto, melted cheese, grated carrots, tomato, baby kale, and sprouts, aka the most Californian sandwich that ever existed. This is inspired by a sandwich I used to get at Cafe Literati in Los Angeles before they stopped making it. It was served with homemade potato chips on the side. I eat it with Kettle unsalted chips or purple heirloom chips.

This would be perfect in a panini press. I don’t have one, so the instructions are for making it in a toaster oven. Since the vegetables don’t need to be warmed, I split up which ingredients I heat up. But I do have the other ingredients ready so I can compile the sandwich quickly and enjoy it warm. If you have a panini press, compile the whole sandwich before pressing.

For those on low-sodium diets, my recipe for low-sodium bread yields about 3 normal-sized loaves. I’ve been working on a recipe that yields exactly one loaf but just using 1/3 of the ingredients from the recipe I posted doesn’t work as well as I expected, and neither does doubling pizza dough recipe so I’m still perfecting it. Pictured here is a trial of a light whole wheat bread with added sesame seeds. This picky eater thinks it came out a bit dense.

If you can’t be bothered to make your own bread (or if it’s too hot!) get bread with the lowest sodium content you can find that isn’t pre-sliced and slice it into thin slices. The serving size on the packages is listed for about 1/8 of a loaf so thinner slices make a big difference.

Lately I have been reheating bread I buy in store and it is the best! Heat the loaf directly on the oven rack for 5-8 minutes at 400°F, transfer onto a cooling rack and wait at least 5 minutes for it to cool before slicing, and then enjoy crusty, fresh-tasting bread!

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Beans, Carrots, Chickpeas, Corn, Dinner, Legumes, Lunch, Pepper, Vegan, Vegetables, Vegetarian, Zucchini

Vegan chili

Vegan chili

This vegan chili is very filling and quickly made its way into our rotation of favorite dinners. It’s got protein from the beans and chickpeas, lots of vegetable and lots of spices. It’s very tasty and sort of sweet and doesn’t give you that heavy feeling some chili can. We get three dinners out of one batch so it’s a lifesaver during crunch time.

The recipe is based on the vegetarian chili recipe from Archie Moore’s, a small chain of American-style restaurants around New Haven. Most people go there for their wings but I almost always got a bowl of veggie chili. This is a vegan replica of that, the only missing ingredient being shredded cheddar cheese used as a topping. I eat the chili with tortilla chips so I find it filling enough without the cheese and don’t really miss it, but (vegan) cheddar cheese can be added as a topping. I like this adapted recipe so much, I was not even tempted to go back for the original the last time I visited New Haven.

I use a large 7.5 quart (7 liter) pot to cook the chili and it is much too big. The second largest pot I have, however, is 3.2 quarts (3 liters) and wouldn’t give me enough room to stir. A pot of any size in between should work well.

It takes a while to get all of the ingredients ready. To cut down on prep time, I get the onion, garlic, spices, broth, and tomato sauce ready before I begin and I prepare the rest of the ingredients while cooking. I chop up the carrot while the onion is cooking, I open the remaining cans while the sauce is cooking, and I chop up the remaining vegetables while the sauce with the legumes and corn are cooking. The zucchini and peppers do overcook when the chili is reheated, so if you’re making ahead, add them in when reheating, and simmer them for 15 minutes before eating.

My absolute favorite tortilla chips for this chili are multigrain scoops. They’re little edible spoons! And there’s something about the multigrain that makes the chili taste even heartier and tastier. These chips are very hard to find in my neighborhood so I order them online and sometimes they arrive in good condition and sometimes they arrive mostly crushed, so I don’t always get my first choice. Regular scoops taste too salty for me so my second choice is tortilla chips that are made in store in our grocery store. They’re thick enough to allow me to scoop up the chili, don’t have much salt, are very inexpensive, and remind me of homemade tortilla chips. Homemade tortilla chips are fairly easy to make from corn tortillas if you cut some tortillas up into triangle shapes and they are so, so good warm. But you have to have the patience and/or tools to fry them. I, for one, have never had this with homemade tortilla chips.

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Berries, Blackberries, Breakfast, Brunch, Fruit, Nuts, Pancakes, Peaches, Pecans, Quick, Raspberries, Vegetarian

Dutch baby with summer fruit, pecans, and Nutella

Dutch baby with summer fruit, pecans, and Nutella

Summer has come and gone and now that our apartment no longer turns into a sauna everyday, I have free rein over the oven again, which means that I can restart my tradition of weekly dutch babies. It has been a little over two years since I posted my first recipe on here and two years later, my dutch baby obsession is still going strong. This one is large enough to share, unlike the first one, which has not served two people since we got our larger cast iron pan.

When we’re feeling fancy, our favorite toppings are summer fruit and Nutella. I sometimes add chopped pecans to the dough, but I’m not always in the mood for them. I have also made a few changes to my technique. I don’t cook the fruit in the oven anymore. Instead, I prepare it while the oven is preheating, put it in little porcelain bowls, and place the bowls on the warm potion of the stovetop until the dutch baby is ready to come out of the oven. This warms the fruit up a little bit. If the fruit is not very ripe, I also sprinkle some powdered sugar on it to sweeten it up a bit. The Nutella goes in a little porcelain bowl as well because my stovetop gets warm enough that it would melt the plastic jar if I tried to heat it up directly. I learned this the hard way, by mutilating our immersion blender.

The dutch baby lessons I’ve learned since my first post is that it’s a pretty failproof recipe as long as I use whole milk, and that it absolutely has to be eaten right away. If you don’t eat it right away, my obsession with this pancake will baffle you, as it baffles me the few times it ends up cooling on me before I can dig in. So if the person you’re sharing it with ends up needing to do their bathroom activities as soon as the dutch baby is ready to come out of the oven — does this happen in other families or just ours? — then turn off the oven and keep the dutch baby in there until they’re back because slightly burnt dutch baby is better than cold dutch baby, trust me.

Also, if you’re feeling lazy and can’t be bothered with the fruit or pecans, it is still delicious served the traditional way, with just the powdered sugar, some drizzles of freshly squeezed lemon juice, and maybe some maple syrup.

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Asparagus, Dinner, Leeks, Legumes, Lentils, Lunch, potatoes, Quick, Salad, Side salad, Vegan, Vegetarian

Warm potato salad with lentils, asparagus, and caramelized leeks

Warm potato salad with lentils, asparagus, and caramelized leeks

Salads make for great meals in the summer, especially ones that don’t require you to heat up your oven, like this one. Fingerling potatoes are still in season, and the colorful ones look great in this filling and accidentally-vegan salad. If you can’t find fingerling potatoes, new potatoes are also nice but really, any kind of potato works; just be sure to mind the cooking time. Some hints about modifications and serving the salad as a side can be found in the Tips section below.

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Breakfast, Brunch, Chickpeas, Dinner, Eggs, Lunch, Quick, Vegetarian

Poached Eggs in Tomato Sauce with Chickpeas and Feta (Shakshuka)

Poached Eggs in Tomato Sauce with Chickpeas and Feta (Shakshuka)

This poached egg, tomato, and feta dish is quick and easy to make, tasty, and hearty enough to be breakfast, brunch, lunch, or even dinner. We usually only poach as many eggs as we eat on the day we make it and save the rest to reheat and serve with fried eggs. This shakshuka is slightly spicy. For a bit more spice, I would use either two jalapeños or increase the chili powder to 1/2 teaspoon (2.5 mL). Serve with good bread or warmed pita or tortilla.

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Avocado, Beans, Dinner, Legumes, Lunch, Mushrooms, Quick, Vegan, Vegetarian

Black bean, mushroom, and avocado tacos

Tacos were actually our first successful home-cooked low-sodium meal two years ago. We licked our fingers clean and rubbed our bellies and patted ourselves on the back and have been making some version of them every one to two weeks since. This version is vegetarian and has our favorite source of vegetarian protein, black beans. It can easily be made vegan if you use vegan cheese or skip the cheese altogether.

We always use corn tortillas; they have much less sodium than flour tortillas. I prefer hard shell tacos and I fry mine in a pan with a little bit of oil. I have yet to perfect my method — I never seem to get the temperature and time ratio right — but they’re still always better and less likely to fall apart than store-bought hard shell tacos, even when I accidentally dry them out. The only constant I’ve noticed is that the fresher they are, the less likely I am to screw them up. My husband toasts his tortillas in the toaster oven for a couple of minutes. Check the tips section for more explicit instructions on how I heat them up.

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Breakfast, Brunch, Farro, Grains, Lunch, Vegetables, Vegetarian, Zucchini

Zucchini farro fritters with a fried egg

Today marks the two-year anniversary anniversary of the beginning of my partner’s dietary restrictions and of our low-sodium cooking adventures. To celebrate, I’ve returned from my unannounced and unexpectedly long hiatus with a brunch recipe for zucchini farro fritters. Not the most celebratory of dishes, I know, but it will have to do.

We’ve made this recipe a couple of times. More often than not, we top the fritters with a fried egg and serve them with bread on the side. Since it’s just the two of us and this picky eater gets sick of eating the same thing the next day, we’ve also turned the remaining patty mixture into a stir-fry. If you have yet to master the art of patty-making, I very much feel your pain (as this picture, out of which I cropped most of the messiness, may suggest), and would not discourage you from making the patty mixture into a stir-fry right away. The mixture shrinks while it’s cooking. We start out with 4-inch patties which then shrink to a size that still fits a large fried egg. We don’t use any added salt so they turn out slightly sweet. If your diet allows it, instructions for how to incorporate salt into the fritters are included in the tips section.

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Avocado, Barley, Bowl, Brunch, Grains, Lunch, Nuts, Pecans, Vegetarian

Avocado and pecan barley bowl with yogurt sauce

Avocado and pecan barley bowl with yogurt sauce

Today was arugula harvest day. We got some arugula starters a while ago and planted them on our balcony. We didn’t have a big enough yield for a salad, so we made this barley bowl instead.

This recipe has a higher amount of sodium than other recipes posted here. I’ve estimated the approximate sodium intake to be 337 mg per serving given the ingredients I used. Check the tips below for information on how this amount was calculated and suggestions on how to further reduce the sodium in this recipe if needed.

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Dinner, Figs, Fruit, Grains, Lunch, Pomegranate, Quick, Quinoa, Salad, Vegan, Vegetarian

Baby kale autumn salad with figs and pomegranate

Baby kale autumn salad with figs and pomegranate

Here is a seasonal recipe combining the last of the summer fruit season with the beginning of the winter one. I really like the sweetness the ripe figs add to this salad but if you’re unlucky enough to live in a place where figs are no longer available, you can add some fig jam to the dressing or just skip the figs altogether.

The main sources of protein in this salad are the quinoa and pecans. I try to time it so that both the quinoa and the pecans are still warm by the time they go in the salad. We prep the fruit and vegetables while the quinoa is on the stove, the pecans go in to the oven just before the quinoa is ready to rest and we toss and dress the salad as the pecans cool.

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Chickpeas, Dinner, Legumes, Lunch, Quick, Salad, Vegan, Vegetarian

Crisped chickpeas and arugula salad

Crisped chickpeas and arugula salad

One of our quick, go-to meals when we’re feeling lazy is some version of this salad. This particular version is vegan. Its large amount of protein from the chickpeas and sunflower seed kernels should satisfy omnivores as well. We add just a simple dressing and we don’t add a lot of it. The cherry tomatoes, ripe avocado, and grated carrot and beet add a lot of flavor on their own.

We add a whole can of chickpeas because we never remember to use the rest of the chickpeas when we use only half. But it’s really quite a lot of chickpeas. If you soak your own or if you’re better at remembering to use the things that end up in your fridge, you could easily halve the amount in the recipe and still have a satisfying meal.

We prepare everything that goes in the salad while the oven is preheating and while the chickpeas are in the oven so the salad is pretty much ready to eat by the time the chickpeas are ready to come out of the oven.

This recipe, too, has in part been adapted from my cooking bible, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. The crisped chickpeas are adapted from the book and their recipe is also available on the Smitten Kitchen blog.

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