A lot of recipes in The Complete Vegan are based on basic techniques from French Cuisine, only without all the fat and crazy bits of animals- this one even more than most. It followed the sautee onions, add garlic, a cup of white wine, 2 tbsp tomato sauce and herbes de provence (tarragon and friends), cook 5 minutes, sprinkle in 2 tbsp flour, stir, cook some more, add turnips, cook some more, add carrots and cauliflower, cook ’till tender, add cooked white beans, frozen peas, heat through, add parsley and serve pattern of French recipeing.
The result? It tasted like spring, which is mighty tough to achieve in January.
In my haste to devour the tastiness, I forgot to snap a photo, but if you can imagine a pot full of vegetables that are mainly white, with orange as a gentle secondary colour, accented by green for contrast, that’s what we’re dealing with.
The small amount of tomato paste in a whole cup of white wine came as a pleasant culinary surprise to me, as did the broth, thickened only just un petit peu by the scant quantity of flour.
I served mine over barley and the Delightful Rapper’s over brown rice because we only had so much barley and he wasn’t at all choosey.
It generated about 6 servings, but we ate 4 right there on the spot just because it was good. The recipe is not to be faulted for this. We are gluttons.
At $2.47, the cauliflower was the splurge of this recipe, but well worth it given the springy taste. And to think, I don’t even like cauliflower. Not on the official record, anyway.
| What it’s cost so far: | |
|---|---|
| beans | $1.27 |
| mushrooms | $2.00 |
| carrots | $1.27 |
| onion | $0.67 |
| turnip | $0.70 |
| cauliflower | $2.47 |
| garlic | $0.46 |
| TOTAL: | $8.84 |
I did also use up some ingredients that aren’t on this list that I already had in my cupboard. Rather than try to figure out the cost of ingredients I already had, I’ll count the cost of ALL the groceries I buy in connection to these beans for the week, and then average it out per serving at the end of my experiment. (So here, for instance, I only used a couple cloves of garlic, but I’m including the expense for three whole bulbs.) I figure that’ll be pretty close to realistic, especially if I keep it up for a few weeks in a row.
