Vegetarian Split Pea Soup

So, back in February, when I posted about the French Split Pea Soup, one of my colleagues commented to me, "What about American split pea soup?"  I took this as a challenge and looked through my cookbooks to find what could be considered an American split pea soup.  In the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook, I found Vegetarian Split Pea Soup and made it on March 1.  Now, the reason I considered this "American," is that according to the description in the cookbook, this recipe is similar to that of Pea Soup Andersen's, a restaurant in the middle of California which does have really good pea soup!

As you can see from the above image, the good thing about this recipe for the grad student is that you can do a lot of the prep work the night before.  I chopped the shallots, carrots, and celery the night before and so only had to throw in the split peas and the spices in the morning before heading off to school.  As you can (somewhat) see from the image on the right, the spices include a bay leaf, thyme, sage, and salt (which I probably didn't put in, but it was a long time ago so it's hard to remember!).  The good thing about this recipe as well for the grad student is that you just use water so you don't have to spend any extra money on chicken or vegetable broth.  You then just stir everything together and cook it for 12-15 hours, which is really good if you're going to have a long day at school.

This is what the soup looked like before I turned it on.

And this is what it looked like after cooking on low for 12-15 hours.

After the soup is done cooking, you remove the bay leaf and puree the soup.  I used my roommate's food processor at the time, but it was awkward and messy to switch the soup from the crock pot to the food processor and back.  I highly recommend an immersion blender (which I do have now, so future pureed soups will be done that way).  You serve the soup with a little bit of cayenne pepper on top.  The cookbook suggests serving it with warm bread or croutons, but I opted not to do this.  Now, I didn't really like this recipe.  It was too watery and there wasn't enough flavor, not thick like split pea soup should be.  So, sorry Kyle, but the French win on this one.

I ended up adding a piece of the pork from my French Split Pea Soup adventure to this and cooking it overnight.  This cooked off the water a bit and the pork added more flavor.  Now, it is very true that perhaps if I had added the salt originally, my results would have been different.  But honestly, I think my evaluation is that I prefer the non-vegetarian version better.  Apologies to all my vegetarian friends.  However, if anyone would like to try the recipe with the salt added, let me know and I'll send it to you and you can either comment with your results or let me know and I'll do an "update" post (or, if you want to write a guest post, I'll be happy to include it here).

So, ultimately, I think that because I recooked the soup, it messed up how many servings I should have gotten out of it.  The recipe says that it makes four to six servings, but I think I only got 4 out of it: one which I ate as the vegetarian  version and then three more that I ate after adding the pork.  But, look at that picture to the left: doesn't that look more thick and yummy than the watery version that I added the ham to above (sorry that the color is a little off in the picture, I was using my cell phone)?  Well, I think so.  I guess my final analysis is that this recipe wasn't that great and I probably won't bother trying to make it again, especially since I have several other split pea soup recipes that I can try.

So, for the sake of recipe analysis, let's pretend like I didn't add the pork so I'll estimate that you'd get about five servings out of this.  Each serving is less than 175 calories (so to make it a meal, you might actually want to have some bread with it, and a salad).  In terms of cost per serving, we already had bay leaves, sage, and cayenne pepper, so my cost per serving, had I followed the recipe in the end, would have only been about $1.72 per serving.  If you had to get all the spices, your costs would increase dramatically (to about $3.50 per serving), but in theory these are spices that you have on hand from previous recipes and such so it's not that expensive to make at all.

Cinnamon Apple Oatmeal

My Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook has a whole chapter titled "From the Porridge Pot."  Back in February, I thought it'd be fun to try out one of the recipes for oatmeal.  Although this is a breakfast item, so different from the other things I review (in that, you won't get a week's worth of dinners out of it), but I actually loved this so much that I was thinking about making it again this week!  I wanted to make this oatmeal, the "Cinnamon Apple Oatmeal," because I had an apple that needed to be used.  The recipe actually says that you can use either an apple or a pear so I actually ended up making this twice because my roommate had a pear that needed to be used.  (All of the pictures in this post, however, are from my initial attempt.)

I used one side of the dual crock pot to make this one because it says that you should use a "small round" slow cooker.  Plus, the recipe says that it only serves 2, so I figured that it would cook better in the smaller pot.  The recipe is pretty easy.  It calls for "old-fashioned rolled oats" or "think-cut rolled oats."  Instead, I found "oven toasted, old fashioned oats" in the grocery store.  You add some brown sugar and cinnamon.  The recipe calls for a "pinch of salt" and then some unsalted butter, but when do I ever buy unsalted butter?  Instead, I just ignored the salt and used salted butter.

Finally, you add the chopped apple or pear.  For the liquid, the recipe says that you should use either water or a combination of water and apple juice.  I'm not sure what the difference in taste with the apple juice-water combo would be because I just used water.  But, what do you expect?  I'm a grad student.  And I know that apple juice is pretty cheap, but what am I going to then do with a whole thing of apple juice?  Ultimately, I decided to save money and just use water.

Now, all of this preparation was done at night before I went to bed and I woke up in the morning to piping hot oatmeal!  (It cooks on low for 7 to 9 hours, so... overnight.)  Now, when I told my fiance that I wanted to make this again, he noted that it might actually be quicker to just make oatmeal in the morning.  And sure, the oats only take about 5 minutes to cook on the stove.  But, it wouldn't be the same.  Sure, you can add brown sugar and cinnamon to your oatmeal after its cooked, but you won't get the fresh fruit blended in in the same way as you do with the crock pot (though the recipe does give you the option to add the fruit in the last 30 minutes of cooking if you prefer it to be fresher and less blended... I liked it blended).

Now, the recipe says that it serves two, but I honestly don't know what kind of appetite they think these two people have in the morning.  I got four servings out of it and although I was initially worried about leftovers (which is why I shared it with my roommate each time), I just zapped them in the microwave and added some skim milk and it was quick and tasty.  A fresher take on instant oatmeal perhaps?  And it's pretty decent for a breakfast.  The serving size I used is about 155 calories, whether you use the pear or the apple.  With half a cup of skim milk, that puts it around 200 calories... a decent start to the morning.  And since the oatmeal was mushy and sticks together, adding the skim milk really made it a bit nicer in my mind.  In terms of cost, I can't image that this would cost much more than $1.00 per serving for anyone.  Most of the items, brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter, are things that you have around the house already (at least I did, though since we just moved, I will have to go out and get brown sugar to make it again).  I just bought the oats, which were only around $3.00 and apples are especially cheap, normally around $1.99/lb or less for the various kinds at my grocery store.

Overall: yummy and cheap.  I'd recommend oatmeal in the crock pot to anyone, especially seeing as I'm planning to make this one again.

Southern-Style Barbecue Green Beans with Bacon

Seriously.  "Southern-Style Barbecue Green Beans with Bacon."  Doesn't that sound like an appropriate side dish for the Fourth of July weekend?  My fiance decided that he wanted to have some of his friends from his nursing program over for a barbecue, so I volunteered to make a side dish.  I thought that I might give baked beans in the crock pot another try, but ultimately decided that green beans + bacon, cooked in barbecue sauce sounded like a good dish to feed nursing students.

This was from the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook, which is quickly becoming one of my favorites (though thanks to bridal shower gifts and such, I now have Italian and Indian slow cooker cookbooks to try... also: how excited am I about this French slow cooker cookbook, due to be released in January 2012).  Since I was planning to go into school to the gym and to work at the library on the day of my fiance's barbecue, we were smart and prepped some of the ingredients the night before.  This recipe is actually set perfectly for a grad student: there's only four steps and if you prep it the night before, and thus eliminate one of the steps, all you have to do the day of is throw everything together in the crock pot.

As you can see from the images, the first step is to cook the bacon and then cook a chopped onion in the remnants of bacon grease.  The step that we skipped is actually the one in between those: "Grease the inside of the slow cooker with some of the bacon drippings."  I thought that it wouldn't be sanitary to leave the grease out in the slow cooker overnight and it wouldn't be smart to refrigerate the slow cooker insert itself, so I decided that since the bacon was going in and we cooked the onion in bacon grease, that would be sufficient.  I also washed all the green beans and snapped off the ends the night before, to make my life easier in the morning.

So, all I had to do when I got up in the morning was to throw the green beans and the onion/bacon mixture (I stored those in the same Tupperware container) and cover it all with barbecue sauce.  In terms of timing, this one is pretty good for an all-day, out-of-the-house cooking, though I think the beans might have been better if they hadn't cooked for as long as they did.  The recipe says to cook them on low for six to seven hours and I found the beans to be a little too limp in the end.

This is what the beans looked like after they were done cooking.

And this is what they looked like after I stirred them... much better, no?

Now, I couldn't even begin to tell you how many servings we got out of this because people just were helping themselves at the barbecue.  I made a double recipe, but a single recipe says that it serves four to six.  So, for the sake of this, let's assume that I got twelve servings total, though I'm sure we got more than that.  So, in terms of cost, I'd estimate this dish to be anywhere from $1.05-$1.25 per serving according to the number of servings estimated by the cookbook.  The range, of course, depends on how cheap certain things are, especially the bacon and the barbecue sauce.  In terms of calories, the big ticket item here is actually the barbecue sauce, making the per serving calorie count about 128.  In reality, it's probably less than that because (a) you don't eat all the barbecue sauce, just the stuff that sticks to the beans and (b) we probably ate smaller servings that the estimated.

So, how was this recipe?  Not bad.  My fiance's assessment is probably what I'm going with: this dish is more barbecue sauce than green beans in terms of taste.  I think that if I ever make it again, I may try diluting the barbecue sauce with some water, going half barbecue sauce and half just water, which may make the taste of the beans stand out a bit more.  I think I'd also probably cook it for less time, so the beans would be crisper and taste more fresh.

Crock-Baked Beets AND Pollo Colorado

Back in January, I posted about making Soy-Sake Asparagus in the crock pot.  At the end of the post, I mentioned that my friend Roopsi had given me the dual crock pot that I had been coveting.  Well, not long after making that post (January 25), I tried it out for the first time, making both a side dish (Crock-Baked Beets) and a main dish (Pollo Colorado) from the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook.  My pair of recipes in this case might seem a little bizarre, but I was looking for two recipes that both cooked all day and both didn't take very many ingredients so I would be able to turn them on before I went to school and also wouldn't have to spend much money.  The cool thing about the dual crock pot, however, is that you can easily do two recipes that cook for different times -- you just have to be able to be home to start the second recipe whenever that is called for.

As usual, I did most of the prep work the night before.  For the beets, this meant that they had to be scrubbed and the stems trimmed to one inch.  The great thing is that I saved the beet greens and cooked them up later after I had finished the beets.  The beets only need to be wrapped in aluminum foil and then placed in the crock pot, so I wrapped them the night before, but waited until the next morning to put them in the crock pot.  For the pollo colorado (a.k.a. chicken in red chile sauce), I only had to chop some onions and peppers.  The recipe says, "If you are going to eat pollo colorado as a stew, chop the onions and peppers into 3/4-inch pieces.  If you are going to use it as an enchilada, burrito or taco filling, slice the onions and peppers."  I wasn't planning to do either of these things, so I chose to slice them, which I did the night before.

That morning, I assembled the crock pots.  The beets were easy because all I needed to do was put the beets that had been wrapped in aluminum foil into the crock pot.  For the chicken, I had to put the sliced vegetables in first.  Putting this recipe together really showed me what the one drawback to the dual crock pot is: each of the pots is only 2.5 quarts (about half the size of my 4 quart crock pot).  I started adding all the vegetables, quickly realizing that the recipe I was making was designed to be cooked in a crock pot at least the size of the red one that I have.  So, I decided to just make half the recipe, figuring that I could just make the other half once I ate all of this one.

After adding the vegetables to the pollo colorado recipe, the only other ingredients are frozen boneless, skinless chicken breast halves and a can of red chile sauce or enchilada sauce.  Now, the cool thing about the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook is that for sauces that might be difficult to find, they often will provide a recipe for making it yourself.  I didn't do that in this case, but the book has a recipe for a basic red chile sauce just in case.

Each of these recipes was able to cook for about the same amount of time.  The beets say to cook for four to six hours on high, while the chicken was to cook for five to seven hours on low.  As you already know if you've read my blog before, I turned the crock pot on when I left the house in the morning and was able to have dinner when I got home that night -- longer than the allotted time according to the recipes, but I've never had a problem with things overcooking.

When these were done cooking, the beets took a little extra work to finish preparing because you have to take the skin off.  An especially fun task when the beets are as hot as they were coming out of the slow cooker!  Then they are sliced and can be served hot with butter or cold with salad dressing (as I did with some of the leftovers.  Overall, I feel the same way about cooking beets in the crock pot as I do about doing baked potatoes in the crock pot: It doesn't feel like the best use of time because they can be cooked quicker getting the same result.  However, there may be times when it actually is the best use of time to cook them in the crock pot.

For the chicken, the recipe says, "Cut [the chicken] into chunks if you are making a stew; slice or shred it if you are going to be filling tortillas."  As you can see from the picture to the right, I just served myself some chicken.  However, I would not recommend this.  Although this recipe would make some great burrito filling, it is too blah on its own.  Now, the pollo colorado recipe says that it serves 4-5.  I only got 4 servings out of it (after making it a second time to use up the vegetables that I had previously cut), but I also purposely selected smaller pieces of chicken because they fit better in the smaller crock pot.  The beets are supposed to serve four, but I tend to give myself big servings of vegetables, so I only got three out of it.

So, each of my servings of beets were about 105 calories and about $2.00.  That's pricey for a side dish, but I also had to search the produce aisle for the fresh beets so it's obvious that they're not all that common here.  Though, I used to buy them at the farmers' market in Berkeley, California when they were in season at a much better price.  The chicken was only about 237 calories per serving (though if you added it into a burrito, the whole dish would have more).  I paid about $4.12 per serving for the chicken dish, but the bulk of that was the large bag of frozen chicken breasts.  Since most of those were leftover I could probably cut the price for that in half in terms of actual use (making it a much more reasonable $2.87 per serving).

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I apologize for missing the blog for so many weeks.  After the semester ended, I was home visiting my parents and although I brought all the information about the recipes to update my blog, I just didn't have an opportunity!  I should be better over the summer... until August when I'm getting married. :)

Slow-Cooked Broccoli Soup with Garlic and Olive Oil

For the first few months of this year, I got on a soup kick with my crock pot, trying out different soups from Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook and The Gourmet Slow Cooker: Simple and Sophisticated Meals from Around the World.  The recipe I made on February 10 was from Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook: Slow-Cooked Broccoli Soup with Garlic and Olive Oil.  The cookbook describes this recipe as an "Italian peasant soup," so I figured it must be cheap to make!

It was also really easy to make because after chopping the broccoli florets and thinly slicing the stems, you just throw all the other ingredients into the slow cooker: olive oil, sliced garlic, fresh thyme (the recipe says you can use fresh or dried, thyme or marjoram -- I chose to use fresh thyme), vegetable or chicken broth, dry white wine, and lemon juice.  Then, you mix it all together and cook on low for five to six hours.  You really can't get any easier than that!

I actually made the soup twice, once with the chicken broth and once with vegetable broth, because I bought too much broccoli the first time.  It ended up being a pretty good soup both times.  Now, after it's done cooking, you're supposed to mash the broccoli against the side, but honestly after I did that once or twice I said, "This is going to take too long, forget it."  It didn't really matter all that much that I hadn't mashed the broccoli.  But, I would like to try this soup with the immersion blender that my fiance and I received as a wedding gift, which the cookbook lists as another option if you want a smoother soup.

Before serving the soup, you season it with salt and pepper to taste and top it with grated Parmesan cheese.  Overall, I really enjoyed this soup, but I found it necessary to add a bunch of the Parmesan cheese to really get a good flavor -- it's a bit bland otherwise.  The other complaint I had is that you don't get enough protein with this meal and even with a large salad (as you see to the right), I found myself still hungry an hour or so after eating this soup.  I think it might be better as an appetizer than as a full meal.

Now, this recipe says that it serves six and I got exactly six servings out of each batch I made.  Using the chicken broth, that comes out to about 238 calories per serving; using the vegetable broth, 215 calories per serving.  I'd also estimate that I added 75-90 calories per serving with the cheese that I added, but since I didn't measure exactly, I can't really tell.  But actually, the largest calorie item is the olive oil!

In terms of cost, since I had many of the ingredients already, this fit really well into my budget.  I already had olive oil, garlic, chicken broth, and lemon on hand, and I had the Parmesan cheese and fresh thyme left over from the Tuscan White Bean Soup.  So, it actually only cost me about $1.46 per serving for the chicken broth version and $2.33 per serving for the vegetable broth version!  Of course, those numbers don't really give an accurate picture of the cost of the soup as a whole.  I'd estimate $3.79 per serving for the chicken broth version and $4.12 per serving for the vegetable broth version!  Overall, not bad on a budget if you're eating this as a meal, but I'd recommend only having it as an appetizer or side.