Vegan black bean soup and wheat bread

Vegan black bean soup

Last night I attempted vegan dinner number 1: Black bean soup and wheat bread. I also attempted vegan grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s, there was a lot of stopping the grocery cart and reading through ingredients and asking employees if they thought an item was vegan or not. I failed when I tried their samples, I looked at the box of crackers and saw that they were vegan, the roasted red pepper soup they had out on the other hand, not vegan. My bad! At least I’m trying though. I stocked up on multi-grain crackers, water crackers, soy mozzarella (which has a really bad aftertaste), soy chocolate sorbet (they didn’t have coconut ice cream) and TJ’s very own “Monkey business” mix which contains banana chips, cooca nibs, dried cranberries and peanuts. I tried my best to make sure everything was vegan, but they didn’t always have the “V” on the packaging, so I wasn’t sure. Please let me know if you see something that’s wrong!

When we finally made it home last night, I started on the wheat bread recipe that I got off of vegweb.com.

Ingredients:

• 3 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 tablespoon salt
• 1 (1/4 ounce) package dry yeast
• 1 2/3 cups warm water

Turn oven to 400 degrees and grease a loaf pan. Mix together all the dry ingredients then add in the water. I used a spoon which was fast, easy and clean. Pour the batter into the loaf pan and cover with a towel or greased plastic wrap (I put olive oil on one side of the plastic wrap and put that over the dough). Let rise for one hour or until it’s double its size. Back for about 25 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

Fast and easy dough!

You can also add a bit of cinnamon into some raisins into the dough to make a sweet bread. After tasting the bread, I definitely recommend doing this as the bread is a bit dense and I think would make a better breakfast bread than everyday use bread.

While the dough was rising, I started in on the Vegan Black Bean Soup from allrecipes.com. As always, Dan and I embellished and added whatever we thought would make the soup tastier. Please take note, this recipe uses FOUR cans of black beans, not the ONE I had mis-read… And caused there to be panic and a trip to the over-priced convenient store downstairs.

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 large onion
• 4 stalk celery
• 2 carrot
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 red bell pepper
• 1/2 cup crimini mushrooms
• 2 1/2 tablespoons chili powder
• 2 tablespoon ground cumin
• Salt and black pepper to taste
• Red pepper flakes to taste
• 4 cups vegetable broth
• 4 (15 ounce) cans black beans
• 1bag frozen roasted corn
• 1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes

Veggies

Chop up celery, carrots, garlic, red bell pepper and mushrooms, then add to a large pot and sauté with olive oil for about 5 minutes on medium-high heat. Stir in chili powder, cumin and black pepper for one minute. Add 2 cans black beans and the corn and bring to boil.

Sauteed veggies

In a food processor, mix 2 cans of black beans and tomatoes until smooth. Add it into the soup mixture and bring to a boil. Salt and pepper to taste. We used low-sodium vegetable broth, so we ended up needing to salt the soup.

Mmmmmm

We ate it with some TJ’s sourdough bread and salad, as the wheat bread was still baking. Dan added some cheese and sour cream to his…

Not so vegan black bean soup

Tada! Fast & Easy wheat bread

The soup turned out really well, though I had to continue to add seasoning to it until I thought it tasted right. The bread was alright, like I mentioned above, it is a bit dense and I think should only be eaten when accompanied with something. The pot of soup we made is HUGE, so I have a feeling I’ll be eating that for the next week. Though I may freeze it and use it for back-up-lunch when I run out of food! Hopefully this weekend will involved baking some vegan cookies!