(Swedish) Pakistani Stew

I’m on vacation in Fort Lauderdale, visiting one of my best friends from college, Victoria. One of our other best friends, Kinley, showed up a couple days ago and we’ve been reliving our glory days: staying out way too late and making Victoria’s mom come pick us up after last call. It’s a bit embarrassing. The only difference is that now one of us is married (ugh… Kinley…) and we’re all approximately 20% less fun.

I can’t complain. Right now, I’m sitting in a lounge chair next to the pool with my laptop sticking to the tops of my thighs which, like the rest of my sunburned body, are steadily accumulating a slimy film of sweat. It’s awesome.

Why, you might ask, don’t I just take advantage of the similarly hot and sunny weather where I live, in Santa Barbara? The answer, I suppose, is that this type of relaxation is addictive. If I give myself one beach day at home, I will never return from the beach and, consequently, never finish my graduate degree. Give me an inch and I take a mile, you know how it goes with me.

In addition to being my first Florida vacation in years, this is also my first time being a house guest as a vegan. My original strategy was to prepare a vegan dish for everyone else to try along with their normal-people meal, but that strategy has been derailed.

That’s because Victoria’s mother, Martha, discovered a vegetarian Swedish cookbook that had been gifted to her years ago when one of her cousins went through a week-long vegetarian phase. Martha is Colombian, but she learned Swedish for love about thirty years ago and so she went about translating a few vegan recipes I might be interested in.

We settled on the recipe for Pakistani Stew. Well, it’s what Swedish people perceive as Pakistani Stew. If you're getting bored of this blog post, and if you happen to understand Swedish, feel free to just use the recipe below:

The best part about this meal, other than that it tasted wonderful, was that we all got to participate in preparing it. Martha translated the (rather simple) Swedish directions aloud in her Spanish-accented English and we all got to work.

Here’s what we did:

(Swedish) Pakistani Stew

¼ head white cabbage
1 head cauliflower
2 carrots
1 onion, diced
4 potatoes, diced
1 can whole tomatoes
1 packet frozen peas
4 tbsp olive oil
½ tbsp cumin
½ tbsp cinnamon
2 cups water salt to taste
cilantro to taste

We chopped up the cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, onion, and potatoes, and tossed them into a pot to cook in olive oil on medium heat. It took about ten minutes of stirring for them to become rather tender:

Then we added the peas (a “packet” is obviously a vague amount of peas, but we all like peas so I just dumped in an entire frozen bag), tomatoes, cumin, and cinnamon.

After stirring that all together, we added two cups of water and a handful of salt (Martha told me, “Look away!” as she poured in a ridiculous generous amount of salt) and let the whole thing simmer for ten more minutes.

We served it over the leftover quinoa from the meal I had made the night before, and it was delicious. I have never combined cumin and cinnamon before, but now that I’ve tried it, it seems like an obvious combination.

Everyone went back for second helpings, and Kinley ate the leftovers for breakfast the following morning. In fact, she's eating them right now, and washing them down with a Bloody Mary. Being married makes you so weird.

Yam I Am and Lentil Stew

My always-inspirational sister, Katie, sent me an email the other day with a link to this delicious soup recipe she had just successfully made. She had purchased a crock pot for $1 at a yard sale earlier in the week and was thrilled to have put it to good use.

I wanted to try the recipe that came so highly endorsed, but there were two obvious obstacles. First, it wasn’t vegan. Second, it would take forever to make. Who waits four hours for soup? I don't have that kind of time. And if I did, I wouldn't spend it waiting for soup.

I was feeling confident after my sweet potato success from last weekend, so I decided to take some pointers from my Reasonably Skilled Alter-Ego and go about inventing my own vegan version of a soup involving lentils and root vegetables.

I decided to go with yams, since they've always seemed really weird to me. I never tried them growing up because I was suspicious of them. They were kind of like my green eggs and ham (which, by the way, I tried and liked in my pre-vegan days). But there was no Sam I Am to convince me to try yams, so it just never happened.

I would be my own Sam I Am. And I would try my vegan version of green eggs and ham: lentils and yam.

I hopped out of bed this morning (I apologize for being one of those people who hop out of bed in the morning) and immediately headed to Whole Foods to pick up some ingredients. I made the mistake of not eating breakfast beforehand, so I was hungry while I shopped and ended up purchasing quite a few random things in addition to what I needed for my soup recipe.

… Eighty dollars later, I was ready to get to work. Here’s what I came up with:

Yam I Am and Lentil Stew

1 large yam
2 tbsp coconut oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 onion, chopped
5 cups organic vegetable broth
1 ½ cups green lentils
½ cup unprocessed soy milk (I used Eden Soy)
1 tsp sea salt

For the vegetable broth, I used Whole Foods’ 365 brand since it’s unprocessed. Its only ingredients are purified water, carrot, celery, onion, sea salt, and onion powder; my Reasonably Skilled Alter Ego could totally prepare that stuff, no problem.

I figured I should probably soften the yams before adding them into the mix, so I boiled them for fifteen minutes while I was getting the rest of the soup ready.

While the yams boiled, I put the coconut oil, chopped onion, and garlic in a big pot and sautéed them for a few minutes. I knew from past experience that if you don’t stir garlic often, it will burn… and that if you use a wok instead of a pot when preparing lentil soup, you end up with a huge pile of wet lentils.

After a few minutes, I poured in the vegetable broth and the lentils. My Reasonably Skilled Alter-Ego knew that it would be a good idea to bring the whole thing to a boil, then reduce it to a simmer for about 45 minutes.

I don’t know how she knows these things.

So while she dealt with that, I removed the yams, rinsed them, and chopped them into small cubes:

I still hadn’t decided whether or not to puree this stuff – it would depend on how mushy the yams got while they simmered. I tossed them into the pot with the rest of the ingredients, covered it, and waited.

While I waited, I nommed on some Ethnic Breads whole wheat pita, one of the random things I had purchased while grocery shopping on an empty stomach. It tasted so good that I decided to dip it in my stew later.

After 45 minutes of simmering, the lentils had absorbed all the broth and the stew looked like this:

I stirred in the soy milk and salt, but it was still too much like a pile of lentils and not enough like a stew. So I put it in the blender (which, unlike some other blenders, has yet to explode in my face) and pulsed it a few times to make it mushy.

It was much thicker than I had anticipated, so I used the Ethnic Breads pita to scoop it up, naan-style. It tasted good. So. Good. The texture was perfectly stew-like and the taste combination of lentils and yams was incredible.

Say! I like lentils and yam! I will eat them in a house (done), probably not with a mouse, definitely in a boat (if I had one), and maybe with a goat. Maybe.