Vegetarian BBQ dinner

While we're still waiting around for the arrival of our little one, I decided to grill up a dinner for us this evening. The CSA is in abundance at the moment, so I'm trying to prepare food that uses the vegetables we get to the maximum! Tonight was no exception, the corn, radicchio, onions, potatoes, and dill all came from the share!

On to our menu:

• Grilled Corn - As per my usual, I like to grill the corn in their husk, so it more or less steams inside. As usual it turned out great, if I do say so myself. I had pinned a recipe for Siracha Street corn recently and thought, now was as good of a time as any to try it out. It turns out I'm not really a fan. While I really like spicy and Siracha sauce, I'm more of a sweet corn purist - I like to taste the flavor of the corn.
• Grilled Radicchio - I'm never quite sure what to do with radicchio, but I had seen several recipes for the grilled variety in past internet searches, so I thought I would try it tonight. The only thing I left out from the recipe was the orange peel, as I didn't have any; also I used Parmesan cheese instead of Romano. I didn't really miss the orange, though I probably could have grilled/cooked the quarters a bit longer. Overall I thought all the flavors were excellent - the radicchio was a little bitter, which was cut by the spicy balsamic marinade.
• Baked beans - well these came out of a can and were prepared on the stove, but I thought they went well with everything, and Ebon likes them :)
• Veggie Italian sausages and grilled onions - I like the Tofurkey brand and the onions were sprayed with olive oil and cooked on top of a foil sheet on the grill - Yum for carmelization.
• Potato Salad - I didn't really have a recipe, I just kind of threw some things together. I boiled some new potatoes - either cut in half or whole depending on their size. When they were tender, I stopped cooking, drained and let them cool for about 20 min (this is where I was doing the preparations of other things above). When they were cool, I cut them into bite-sized chunks. The dressing was a dip that I prepared a few days earlier - 

~1 cup plain lowfat yogurt
~2 tablespoons fresh dill
~1 teaspoon salt
~1/2 teaspoon pepper
~1-2 tablespoons of olive oil
couple pinches of sugar
I mixed the dressing portion together and poured over the potato chunks and mixed everything to coat.

This was a very filling meal, and it would have been much better to have more than just two people to help eat this one!

Spicy Kohlrabi Stew with Tomatoes

I've had some kohlrabi from our CSA share sitting in my fridge for too long. So long in fact that some of it went bad, but I needed to use up the good parts, so I surfed the interwebs for recipes. I didn't really find anything too good until I came across this recipe. There wasn't a picture that I could pin to my YUM Pintrest Board, so I decided to find the cookbook at the library. I requested it and a few days later I had Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian: More Than 650 Meatless Recipes from Around the World in my hands.  It took me another few days before I actually looked at the cookbook, but it is very thorough in terms of vegetables, grains, dairy, etc. Pretty much anything vegetarian that you want to cook, you will probably be able to find it.  I might just have to buy this cookbook to have in my arsenal.

Getting to the actual food... Although I had most of the ingredients for the original recipe I found, I opted to make the Spicy Kohlrabi Stew with Tomatoes.

2 pounds kohlrabi heads cut in ~1/4" dice
2 tablespoons oil
1/2 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
generous pinch of ground asafetida (I didn't have this and opted for garlic powder instead)
1-4 dried hot red chilies - to desired heat (again I opted for ~1/2 teaspoon crushed red chilies/peppers)
5 medium tomatoes peels and finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon sugar (if the tomatoes are sour)
Put the oil in a medium pan and set over med-high heat. When hot, put in the cumin seeds. A second later, put in the asafetida and the red chilies. Stir briefly until the chilies turn dark, a matter of seconds. Now put in the kohlrabi. Stir once or twice and quickly put in the tomatoes, turmeric, 3/4 cup water, salt, and sugar. Stir and bring to a boil. Cover, turn the heat down to low, and simmer very gently for 30-35 min, or until the kohlrabi is tender.

I also cooked up some brown lentils to which I added, ground cumin, coriander, salt, and pepper. This was all served with rice.

I thought this turned out well. Some of the kohlrabi just didn't cook right because it was so big/tough, but the flavors turned out pretty good and the heat was just right. The tomatoes came from my garden and from the CSA share - another reason to use this recipe!
Ebon seemed to like it well enough, so I would make this again if I had an abundance of kohlrabi and tomatoes.  Now go buy that cookbook!