Drat this working for a living all to heck.

1 package peeled chestnuts, either halved or quartered
1 parsnip, peeled and chopped bite size
2 (or so) carrots, peeled and coined
10 to 15 white mushrooms, quartered
1 cooking onion, peeled and diced
sprigs of fresh thyme
bay leaf
butter and/or olive oil
water and/or stock and/or wine and/or liquid that is alluring
dash(es) of yeasty flavouring like Magi

Saute onion in fat(s). Add carrots and parsnip and cook until starting to soften. Add thyme sprigs (don't worry about picking off the leaves - after the soup has become soup you will be able to pick out the sadly denuded little twigs before serving). Add bay leaf. Add mushrooms and cook until starting to soften. Add chestnuts. Add liquid and bring to a boil. Immediately reduce heat to simmer, and simmer for at least 15 minutes - longer is better. Taste and add yeasty flavouring (or worcestershire sauce, or other savoury flavouring).

This soup is usually finished with a grating of parmesan cheese, but it is not needed. Some kind of crusty bready thing will be missed if not substituted with something. (Ooo - I bet cornbread would be good.)
How much liquid you add depends on how much broth you like - I like lots.
This soup also allows for mucho modification: adding a can of any kind of bean (black, white kidney, lentil, chickpeas, blah blah blah) is really nice. Adding a blob of frozen spinach also. Celery can go in before the carrots.

The mushrooms, parsnip, and chestnuts are crucial, however.

https://www.fleursauvage.ca/product/cesares-chestnuts-150g-chataignes-pelees-roties/
https://eastwestmarkets.ca/products/dan-d-pak-organic-peeled-chestnuts
https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/Aurora-Roasted-Chestnuts-100g/6000196034224

You may recall that I posted the original recipe here:
https://agoodwinsmith.dreamwidth.org/209789.html

I make it often and I really like it. I am able to tolerate more fats these days, and adding parmesan cheese to it is amazing. Omity nomity.

Today I also used a box of Pho broth, which is 900 ml (3.8 cups), and while it took a little longer to absorb/evaporate, it is fine and tasty.

You may recall that I had gallbladder issues last year (ugh). I am better now, and I think I have dodged the gallbladder removal operation by modifying my diet. Apparently a non-insignificant percentage of people who have had their gallbladders removed have to modify their diet considerably or they continue to have grief. So. Why not just go straight to modifying the diet? It's been working so far.

For me the issue is fat. A bit of extra virgin olive oil[6] is okay. No unspecified "vegetable" oils, no palm oil, no peanut oil, no sesame oil, no butter. But this also means no cheese (sob!) no parmesan, no cheddar, no no no. Rarely I have a bit of blue cheese - but boy do I make it work. I can make a half centimetre cube last an entire appetizer hour (many of our family gatherings are just one long appetizer hour - tasty) (no, we're currently not doing that).

So. The point of this preamble is that my recipes are now going to be super skimpy on the oil and cheese front - but this does not mean that you can't jazz them up to suit your own taste buds. I think this one would benefit from real onion or shallot and parmesan, but I think it is really tasty the way it is.

Spinach and Quinoa Pilaf[1]

1 tsp extra virgin olive oil[6]
1 tsp persaillotte[2]
1 cup rinsed quinoa[3]
2 cups water[4]
1 package (300 g) frozen chopped spinach[5]
grated zest of one lemon
strained juice of one lemon
Salt and pepper

Rinse and drain the quinoa. Take a large fry pan and on medium heat warm the olive oil with the persaillotte in it (it will be a sad little puddle in the pan). Once starting to sizzle gently, add the drained quinoa and stir to coat as much of the quinoa with oil as possible. Keep stirring and toasting until you are happy, about two or three minutes. Add the two cups of liquid all at once, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cover. Simmer for 15 minutes. You may stir it if you wish since this doesn't seem to damage the grain's integrity. Add the frozen chopped spinach, and thaw it by turning and scraping until all the spinach is mixed with the quinoa. If the mixutre has too much liquid, continue simmering until more liquid is absorbed by the grain.

Wash and dry the lemon, and then zest it with a plane grater directly into the mixture in the pan. Juice the lemon and strain the juice. Mix the zest into the mixture. Turn off or further reduce the heat and add the strained lemon juice direcly to the mixture and mix in. Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve.

Yes, you could use fresh spinach, but as this is, it is a perfect quarantine recipe since nothing will rot before you get to it. Except maybe the fresh lemon. I haven't tried dried zest and bottled lemon juice, but it might work (I think I wouldn't like it, since they both have funny preservative flavours that get embittered by heat, but you never know until you try.)


[1] - Pilaf. I looked it up - Holy Moly - it's an ancient recipe for rice made by bazillions of cultures and most of them are the kind of recipe for which every family has their own favorite. You can put anything in it - including not-rice grains. Basically, the difference between pilaf and rissotto is that the pilaf grains should be separate and fluffy, whereas the rissotto grains should be unctuous and creamy. So. If you get the "wrong" results, you just change the name.
[2] - Persaillotte. This is a dried mixture of parsley, garlic, and shallot. Mine is made by Albert Menes. https://www.albertmenes.fr/en/herbes-aromatiques/289-persaillotte.html
[3] - Rinse your quinoa thoroughly. It has saponins on it which taste bitter.
[4] - Water. Or other tasty liquids, or mixtures of same.
[5] - Frozen spinach. Thawed or rock hard - either is fine. I tend to leave it frozen because I am often deflected from my original plans by other people's spontenaity - and then it sits in the fridge leaking (ick). Once you throw it in the pan, it will melt if you keep flipping it over and getting it down on the direct heat of the pan.
[6] - Extra Virgin olive oil. I think some of my issues are the chemical residues from some of the agents that are used to extract the cheaper quality oils. I also have trouble with whatever gas is used to inflate salad bags to keep them fresh. If I don't wash that off, my experience is gross. I've reached the point where I can taste whether a restaurant has washed it off. I know it is nitrogen - but there will also be a propellant and cleaning solution and machinery lubricants. I don't know what it is - but I can taste it. And if I eat it, I'm sorry.

So, this is another thing I do regularly.

The original is Scabbage (using cabbage as the noodle-base for spaghetti):

pot large enough for everything
heat medium to medium low

olive oil
butter
yellow onion
thyme
whole green cabbage, 6 or 7 inches in diameter
Yves fake ground round

Melt butter in olive oil. Add diced onion and sauté until translucent. Add thyme and stir. While onions sauté, dice cabbage into bite-sized bits. Once thyme is fragrant, add the cabbage. Stir cabbage to distribute the onion mixture and get the oil covering the cabbage. Stir every five minutes, bringing up the wilted cabbage and sending the raw down to the heat. Once all of the cabbage has translucent edges, add the crumbled fake ground round. Stir until all is hot and the ground round is well distributed.

Serve under jarred spaghetti sauce and grated parmesan.

Note - you can make your own spaghetti sauce, but I don't. You can use pre-grated parmesan, but we don't: grate-your-own is the best.

Taco Cabbage

Very similar, but include garlic and a taco seasoning package instead of the thyme, and add the taco seasoning in a different way:

Do the onion and cabbage the same way, but add some minced garlic to the onion just before adding the cabbage. Put the fake ground round in a microwaveable bowl, add a little bit of water and the taco seasoning pack. Stir well and nuke for 30 or so seconds - a little bit of steam is good. Add fake ground round as before, but you will wish to heat longer to steam off the extra water.

Serve with anything you would serve for tacos (shells and lettuce and so on), or do like we do and throw some in a bowl and add salsa and sour cream and grated cheddar cheese. A few taco chips flung on top of your bowl would be good.

Note - I tried adding the taco seasoning to the fat, as if I was making chili, and it didn't seem to bloom the flavor as well as heating it with the meat + a little water.

This is a lot of pan work before you can shove it in the oven for the final burn (think liftoff), so remember to preheat your oven to 350F prior to putting it in the oven. You will also need a glass or corningware casserole dish, greased liberally with butter, so prepare that sometime before also.

Ingredients

Very dry (00) sherry, 1/2 to 1 cup
Home made vegetable stock made with bay leaf, 2 to 3 cups
White mushrooms, sliced, about 6 cups when sliced
Yellow onion, diced, about a baseball size when peeled
Celery, two stalks trimmed and diced
Carrot, two small medium peeled and diced
Garlic, one clove minced
Dried Thyme, 1/4 teaspoon bruised
Spaghetti noodles made from brown rice, dry bundle about 1+1/2 inch diameter
Corn starch, about 3 heaped tablespoons
Gruyere cheese, cave aged, 1 X 2 X 3 inch slab grated
Parmesan cheese, 1 X 1 X 1 inch slab grated
Cream cheese, about 1/2 cup
Frozen peas, about 1 cup
Salt & Pepper to taste
Saltine crackers, crushed, about 10 crackers
Store bought dry bread crumbs, about 1/2 cup
Store bought grated parmesan cheese, about 1/2 cup
Butter to rub into the cracker+crumb mix, about 2 tablespoons

Method

Early, start pot of water for stock. Add bay leaves and all the frozen vegetable peelings you have been saving (onions peels, garlic paper, pepper ribs, etc etc). Also add the vegetable trimmings from this dish as you produce them. Start early and simmer for a couple hours.

As you begin, start the water for your noodles. Add a bay leaf. Bring to a boil and then turn off and cover, and allow the bay leaf to infuse the water.

Add butter to a pan and throw in all the sliced white mushrooms. Sweat them over medium low heat until they have wilted, released all their moisture, and most of the moisture is gone. Reserve mushrooms. To same pan (do not clean), add more butter and diced onion, and sauté until translucent but not browned. Add diced celery and carrot. Saute until carrot softening. Add minced garlic, and freshly crushed thyme. Stir and allow the garlic to become fragrant, but only just, and then return the mushrooms to the pan.

Once the mushrooms are hot again, add two ladles of strained vegetable stock. Allow to begin to bubble. Add sherry. Add three or four more ladles of vegetable stock and allow it to begin to bubble.

Sometime around now, prepare your noodles.

Add cold water to cornstarch and mix until completely smooth. Add some of the broth from the mushroom pan to the mix to temper it, and then pour the whole cornstarch mixture into the mushroom mixture. Stir constantly and add more vegetable stock if it thickens too much.

Once mushroom mixture is bubbling again, add the grated gruyere and parmesan and stir until melted. Add cream cheese in blobs and stir until all melted and mixed in. Add the frozen peas and drained noodles and mix well. Taste and add any salt and pepper needed. Pour into a greased casserole.

Crush the saltines finely and add the dry bread crumbs and store bought parmesan. Add butter in small blobs and then use your clean fingers to rub the butter into the mixture until a fine greasy meal is formed. Spread uniformly on top of casserole, covering to all edges.

You may place it in the oven now, or cover it with plastic wrap and store it in the fridge until needed. It will probably freeze well, but you would then hold back the crumb topping and apply it when thawed again.

When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350F, and bake on middle shelf for 40 to 50 minutes, or until top bubbling and browned. Allow it to rest out of the oven for about 10 minutes before serving.

We served it with sweet potato oven fries, brussel sprouts, cranberry sauce, sliced heirloom tomatoes and a token nibble of ham for the meatatarians. It reheats marvelously next day in the microwave.

As you can see, I am not anchored to a recipe. This is what I did after I tried a regular turkey tetrazzini recipe in which I substituted fake meat, and then made up my mind how to improve it to our tastes. I decided that store bought grated parmesan is useless, and that the crust was too dry, and that the fake meat did it no favours. Going all out for mushrooms meant I could add a more robust cheese. My uncle is celiac, so I was quite pleased with the brown rice spaghetti in here, since I had previously used a whole wheat pasta and they end up being very similar in this dish.

So, as you can see, this is a smell and watch and taste as you go process, and if you feel it needs another shot of sherry - do it. :)

Oh yes. I cannot stress enough how valuable home made vegetable stock is for vegetarian recipes. In fact, I think water is better than store bought vegetable stock or cubes. I made a full pot of stock while I was at it and now have some frozen for later. :)

So, I saw this recipe in my travels around the interwebs:
http://porterandcharlesrecipes.ca/recipes/bacon-penne-a-la-vodka-for-a-crowd/
...edit 15 December 2019 because recipe moved to here:
https://www.porterandcharles.ca/recipes/bacon-penne-a-la-vodka-for-a-crowd/
and I thought it looked so tasty.  But my SOGP is a vegetarian, thus the bacon is out, so I wondered whether chestnuts wouldn't be an acceptable substitute.  So I bought the tomatoes, tomato sauce, and fresh basil leaves.

Then I discovered that I had no penne or vodka in the house - so I improvised with these:

(I forgot: I can't upload pictures from my computer at home - and I no longer have access to another computer.  It was a picture of La Molisana 51 Tubettini pasta di semola de grano duro, Dand-D-Organic Chestnuts, and Cirroc distilled grape spirits in a swanky bottle.)

and it was excellent.

Here are the sauce ingredients

butter
1 onion chopped
1 garlic clove minced
2 fresh tomatoes chopped
1 tin tomato paste (369 ml)
water
heavy cream (35% mf)
distilled grape spirit
chestnuts chopped
fresh basil leaves chiffonaded (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiffonade)
parmesan cheese grated

Here are the steps

Bring water to a boil.  Once boiling, add the tubettini, stir to prevent sticking, cook 8 to 10 minutes.

At the same time, melt butter in medium heat pan.  Add diced onion and saute until translucent.  Add minced garlic and after 30 seconds add the diced tomatoes.  Saute until softening and juicy, then add tomato paste and enough water to rinse the tin and thin the tomato paste for stirring.  Sauce should be thick and your wooden spoon should leave lines in it when you stir it.  Allow it to heat through until it begins to blup.  Add enough heavy cream to change the colour to your preference.  Allow it to heat through until it is blupping again.  Add distilled grape spirit and return to blup.  Add chopped chestnuts.  Drain the tubettini, stirring the pasta in the strainer to help each little tube dump its water.  Add to tomato mixture and stir to combine well.  Add chiffonaded basil and stir until well combined.  Turn off heat.

Serve immediately with grated parmesan liberally heaped on top.

I was desperate for a cookie last night, but I am through the sugar withdrawal (and my knees feel soooo much better), that I did not want an actual cookie.  So here's what I made:

2 package ground almonds (each pk 100 grams)
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 Sweet & Low artificial sweetener packets (tea serving size)
2 eggs, large
1/4 cup whipping cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract, generously estimated

Preheat oven to 350 F.  Sift together ground almonds, cocoa powder, and sweetener in a bowl.  Set aside.  Whip together eggs, whipping cream, and vanilla until smooth consistency achieved.  Make a well in the almond mixture and pour in the egg mixture.  Stir until well combined.  Grease cookie sheets with butter.  Place blobs on the cookie sheets.  Once oven is up to temperature, place cookie trays in oven and bake for 13 to 14 minutes.  Cool until you can touch them and then eat.  Store in fridge because these will spoil fast.

Cons - texture is between a pancake and a cooled biscuit - no crisp or crunch.  This soft texture will probably increase in fridge.

Pros - CHOCOLATE.  Also, but way less important: not too sweet; nice with black coffee or tea.

I got 19 blobs, but more careful blobbing could give you twenty-four, especially if you put a pecan half on the top of each.

Each blob = 83 calories; 3 total carbs, of which 1.5 are fiber carbs.

We ate Deep Brown Apple Betty when I was a kid, which was basically a big pile of apple chunks baked under an oatmeal crust.  After moving away from home and wanting to have some, I found a recipe that didn't sound right, but I made it anyway - yuck.  My DBAB does not have a vast disgusting pool of apple juice poured over it.  I gave it up then but recently went looking again.  Apparently, what I want to call an Apple Betty, other people want to call an apple crumble.  And I'm with Captain Vimes when I say, "Arseholes to the lot of them."  So, here's my reconstructed version, with only a tiny tinker.

Deep Brown Apple Betty

Apple Mixture
5 large golden delicious apples
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon powdered cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger

Oatey Topping
1/2 cup butter
1 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup fluffed flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon

(1) Sift white sugar, cinnamon, and ginger together.  Use this to sprinkle over the apples as you prepare them.  Peel and core apples, and cut into bite-sized pieces.  Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar and mix well.
(2) In another bowl, mix together flour, oats, brown sugar, and cinnamon, and then cut in the butter until peas-sized (or you get tired).
(3) Liberally butter a 2.5 litre deep casserole with a lid.  Fill with apple mixture.  Top with oatey mixture.
(4) Baked uncovered in 350F oven for 50 - 60 minutes.  Allow to cool 10 minutes before eating.
(5) Store on counter, covered.

The tiny tinker is the added ginger.  My parents liked to eat this with cream poured over.  I'm all about the crispy oatey topping, so I never thought that was a good idea.  Ice cream underneath when hot can be nice.  Naturally, any apple you would like to eat can be DBABed.

Oh yes - you can remove more sugar, if you like.  I have already drastically cut the amount in the recipe I found on line.  Even my SOGP, who loves everything to be sweeter than a sicky-sweet thing, said the first iteration was too sweet.

This was me using up a mistakenly purchased bag of frozen spinach, because Lorne doesn't like spinach.  This turned out to be a keeper, so I am putting it here to be able to find it again.  :)

butter
grape seed oil
1 sweet onion
1 yellow onion
1 package frozen spinach
1/8 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
5 large eggs
1/3 cup whipping cream
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/3 cup grated cheddar cheese
salt + pepper
bread crumbs

Melt butter in grape seed oil over medium heat in a frypan.  Dice both onions and add to pan.  Saute slowly until reasonable browning has occurred.  Sprinkle in dried thyme and stir.  Place frozen spinach in and stir until all ice crystals are gone and spinach is warm.  Sprinkle with nutmeg and continue to stir.  Once fragrant, remove from heat.

In a bowl, whisk eggs and cream together with salt + pepper.  Add both shredded cheeses and whisk again.

Grease a baking dish (solid not clear) liberally with butter.  Place spinach mixture in bottom and roughly smooth (leave gentle hummocks).  Pour egg mixture over top, shaking gently to cover.  Submerge any hummocks that are too peaky.  Sprinkle with bread crumbs and dot with butter.

Bake at 350 F for 30 to 40 minutes.  Remove from oven and allow to cool 10 minutes before serving.

NOTES:

onions were the size of baseballs, not softballs
frozen spinach package was about ... yay ... big
it poofed very prettily, but then subsided
it is easy to overdo thyme: be cautious
apparently it is possible to have too much nutmeg, too (rumour has it)
once it cooled it released some grease, but it was damn tasty
report is today that reheat in microwave is a success