I seemed to miss the memo, or left the email get too far down the list of saved. We were supposed to cook vegan in our weekly Cook Locally challenge, the one that my small group of online locavore friends agreed to take.
I cooked lots of vegan the past two weeks. We eat less meat than we used to eat, but most of the recipes weren’t completely local.
In the spirit of the challenge, here are the things I made that qualify as vegan, even though I used all sorts of ingredients in them.
Posole
Pumpkin hummus
Fennel and orange salad
Guacamole — no pictures, just a simple mix of avocado, jalapeno, onion, lime, salt and pepper
The posole, was the largest recipe. We ate that soup for at least four meals finishing up today at lunch with the last of it. I really like using the chayote.
My husband’s comment today again was how this soup had that tanginess of sauerkraut.
As for that pumpkin hummus, it has been to the potluck luncheon and has shown up at lunches this weekend. We got an acorn squash last week from the CSA, and I still have sweet potatoes, as well as a quarter jar of tahini. Maybe more hummus will be made and consumed.
We eat mostly food made from scratch these days. Lots of vegetarian, and even quite a few vegan choices. Making us feel better, and using up those lovely fresh veggies from Breezy Willow. At least a fair amount of them.
As for how well we are doing, the fruit is almost gone. Half the onions. Still have the squash, the eggs, the Brussels sprouts and the turnips. And, half the potatoes. Can’t wait to see what we get this week. The advance email just came in, and there are some really good additions that will lend themselves to some stir fries. Plus, no repeats of what we have left so meal planning can combine items from both weeks.
Wednesday will give us new inspiration for our challenge. Now, at the moment, we are officially drowning in eggs, so vegan doesn’t seem to be on the menu much in the next few weeks. I am saving some eggs to get old enough to do Easter eggs.
Oh, and I still have quite a bit of venison left to use, so giving up meat entirely isn’t something we will be doing. I just have converted to using this as my mantra.
Everything in Moderation.
hocofood@@@
AnnieRie Unplugged 
Looks delicious. I’m surprised that you have chayote in VA.
Hi Tammy, the chayote definitely wasn’t local. Even though I cooked lots of vegan recipes the past few weeks, they weren’t all local.
I have been doing my foodie thing more than the locavore thing. Like the guacamole with Florida avocados.
You can grow chayote here in zone 7 but a hard frost will kill it. Mostly grown in parts of Virginia as an annual. It is easily found here in our stores since we have very large Hispanic and Asian populations.
A couple of markets not far from us, Lotte and H Mart, cater to these growing communities. We can find all sorts of Asian specialties and a massive Latin section in these stores.
Fun to experiment.
It’s fun to dye Easter Eggs with natural dyes. Here is one good experiment, but I am not sure if all of them are edible. I’ve had good luck with boiling beets with them and you can eat the beets as well.
http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/SCA/eggs/eggdyes.html
Sharon
Your soup looks great. And as I look at your list of vegan this you have made recently, I guess I do make a few vegan things from time to time – hummus and guacamole. I’ll get an email out to everyone before our next/last theme in April.