The assortment of wonderful ingredients for eating a healthy, whole foods, plant-based diet is truly astonishing these days.  Tonight’s post is a reflection on my meals today, their contents, and some references you might enjoy if you want to duplicate any of the dishes.  Some of these are my own creation, others are found in recent articles online.

The two new recipes I want to share with you are the first two dinner items.  The beets were from Melissa Clark in The New York Times on October 7th — this article followed by her recipe.  Her photo is below; our version used a soy-based “sour cream” instead of yogurt, and some Maras pepper flakes instead of hotter fresh chiles, but looked similar.

The other delightful discovery was the Lemony Leeks dish, from My New Roots, a blog by Sarah Britton.  The recipe is here.  I eliminated the feta cheese to make it vegan, used up the remaining chickpeas I had cooked from excellent Italian dried beans several days ago, and substituted chopped fennel fronds for lack of fresh dill.  Interestingly, my vegetable broth was a unusual combination of leftovers: the water reserved from soaking overnight a blend of radish, fenugreek, red clover, and garlic seeds as the first step in my sprout-making, plus the water drained from Barbara’s rehydrating a batch of Chinese mushrooms used in her dumpling recipe last night.  It was subtle but delicious.  Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that I enriched the broth a bit by warming up three leftover matzo balls in it when I had some soup, too.  Is that eclectic, or what?

The turnips and corn on the Vegetable Dinner Plate were garnered at a local farmer’s market on the weekend, as were the stupendously fresh Asian greens (mustard, and pea greens, and amaranth, along with Chinese scallions) grown by the Hmong gardeners from The Flats Mentor Farm in Lancaster.

Since I was busy preparing for tomorrow night’s class, and grading papers for another course, I did not spent much of the day cooking, as I sometimes do.  The above Food for the Day did not take long to prepare, particularly since the Leeks dish is quite quick and the Roasted Beets had been done a couple of days earlier.  Buon appetito!