Sweet potato and blood orange soup

There’s nothing better in the first cold days of winter than a hearty soup to warm you up. And even better is a soup that is hot and sweet at once. This lovely soup was made from sweet potatoes and a little blood orange juice which adds amazing flavor to it. If you are not sure if you like ‘sweet’ soups, use half sweet and half regular potatoes – this will make the soup more hearty. By the way: This also makes an amazing starter for a festive dinner! 

Fennel risotto with lemon and white beans

I love a big bowl of hot and creamy risotto – it warms you just like a soup on a cold fall or winter day, but is more filling and so more satisfying for a hungry stomach. And it’s really easy to make and extremely versatile since you can add pretty much all kinds of veggies you have at hand. You can also mix several vegetables or legumes in your risotto – just like fennel and white beans. To add a little extra flavor, I added some lemon juice and zest, which really took the dish from ‘good’ to ‘wow’.  Just make sure to add the lemon right before serving, this way you get the best and most intense lemon flavor. 

Hummus pizza with beet root and pumpkin

If you combine the awesomeness of pizza and hummus, what do you get? The answer is: a frigging delicious hummus pizza! Though you could probably argue if you can still call it a pizza if there are no tomatoes on it, but that’s just semantics. Point is, it’s so good, you won’t care what it’s called. To make a perfect fall pizza, I used beet root, pumpkin and onion as topping, and pan-roasted the veggies beforehand to enhance their flavors. I roasted the beets separately from the other veggies to prevent everything from turning pink, but if you don’t mind pink onions and pumpkin cubes, go ahead and roast everything together. Enjoy! 

Spaghetti with swiss chard sauce and cherry tomatoes

Ever since I have a balcony, I try to grow some vegetables every summer. This year I grew lots of tomatoes, some carrots, red radishes, mini cucumbers and swiss chard. I didn’t really knew what to do with the swiss chard first, so it grew kind of massive and I started to desperately think of ideas that would use a lot of it. So I came up with this blended swiss chard sauce, that will turn a whole bunch of swiss chard into a creamy, delicious green sauce. It you don’t want to blend the sauce, I recommend to use a different kind of pasta – so you don’t end up with either pasta or sauce on your fork.

Holiday preparations: Mini vegan ‘meat loafs’

The holidays are approaching fast, and therefore it’s time to start with the first preparations! My mom got remarried in the summer, and this year we will celebrate the holidays in a big patchwork-family fashion – which makes dinner planning slightly more difficult than usual. While most members of my patchwork-family insist on having a roast on Christmas Eve (the current plans involve rabbit roast), my stepsister and I don’t eat meat, and my mom started to worry about what so serve us as meat-free alternative. And by ‘worry’ I mean she started pestering me with increasingly urgent sounding e-mails asking for recipes. So I went on a little ‘holiday appropriate meat alternative invention’-trail, and tried out different types of dishes – with varying results. The vegan roast I tried to prepare came out kind of dry and crumbly, though that might be due to my probably-older-than-me stove. So, I changed tactics and went for pan-fried meat substitutes, and this recipe is the final result! The main ingredients are brown rice, rolled oats and mushrooms, which combine to a deliciously savoury flavour. You can also use quinoa or other grains instead of rice, I just went for the most common one to keep holiday shopping easier.