Engine 2 Farm2Forks Immersion Photos

I found this slide show on another blog, a person who had attended this Engine 2 Farms2Forks Immersion weekend. Looks like they had chilly weather there! I was thinking of attending the one this coming August at the Esselstyn family farm in upstate New York, about 33 miles away from where I live, but OUTDOORS in AUGUST?!?! Not me! Not with my asthma, especially this summer, when we've had a number of 100º PLUS days already in June and July! Now if they had an *indoor* venue . . .

Looks like they had a great time, though.

Here's Rip explaining what they do at an Immersion:

Ginger Peanut Tofu Salad

In my last post I mentioned I'm making that Cheezy Kale Soup to go with sandwiches for today's supper. I guess it would help if I also showed you where to find the sandwich filling recipe.

The  Ginger Peanut Salad is form Julie Hasson's Everyday Dish TV web site.

You can find the video of Julie making it on YouTube:

This will be my first time making it so I can't comment on it. I just figured it's quick, easy, and COOL for this hot July day. I'll be serving it on whole wheat Kaiser rolls with Romaine lettuce and sliced tomatoes. Knowing my husband he'll also be very liberal with the sriracha sauce.

Cheezy Kale Soup

I found this recipe during my web roaming. It's tagged Eat to Live and low-fat, but with that cashew nut butter it's certainly *not* that!

I made this Saturday and ate some for lunch then and Sunday and will finish it off today. Here's the main recipe, as printed in this blog:

http://wholefoodforthewholefamily.blogspot.com/2011/01/cheesy-kale-soup.html

"Cheesy" Kale Soup

Serves: 4
Preparation Time: 15 minutes

Ingredients:

1/2 cup yellow split peas
1 onion, chopped
1 cup white button mushrooms
2 cups carrot juice
15 ounces no-salt tomato sauce
1 1/2 pounds kale, tough stems and center ribs removed and leaves coarsely chopped
1/4 cup cashew butter
1 teaspoon nutritonal yeast

Instructions:
In a pressure cooker
1. Cover yellow split peas with about 2 1/2 cups of water and cook on high pressure for 6-8 minutes.
2. Add remaining ingredients except cashew butter and cook on high pressure for 1 minute.
3. Release pressure and blend soup with cashew butter.
4. Sprinkle with nutritional yeast before serving.

To make without a pressure cooker:
1. Precook the split peas until soft.
2. Combine cooked split peas with all remaining ingredients except cashew butter.
3. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer until kale is tender (about 15 minutes).
4. Add water as needed to achieve desired consistency.
5. Stir in cashew butter.
6. Sprinkle with nutritional yeast before serving.

---

My changes:

I used a bit more mushrooms because that's what I had left in the box. It was almost 2 cups.

The tomato sauce came out to 16 ounces, as I used 2 small cans of no-salt added sauce.

Instead of fresh kale I used half a bag of frozen. It's a one pound bag, so half a pound of cooked/blanched kale.

Skipped the cashew butter but used about 1/4 cup nutritional yeast, as we like things cheesy here.

This is one delicious, creamy soup! So what if it was 90º outside, this soup was worth it! And because it was made in the pressure cooker it didn't really heat the kitchen up that much, either. I forgot to take a photo of it fresh and warm, so this pic of it cold in the Rubbermaid container will have to do:

DH didn't want any over the weekend, but I plan on making it again today to go with tonight's sandwich supper. just to use up the other half bottle of carrot juice, so he'll get a taste of it then. He'll see what he's been missing out on.

He did make one comment on it when he first saw it. If you ever saw the Kevin Bacon/Fred Ward creature movie Tremors,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100814/
you'll know the scenes he compared this soup to. For the rest of you, consider yourselves lucky you don't know.  

If you DO want to know, watch this video (you may want to mute it - the song is annoying) and the scene it at 1:16

But don't say you weren't warned!