This time of year there are more tomatoes than I know what to do with, zucchini everywhere, lovely peppers and kale. Chopping it all up and throwing it into a pot is clearly the way forward. This hearty stew, so thick it is more of a stove top casserole, highlights the best of the late summer harvest.

Summer’s Bounty Stew

The Stuff

• 2 cups cooked chickpeas
• 3 medium zucchini, chopped (about 4 cups)
• 6 cloves garlic, minced roughly
• 1 medium onion, sliced into thin petals
• 1 poblano pepper, diced fine
• 2 bunches of kale, stemmed and torn into small pieces
• 2 pounds of fresh tomatoes, chopped into pieces of varying size (a nice mix of large and rather small bits is perfect)
• 1 t dried oregano
• 1 t dried basil
• 1 t dried marjoram
• ½ t dried rosemary, rubbed together in your palm to break it up a little
• ⅓ c nutritional yeast
• 1 t sweet paprika
• freshly ground black pepper, to taste

The Making

Heat a 4 qt sauce pan or cast iron dutch oven on medium-high (if using cast iron, reduce to medium-low once the pot is hot).

Lightly spray the pot with canola oil. Saute onion until it begins to brown, about 5-7 minutes. Add garlic and continue to saute another 3-5 minutes; onions will begin to caramelize. Add poblano pepper and saute for another 5 minutes. Add in zucchini, chickpeas, and tomatoes.

Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes, until zucchini is tender. Add kale and all the herbs and spices then simmer until kale has softened, another 5 minutes.

Serve with some crusty bread or with quinoa.

Makes 3+ quarts of very tasty stew.

Notes:

• Yes, fresh herbs would totally rock. I just didn’t have any on hand. Next year we’ll have an herb garden going. I’d use up to a tablespoon of each herb, fresh. Parsley would be a great addition.
• This recipe reminds me a lot of the Japanese-inspired winter stew I make, which uses canned tomatoes. They would work perfectly well in this recipe, however, my main goal was to use up some of the pounds and pounds of fresh tomatoes from our garden.
• I use a mix of heirloom tomatoes, because that’s what we grow in the garden. Don’t worry if these are far too expensive to consider — just use any fresh tomatoes or go ahead and used canned, diced tomatoes.
• You could replace the sweet paprika with smoked paprika and it would be delicious. I think I sometimes go a little crazy with the smoked paprika so I skipped it this time.
• Want a spicier stew? Replace the paprika with cayenne and add a ½ teaspoon dried chili flakes – this would be fantastic too!

Nasty Flash + Ugly Counters

By the bye — check out the much better picture I used at the top of this post! Christie gave me a light tent set for my birthday so I can start taking better pictures of my food and art work. I still have a lot to learn about this kind of photography, but even the first attempt with the light tent on the picture above is so much better! For proof take a look at the best possible picture I was able to take at night in my kitchen.

Organics to You has been bringing us fresh fava beans for a few weeks now and I’ve repeatedly put them into a green bag in the fridge until I figure out what to do with this new produce. Tonight I finally decided to cook up the pile of them as inspired by a recipe I found online for an Umbrian fava bean stew, Scafata. I didn’t have the ingredients exactly so I winged it quite a bit (so no exact recipe, just technique follows).

The result was very tasty! Here’s a rough outline of what I used and did:

Roughly 3 pounds of unshelled, fresh Favas were used in the dish. I combined them with a small onion, 3 cloves of garlic, a small bunch of green garlic spears, a bulb of fennel, and 2 large stalks of celery. The onion was sauteed in olive oil along with the bulb garlic, then the celery, fennel, green garlic and the shelled beans. Once they all got going nicely and the fennel was softened a little I layered the chopped kale on top then topped it with a lid.

Once the kale began to wilt a little I added some thinly sliced, fresh sage and basil. I tossed everything together carefully to get the kale and herbs down into the rest of the veggies, then covered again. I added a splash of Vinho Verde we had on hand since it seemed like a little more moisture would help and covered again.

After the kale had fully softened I added some dried dill and marjoram (didn’t have fresh, seems like thyme would be nice too) as well as salt and pepper. At this time I diced up 3 tomatoes and tossed them in. Given that the original recipe comes for Italy I decided to add some champagne vinegar as well as some balsamic & fig vinegar.

Simmer on low until the outside of the beans was tender – total cooking time was a little over an hour since it takes a while for the skins of the fresh favas to get tender. I served this with some garlic/pepper tempeh braised with balsamic vinegar.

Totally delicious and I’ll certainly make again!

More Food Porn – really, this is just my way of gloating about something delicious I made so I can figure out the recipe later. Is that obvious?

Tonight was a discussion at the Dharma Center and we include some potluck food to share for our dinner. I’ve been trying to make something fairly hearty so we don’t end up feeling hungry during meditation afterward. Plus if no one else remembers to bring anything vegan Christie and I have something for us.

She made chocolate chip cookies earlier today. I was in charge of “dinner”.

First was to chop up all the cucumbers in the fridge and add in some vinegar. This was really was to get them out of the fridge to make way for the 1 “boothy blonde”, 1 suyo, and 7 lemon cucumbers that Chrsitie picked yesterday!

For the real meal I thought of using the last of the leftover red qunioa. In the afternoon I grilled up all the summer squash from the garden on the cast iron, let it cool and diced it up. In went thinly chopped up Italian parsley and the last of the slightly limp looking basil.

I sauteed half a sweet onion and diced tempeh, added a little red bell pepper, and when that was all fried up nicely I roughly chopped up a large, over-ripe, heirloom tomato the neighbor had brought over yesterday. This immediately turned into a thin sauce coating the temepeh. All of this went right into the qunioa, squash and herbs.

For a dressing some balsamic and white wine vinegars whisked up with raw tahini, rice milk, and a little whole-grain mustard.

Yummy!  I should let her post about it!  Lots of Trader Joe’s stuff in tonight’s dinner!  I believe everything came from TJ’s unless it came from the garden.