Moroccan Carrot Soup

Generally speaking, I like my soups straight-forward and savory. Salt and pepper please. I have such a carrot soup on here. It's a carrot soup for carrot lovers because it is simple and, well, carroty. I've tried several other carrot soups that sound and look divine (ginger carrot soup, cardamom carrot soup, etc.) and they've been fine, but they just haven't been my cup of soup (ha ha--how hilarious am I?) Consequently, I wasn't sure if I would like this new recipe at all. It's chock full of spices (and they're weirdish ones, people) and it uses--gasp--a little honey. Usually, this is my veggie soup red flag. Even among all those squash soups of autumn--you know the ones--they use a little sugar and some cinnamon or whatever--I just can't quite get into them. If I'm going to have sweet vegetables, then I need you to pass the zucchini bread or pumpkin pie. This soup also uses coconut milk. Now I do love me some coconut milk. But again in soups (except a nice Thai soup of course) I like it, but I still usually prefer to go the old fashioned heavy cream route.

The point is, I wasn't sure if I was going to like this soup. But I super super soup did (sorry--been watching too much children's programming apparently). The combination of the carrot and the foreign-ish spices and the coconut just rocked it. An absolutely perfect combo.

Moroccan Carrot Soup
adapted from This Gal Cooks
Serves 4
prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 20-25 minutes
Cost: $2.65
carrots: .75, pepper: .15, onion: .10,  coconut milk: 1.00, chicken stock: .35, spices: .30

1 Tbsp olive oil
1 small red pepper, chopped
5 average carrots, chopped
1/2 C onion, chopped (I used half a small onion--however much that was)
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 C chicken stock (or veggie stock)
1 C coconut milk
1 Tbsp honey
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 Tbsp ground coriander
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground turmeric
salt to taste

Heat oil in large pot. Add onion, red pepper, and carrots. Cook for 5-7 minutes. Add garlic. Cook one minute. Add spices and cook another minute.

Add 1 1/2 C chicken stock. Cook for 10-20 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.

Put in blender and blend with remaining 1/2 C stock, coconut milk, and honey (Note: don't forget the honey--it makes this recipe sing. I forgot it at first and it was fine when I tasted it, but when I added it, then it became awesomeness).

Reheat a bit if necessary.

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Carrot Cauliflower Sandwiches

Cheap Eat Challenge: Watch as our family of 6 tries really hard to eat on $6/day.

What? You don't see your children galloping to the table when you call, "The carrot cauliflower sandwiches are ready, dears." (Because I totally know you call your babies 'dears' on a regular basis, don't you?)

As for galloping, I've got to tell you, they probably won't. They'll most likely compare the scent of the cooked cauliflower to poop; even your husband will chime in on that one (and let's face it, it does have a slightly shall we say gassy smell when cooked). They'll probably make gagging noises and maybe even make a show of going into the bathroom to "barf." I assure you that this is because they hold your skill as a homemaker in the utmost regard. Okay, well, I don't assure you of that. But I will assure you of this: You should make this anyway because it's very very good and pretty darn nutritious, and even if you end up eating it all by your lonely for lunch one day (or over the course of a couple days), you won't really mind because that means more for you. Amen and amen.

I first discovered this sandwich when writing an article on child care while in graduate school. I went to a woman's house to observe her child care and guess what was on the menu for lunch (and yes, her little dears ate it). She made hers like grilled cheese--she used two pieces of buttered bread, which she toasted (with the filling between) on a skillet. It's crazy wicked good this way, but sometimes I'm not hungry enough for that much at lunch. I usually have mine open faced on one piece of toast, and I find this sandwich SPECTACULAR with a slice of sharp cheddar underneath the veggie filling. I've made this sandwich for several (adult) loved ones. Everyone's a bit skeptical at first (it's like sort of like telling your mother your fiance is named Bertha--sure, she might be sweet and petite and skinny as a nail, but until you get to know her, that name will just trip you up). But everyone who has eaten it has enjoyed it.

Carrot Cauliflower Sandwiches
Serves 6-8
Prep time: 5-10 minutes
Cook Time: 15-20 minutes
Cost: $1.45
(cauliflower: 1.50, carrots: 35, mayo: .05, bread: .05)

1 small head cauliflower
6 medium carrots (I'm thinking about 1/2 pound)
2/3 C mayo
salt and pepper to taste
toast to eat it on (I like it best with sourdough)
slices cheddar cheese (option)

Steam or boil the cauliflower and carrots. Steaming takes a bit longer, but is the healthiest. If you boil them, just use about 1 inch of water, cover the pot, and keep an eye on it just in case the water gets low. I usually cut the stalk off the cauliflower, but otherwise leave it as a head and then dice the carrots.

Steam or boil them until they are tender enough to be mashed with a fork, but not so tender that they will turn into paste when you mash them. (You should be able to cut right into the head of cauliflower with a fork and have it break apart, but it shouldn't feel like cutting soft butter.) For perfectly perfect results, you can cook the cauliflower and carrots in different pans, but that's too much hassle for me, so I just check to make sure one or the other isn't getting too soft. If it is, I take that one out and leave the other to cook longer.

Drain off liquid and mash the carrots and cauliflower with a fork.

(You'll note I cut up my cauliflower here. It cooked a little too fast and came out a little too mushy. The world didn't end, but I wish I'd left it as a head or as bigger chunks.)

Add mayonnaise, beginning with just 1/3 C. If you want more, keep adding it until it's a consistency you like.

Add salt and pepper. Don't skip this step. This needs some salt to make it work. Give it a couple shakes until it's singing your song.

Eat on toast with cheese. Or put between two pieces of bread. Butter the bread and heat on a skillet as you would grilled cheese. (That'll sing your song.) It's also great on Wheat Thins. It'll keep in the fridge for a good week, although I always love it the most right out of the pan.

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Carrot Cake with the Best Cream Cheese Frosting Ever

Cheap Eat Challenge: Watch as our family of 6 eats on $6/day.

With some updated pictures.

(Here's the old pic for old time's sake.)

Let's get one thing straight. Carrot cake is not a health food. But it is one of those foods you can tell yourself is healthier. Especially if you sub out a cup of the white flour for a cup of the wheat flour and serve it as muffins at a brunch.

Now, telling yourself something is healthy when it is only marginally healthier is certainly not the best habit. It probably won't help your waistline at all or aid in any of your New Year's resolutions (huh, what are those, it's, like, March, right?). But every once in a while, it is kind of fun. So while I won't encourage you to eat this for breakfast (I'm quite sure I never have), it's plenty fun to eat for dessert. So if a three-layer cake on a Tuesday night just seems a little wrong to you, just think Vitamin A; and sub out a cup of the white flour for the wheat if you must (which, incidentally, gives it a bit of earthiness I rather enjoy--all undeserved justifications aside).

The other nice thing about carrot cake, and yet another reason you can eat it on a Tuesday night if you darned well please is that, aside from the carrot shredding, it's an absolute breeze to put together (you don't even need to break out the beaters, just a bowl and a spoon). I shred my carrots in the food processor, which makes it a breeze for me all around.

And if you're still not convinced, let me say this: I know the best cream cheese frosting recipe ever. So there. Make it.

Carrot Cake
adapted from Blue Ribbon Recipes
Serves: many (probably about 30)
Prep time: 10 minutes (with food processor)
Cook time: 25 minutes
Cost: $1.90 (not bad for 3 layers)
(carrots: .75, oil: .24, sugar: .32, eggs: .40, flour: .18, other stuff: .01)

1 1/2 C oil
2 C sugar
4 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 C flour
3 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
3 C grated carrots (just a bit shy of 1 lb)

Heat oven to 325. Grease three 9-inch pans and put wax paper on the bottoms, then grease again.

Mix oil and sugar. Mix in eggs and vanilla.

Sift flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt. Mix it into the creamed mixture. Add the carrots, a bit at a time so as to avoid getting a huge clump of them somewhere (your kids will never go for that).

Pour batter evenly into the cake pans. The batter will be shallow. I suppose you could probably get it into two pans (though I can't 100% guarantee that), but I like to have the extra frosting. I guess I'm a bit of a frosting lush. Don't tell, okay.

Bake for 22-25 minutes or until a fork comes out clean. Let cool for 10 minutes in the pans and then turn out on a rack (or some parchment paper or waxed paper on your counter top if you don't have a rack). Let cool completely and then frost.

Cream Cheese Frosting
from The New Best Recipe Cookbook (with an orange cream cheese adaptation from me)
enough for 3 layers
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cost: 3.10
(cream cheese: 2.20, sugar: .40, butter: .70)

2 packages of cream cheese (16 oz. total), softened
10 Tbsp butter, softened
2 Tbsp sour cream
2 1/2 C powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Beat together cream cheese, butter, and sour cream. Add vanilla. Beat in powdered sugar.

An option for Orange Cream Cheese Frosting:

Add the zest from one small orange and 2-3 Tbsp of orange juice to make orange cream cheese frosting.

PRINTABLE RECIPE

P.S. I didn't eat it for breakfast (I swear; no crosses count). I took it to my church party.

Citrus Carrot Juice

Cheap Eat Challenge Count Down: 16 days

I think it's time for a little detoxification.

I know that it seems we just sit around here inhaling sugar and cocoa and almond paste all day. But we actually do eat many healthy things. We eat, or at least put on the table to be eaten, spinach potato soup. We eat winter smoothies. And when the citrus goes on sale, as it has recently done, we make juice.

I know what you're thinking: Homemade juice isn't cheap. Which, compared to some store bought juice or water, is certainly true. First of all, you're saying, there's the juicer. And those things can be pricey. Secondly, there's the produce, some of which goes unused in the making of juices.

Now, allow me to defend myself. And perhaps make an argument for homemade juices as well.

First of all, while homemade juice is expensive compared to some store bought juices or water, it's quite cheap compared to soda or bottled water or Welch's or any juice you buy in the refregerated section and not the frozen juice section.

Secondly, juicer's can be pricey--very pricey. But they needn't be, especially for our humble purposes of just getting an added burst of nutrition. I got mine off of freecycle from the nicest lady ever. It's a Juiceman II juicer and not the greatest juicer in the world, but it gets the job done. My brother and sister-in-law love their Black and Decker juicer, which cost them $50 last winter from WalMart. They claim to get twice as much juice from their fruits/veggies as I do from mine and I believe them. Furthermore, you can get a simple citrus juicer for cheap and that can give you a nice dose of all the nice citrus fruits that are in season this time of year. I see these things at yard sales all the time. And even though they're only good for citrus, they're a heck of a lot easier to clean than the other juicers.

Thirdly, citrus fruits are on sale at this time of year, sometimes for very very cheap. I got 4 lb or oranges for $1.49 this week from Aldi. Grapefruit are well under $1/lb as well. And carrots are usually cheap. I made about 12 oz of juice yesterday for about $.50. People often spend that or double that on a soda or bottled water without thinking twice.

Of course, you may also be asking, Why Juice? (And, yes, you are definitely asking it with capital letters.) This is a good question. In our family, there are many answers.

First, it's a great way to use produce that you realize isn't very good when you bring it home--that bag of oranges that looked so promising, those apples that are all bruised, the grapefruit you bought from Sam's that your kids don't like and that you can't finish off before it goes bad. Juicers are a great way to use the orange you may or may not have given your baby to play with one morning when you were busy in combination with that apple that your toddler only half ate. This was one of my main reasons for getting a juicer and also a reason I didn't want to spend a lot on mine. I wasn't sure how much I'd use it.

Secondly, my husband and kids have a little problem getting enough fruits and vegetables in their diets. But they like juice and it's easy to give them a glass and nice to know that they're getting a good punch of raw fruits (and sometimes veggies depending on how good I am at getting that stuff in). In the summer we make smoothies with summer fruits, but in the winter those are expensive and not very good. Juicing seems the logical way to fill that gap.

Thirdly, there's a very convincing argument for juicing. It goes like this: Some nutrients are bound up in the fibers of fruits and vegetables. Thus, when you eat the fruits and vegetables whole, they are not absorbed, but rather travel through your digestive track with the undigestible fibers. When you juice, you remove the valuable vitamins, minerals, and enzymes from the produce and absorb 100% of it. The statistic I kept finding on the Internet was that if you ate a carrot, you'd get about 1% of the beta carotene, but if you juiced it you'd get 100%. I think those numbers are a little sketchy, since most of us do spend a couple of minutes chewing our carrots, but the principle (that fiber can inhibit the absorption of some vitamins, etc.) seems sound to me. Furthermore when you juice you get the vitamins, minerals, and enzymes into your system faster since there's no fiber to work through. By the way, most of the juicing advocates are not saying to do away with fiber completely. They are only saying that it can inhibit the absorption of some vitamins, etc. and that therefore juicing is a very good addition to a healthy diet.

And as a last question, Why Not Buy Cheap Juice From the Store?

First, it has been pasteurized and stored. Heating the juice makes it no longer a raw food. That means the enzymes get destroyed and that the food simply isn't as nutritious as it would have been.

Secondly, it has additives/preservatives.

Thirdly, sometimes sugar is added. And there are those who believe that even in juices that claim to be 100% fruit juice, there is a use of extra sugars from the fruits to make it sweeter. So, yes, it's 100% from fruit, but they've used extra fruit sugars to sweeten it. I don't know if it's true, but I certainly wouldn't put it past the food industry.

Fourth, the the homemade stuff tastes something awesome.

Now, before we get to the juice recipe, which is itself very simple and can be jimmied in 1000's of ways, let me give a few tips for juicing and using the refuse.

1. Drink your juice quickly. Homemade juice oxidizes quickly, meaning the enzymes and nutrients start to die. The sooner you drink it, the better.

2. Clean your juicer quickly. The stuff will harden on the little bitty holes and the stickiness with be there forevermore. If you don't have time to clean it immediately, soak it till you do.

3. You can use the refuse in soups or smoothies. I personally don't like it in smoothies as I miss the juicy stuff. But the carrot juice refuse is good in soups.

4. Compost it. This is what I do. It breaks down quickly. If you have even a small garden, you can put it in a large rubbermaid bin outside and compost it in that.

And now for the recipe.

Citrus Carrot Juice
Serves 1

1 orange, peeled
1 grapefruit, peeled
1 carrot

Feed them into your juicer and drink up.

My sister-in-law makes great juice. She adds a few strawberries and about a cup of spinach. If I'd had spinach I would have added it too, but strawberries are too rich for my blood at this time of year.

Only have a citrus juicer, skip the carrots. You're kids will like it better that way anyway:).

PRINTABLE RECIPE