Junk in Your Trunk Salsa Chili-Soup

I love this recipe. God bless Kristen for introducing it to me. It is simple, just requires opening up cans and jars and dumping them into a pot, and is damn good. It also is nice because it can help you clean out the fridge and your shelves of all the random shit that's been sitting there for a while but that you haven't had a chance to use up (You happen to have a random old can of squash that's been sitting on your shelf since 1993? Throw it in! Some weird artichokes that will mold soon if you don't use 'em? Plop them in theres!).

General Ingredients:

Small can of black beans (drained)
Small can of kidney beans (drained)
Small can of some other kind of beans (I used white) (drained)
Small can of corn (drained)
1 jar of your favorite salsa
1 large can of stewed tomatoes
1 red pepper
Green onions

Some add-ons:
Roasted red pepper (left-over)
Lots and lots o' cayenne pepper (until it was nice and spicy)
Some red pepper
About a teaspoon and a half's worth of cocoa

Directions: Dump all of the above into a slow-cooker or into a large pot on the stove. Cook.

This is a really tasty recipe, especially if you pick out a decent salsa. It makes a particularly good summer-chili, as it's not heavy or dense at all, moreso just light and verging on a soup. And it's healthy (no oil!) and dirt cheap: total ingredients cost me probably somewhere in the $7 range, and it yields about 6-8 servings worth (which is a whole week's worth of eating). And it has a billion uses: soup, chili, use only one can of stewed tomatoes and it could pass as enough salsa to feed a small army. Also tasty topped with fritos (yep, they's vegan).

Verdict: A

Strawberry-Chocolate Crepes

Sunday morning, I had a hankering for grub, and given that I'd gotten some fresh strawberries from the market on Friday, I decided to whip up some strawberry crepes.

The crepes recipe is from The Garden of Vegan and is a simple but good one (as I'd mentioned before). The rest was my invention. E sliced up all my strawberries, and I threw some semi-sweet chocolate chips in a small saucepan with some soy milk on low, we stuffed the fresh crepes with the strawberries and drizzled the chocolate on top, and *voila*, strawberry crepes. Simple and delicious--a nice change in pace from the previous night's meal.

Verdict: A

Tempeh Loaf and Taters

This weekend was my weekend to cook, so I decided to try out this loaf I'd been eyeing for a while and then settled on some good ol'-fashioned (almost) scalloped potatoes as a side.

Prepping this dinner made me realize that one of the basic standards I have for cooking is that things should be tasty but not take gratuitously long to cook. Unfortunately, this took me 2 hours--just to prep! I suspect it was partially just bad planning on my part--both were a bit more complicated of recipes, and were I cooking each on their own, they might not have seemed quite so complicated and time-consuming. But together, they took ridiculously long to prepare, and given that it was nice outside and I was inside lurching around a kitchen, they reduced me to a whiny mess of a cook.

The problem is, while I may have enjoyed one or the other dishes on their own, given the amount of time I spent on them, they really should've tasted like manna. But they didn't...