My daughter has been asking for tomato soup for a while, and I figured tonight was a good time to make it for her – plus I had all the ingredients! I followed a recipe I found online, with a couple of modifications from the comments, and my daughter was very happy with it. It was quick and easy to do – I actually made the soup in advance, and then had her heat it up and add the coconut milk when she was ready to eat it. Note that I added a diced fresh tomato to the ingredients below – I had it and it was getting close to going bad so I had to use it.
Ingredients
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 28 oz can diced or whole tomatoes
1 cup water
1 tsp. smoked paprika
1 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. dried basil
1/2 – 1 tsp vegetable broth base
salt to taste
1/3 cup coconut milk
Instructions
Heat oil in a medium sauce pan over medium-low heat. Add onion and saute until soft. Add garlic and saute, stirring, for a minute. Add the tomatoes. If using whole tomatoes, push with a wooden spoon to break out. Add the water, paprika, oregano, basil and vegetable broth base. Turn heat to medium-high and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 10 minutes. Using an immersion blender, puree until smooth.
Taste and add salt if needed. At this point, you can refrigerate if you want to use it later. Right before serving, heat the soup until warm and then stir in the coconut milk.
I made this coconut curry for my vegan daughter and vegetarian niece for a family dinner, and they both enjoyed it. It’s very easy to make and you can use any vegetables you have around, tofu or really, anything. My daughter did like it with the sweet potato. Use as much curry as you like.
1 tsp olive oil
1/2 yellow onion , chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 14 oz. can coconut milk
4+ tsp curry powder
1 Tbsp. soy sauce
1 Tbsp. maple or corn syrup
1/2 tsp salt
1 sweet potato , peeled and chopped
2 cups vegetables, peeled and chopped
Instructions
Heat olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Add onions and sauté until they soften, about 5 minutes. Stir in garlic and sauté for one minute.
Add the coconut milk, curry powder, soy sauce, maple syrup and salt. Mix well. Taste and add more curry powder as needed.
Bring to a boil and add the sweet potato. Turn down heat to low, cover and simmer for 5 minutes. Add the rest of the vegetables and mix well. Cover the pot and cook until the vegetables are done, about 10 minutes.
I selected this meal kit for Moroccan Pork Sausage Tagine with Dried Apricots and Chickpeas over Couscous because it seemed easy enough to veganize it for my vegan daughter, by simply substituting vegetable concentrate for the included chicken concentrate, and omitting both the sausage and the cream on her portion. It did mean having to cook the sausage in a different pan, but that wasn’t a big deal.
All in all both my husband and daughter enjoyed this dish, and it’s simple enough to put together. It was a good portion for both of them. If you make the original recipe, beware that the sausage is very salty, so be careful of how much salt you use in the other ingredients.
All ingredients were good quality, though the carrots were a bit wobbly.
I should point out that calling this dish “Moroccan” is almost insulting. Yes, the dish includes couscous and dried apricots – but that’s as far as the Moroccan influence goes. The vast majority of Moroccans are Muslim, and Muslims cannot eat pork. The sweet Italian pork sausage included in this recipe is not used in Morocco. Moroccans are famous for their merguez sausage, which is made of lamb or beef and has no pork products in it, but it is probably too expensive for HelloFresh to include.
I paid about $8.50 for this mealkit or about $4.25 per portion. Great deal!
My vegan daughter discovered she liked vegan chili while eating at the A.Y.C.E. buffet in Vegas – and she asked me to make her some at home. I went with this recipe because it had fairly good reviews and it seemed easy and flexible enough to make. I did make a couple of changes from the original, but my daughter loved the results and has kept bugging me to make it again.
Ingredients
1 Tbsp. oil
1 yellow onion, chopped
1 large carrot, shredded
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup rice or bulgur, rinsed
2 Tbsp. chili powder
1 Tbsp. ground cumin
1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes
1 14.5 oz tomato puree
1 15 oz can kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 15 oz can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 1/2 tsp kosher salt.
Directions
Heat oil in a large cooking pot over medium-high heat. Add the onions and carrots and sauté, stirring often, until the onion is translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté for another minute. Stir in the rice or bulgur, chili powder and ground cumin.
Add the tomatoes and beans and stir well. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer, stirring occasionally for about an hour, or until the beans are tender. Season and serve.
Back in August we visited Las Vegas, where my daughter had the BEST VEGAN PIZZA EVER at Trattoria Reggiano at The Venetian’s Grand Canal Shoppes. It tasted so much like a real cheese pizza that we suspected it might be real cheese after all. After all, my daughter had had plenty of pizzas with Daiya cheese, including from great pizzerias like Zachary’s, and they’ve always tasted like vegan pizza.
The waitress at Trattoria Reggiano had suggested that their pizza was made with nut cheese, so when we saw packages of Parmela Creamery Mozzarella style nut cheese at our local Grocery Outlet, we had to try it. My daughter is very glad we did. While it didn’t work I tried to make an Alfredo sauce with it, it makes a mean vegan pizza.
Parmela Creamery’s cheeses are made with cashew milk, which is cultured and then aged – following a process similar to dairy cheesemaking. It’s not surprising that they taste considerably better than Daiya’s cheeses, whose main ingredient is tapioca flour.
A search online suggests that it’s not easy to find Daiya cheese in stores, though there are a couple of places that sell them online, so we need to stock up at Grocery Outlet and start looking for other nut cheeses to try. When available, a 7 oz package of Parmela Creamery shreds costs $6-7.
My daughter has been making her close-to-real pizzas by putting the cheese on frozen American Flatbread Farmers Tomato Pie. This is a thin pizza shell covered in tomato sauce with some veggies, basil and balsamic vinegar. She just covers it with the shreds and bakes it. I also found this product at Grocery Outlet, but it also seems hard to find in regular stores. Where available it should retail for about $8. I’m not sure why this product is not described as vegan – the only potentially non-vegan ingredient listed is yeast.
Kabob Express is, apparently, a food stand at Bayfair Mall in San Leandro. I say apparently because I’ve never actually been – I’ve just ordered take out a couple times. The most recent one was a couple of nights ago, and I was very satisfied with my order.
My order this time was just for my vegan daughter and I. She got a felafel wrap ($11.50), which comes with hummus, tomato, lettuce, cucumber, grilled onions and tahini sauce. You can specify for it to be vegan and it comes with a side of vegan tahini sauce. My daughter was very pleased with this wrap, and particularly liked the tahini. She’d order it again.
Mantu – Afghani dumplings with beef sauce
I had the mantu ($8), an Afghani dish of dumplings with a meat sauce. While this is listed as an appetizer, the dish is large and heavy enough that it can qualify as an entree. It is also absolutely delicious. The steamed pasta is very soft and has a consistency that I just loved, and the beef is intensely spiced. My only complaint is that it didn’t have enough yogurt sauce to balance the richness of the beef. I made up for it by adding some sour cream.
I also ordered a lamb gyro wrap ($12), which I ended up eating the next day. Once again, I was very happy with it. It had thick lamb cubes, tender and perfectly seasoned (in the past, it was a bit too salty). It was a little bit on the small side, however, and given the price I’d been happier if it came with a side.
I also ordered a mint lassi, but got a mango lassi instead. It was good, thick and very sweet. The mint lassi I’ve had in the past was a bit thin, but also tasty.
In the past, I’ve also ordered the samosas, which were very crisp and had a slightly spicy potato filling. They were very small, maybe half the size of a regular one. They didn’t taste like regular Indian samosas but were good.
I’ve also had the lentil soup, which was chunky and tasty. It did seem to contain meat, but it’s now listed as vegetarian, so they may have changed the recipe.
I didn’t order the hummus this time (which, beware, comes without pita bread, you must order that separately) because last time around it had a very mild flavor, more tahini than chickpeas. Beware that as with the other items, they might have changed how they make it.
Finally, I was disappointed to not find the bolani in the menu any more. This is an Afghani flatbread stuffed with potatoes, onions and herbs. I really liked it when they had it.
Prices at Kabob Express have gone up pretty radically since last year. The mantu, which was just $6 a year ago, is now $8 while the lamb gyro has gone up a full $4.50, from $7 to $11.50. Still, their prices seem in line with other local restaurants.
You can order Kabob Express through Grubhub ($5 delivery fee) or Doordash (free deliver if over $35, but a $4-5 fee). Doordash prices are slightly higher on some items. Delivery took a little over an hour, apparently because my order wasn’t ready in time (or so said the driver).
This kit came with already made hummus, tzatziki, olive tapenade and za’atar spice, as well as a zucchini, a yellow squash, 2 roma tomatoes, a slice of red onion, a small bag of arugula, pita bread and pita chips. Preparation consisted of slicing the squashes, quartering the tomato, sauteing them for about 8 minutes and then assembling the pitas. You then serve it with a side of pita chips and hummus. So a super quick meal to put together.
I didn’t use the tzatziki or tapenade, omitted the onion and substituted the arugula for some spring mix I had to accommodate my daughters’ preferences. I also added some cubed tofu to add protein to the dish.
In all, she was very happy with the results. She found it a very tasty meal. She particularly loved the pita bread. The problem is that the kit came with only two pita breads – so one per person. That was not enough for the amount of filling there was.
This is also a pretty simple meal to put together on your own, though I wouldn’t know where to buy the spongy pita bread they sent.
I got this kit for free due to credits and a welcome back promo code. Use this referral link to get a free kit for 2 with your first box.
– Note: if you use my referral link I *may* get some credits in return, if I happen to be subscribed to the meal kit service at the exact moment you use the code – which is unlikely.
This was the dinner offering for Wednesday, this week, but my daughter was out that night so she took it to school this for lunch today. It looked like a salad to her, so she thought it was a lunch. That meant, she ate it cold.
She thought it was fine, but she did not like one of the herbs – probably the cilantro. It reminded her of a deconstructed spring roll (her words). She said she’d eat it again, but wasn’t enthusiastic about her.
Because she took it to school without my knowing it, I wasn’t able to photograph it.
I made this kit for my vegan daughter tonight and she was relatively pleased with it. She thought it was tasty enough, though she was sort of dumbfounded by the tostadas – she didn’t get them at all. Still, she found them tasty and 3 tostadas were more than enough.
That said, I did make some modifications to the kit. First, I omitted the cheese, to make the tostadas vegan. Second, my daughter doesn’t like peppers (I hadn’t paid attention to what actually came with the kit), so I substituted them with chopped tomato. Of course, making substitutions sort of defeats the purpose of the kit.
Making the dish was relatively simple, but it required using the oven to saute the zucchini and toast the tortillas/tostadas. As summer comes, I want to avoid using the oven.
I paid $6.30 for this kit ($3.15 per serving), using a promo. It’s probably how much it would cost me to buy the ingredients myself. The kit did require me to use my own vinegar.
The key to the dish is the sauce, of course, so I imagine I’ll have to experiment and find one that my daughter might like. Safeway has a pineapple peach salsa that might fit the bill. The cauliflower for these tacos is basically sauteed for 3-4 minutes with green pepper (which she didn’t like so I’ll omit next time), you then add some cubed pineapple, 1/4 cup of water and the al pastor sauce, and put it in a 400F oven for 15 minutes.
This kit also taught me how to make mashed black beans – you put the canned beans in a pot with a little bit of water and a teaspoon of vegetable stock concentrate, cook it for five minutes and then mashed.
The cabbage in the kit was supposed to be mixed with a cilantro aioli, but this wasn’t vegan, so I had to skip it. The cabbage was sort of blah on its own, but it added some crunch to the tacos.
Again, all in all she liked them and she wants me to make them again.
And I will, because I’m certainly not going to pay $26 to make this meal. I paid $10 with a promo, and for that it was a bargain.
