Double Mushroom Barley Soup

Yet another recipe from Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure. This was, of course, delicious. I originally had checked this book out of the library to make sure that I liked it. I have fallen in love with it and gone ahead and bought it. I highly recommend it. The double mushrooms in this soup are buttons and dried shiitake. After we spent entirely too much money on the shiitake mushrooms at the health food store, we just happened to go to an Asian grocery store the next day and found them for MUCH cheaper. Lesson learned. I also found vegan spring roll wrappers there, which I am very excited about, but have yet to use.

Potatoes and Onions, Thai Style

This is another (hit) recipe from Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure. Potatoes and onions, what's not to love? After it was done cooking, I added some Lightlife Chick'n Strips to make it a meal. It's cooked in coconut milk. My boyfriend said that the texture was pretty close to clam chowder. I wouldn't know, as I've never had clam chowder (or any other kind of shellfish), but now I want to play with the basic recipe to make it into some kind of chowder. I'll never really know if it tastes like clam chowder or not. I guess my boyfriend will have to be the taste tester on that one.

Caribbean Beans and Rice

This was the first dish we made using the pressure cooker my boyfriend got me for Hanukkah. I must admit that even though I am the one who asked for a pressure cooker, I was scared to use it. Have I mentioned that I scare really really easily? This recipe came from Lorna Sass's Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure. If this recipe is any indication of the quality of the rest of the book, it is an AWESOME cookbook. We absolutely loved this dish. I think it was one of my favorite dinners yet. I thought I was going to find black-eyed peas to be an odd addition to a Caribbean dish, but they were really good. The only substitution I made in the recipe was to use two jalapeños instead of a red chili pepper, but that was because I already had the jalapeños on hand and needed to use them up.