Summer Squash Soup - Mushroom Pesto Pasta - Sweet Eggplant Dip - How To Cook Delicious Meal

In this post I'm showing you two weeks of the local produce that I got and what I made with it.

This year I joined a CSA which stands for community supported agriculture, so I've been getting fresh produce from a local farmer every week.

This is sort of becoming like a video diary of that and what I've been making every week.

Everything I make is really easy, but in these two weeks I went super simple with one pot meals.

I think one of the biggest challenges for most people in maintaining their whole food vegan diet is trying to find the time to cook.

So when you do a one pot meal you're throwing everything in and you're done.

So hopefully you'll find some inspiration for your next plant-based meal.

Let's take a look.

I got two weeks in a row of a pretty similar haul so I decided to lump them into one video.

So here's the first week.

I got some gorgeous heirloom tomatoes, garlic, shishito peppers, which I talked about last week but we'll go over those in a little bit again.

And then I got a couple different kinds of summer squash, those little round ones are patty pan squash, which I hadn't tried before but they were really delicious, so I'll tell you all about those.

Summer Squash Soup

And then some cucumbers, green onions or scallions, whatever you like to call them, a little bit of basil, and some lettuce.

So this week I decided to do what I do most often which is to dump a bunch of stuff into a pot and just make kind of like a soup or stew.

So as always I'm starting with chopping an onion.

My CSA had huge garlic cloves this week so I'm only using about two there, but it was the equivalent of about five or six normal cloves of garlic.

And then here are the shishito peppers that I mentioned.

So I talked a little about these last week, but basically this is a sweet pepper, but every once in a while you'll get a spicy one, so about nine out of ten of these are sweet and the others might be spicy.

This was my second time getting shishito peppers in my CSA.

the first week they were all sweet, and this second batch was also all sweet.

So I'm just slicing those into rings to add to my soup, and next up I'm chopping up the summer squash.

So I have a couple of just the regular summer squash that I've been getting, and I'm just chopping those into big chunks, and then with the patty pan squash, you can eat the skins of these, but I just cut the tops off, and then again just cutting these into some big chunks.

And these were really good.

I didn't really notice much of a difference in flavor between these and any other kind of summer squash, I'm sure they do have a subtle difference in flavor.

My soup actually ended up being really sweet and I'm not sure if it was from these squash or if it was from the peppers, the shishito peppers, since they were very sweet this time.

But it ended up tasting delicious.

So a little cooking tip, it's always good to get all of your veggies prepped before you start cooking so everything's ready to go.

And the first thing I'm going to do is saute my onions.

I start with a dry pan on a high heat.

I usually don't even have to add water because the onions will start to release their own juices and prevent themselves from sticking.

And then I'm adding my shishito peppers.

If you ever do get some sticking you can always add a little water though.

But as you can see you can get a beautiful caramelized color even without using oil.

And there you saw I added some broth, again that's just to kind of help with sticking.

I'm adding my garlic and then I'll just start dumping everything else in.

So here's all of my squash.

I probably should have used a slightly larger pot, but I decided to just go with it.

And I forgot to record myself chopping the tomatoes, but I'm throwing some of the tomatoes from my CSA in there as well, and then I'm flavoring this soup really simply just by using a store-bought jar of salsa.

And then I always like to get every little bit out of the jar, so I put a little bit of my broth into the salsa jar, shook it up to get everything out, and then added a little more broth to the pot, covered it up, and I'll let that simmer away for a while until all the veggies start to soften.

And there you can see my beautiful soup, everything looks so delicious.

I love fresh summer veggies.

This is a lovely summer soup, and like I said it turned out to be kind of sweet, I think it was from the shishito peppers, but it was really delicious, and I decided to eat that along with some mung beans and some mixed whole grains.

I'll add a link here to a video for you where I make this mixture of whole grains so you can see exactly how I make them, but of course you could use any whole grains you like.

Mushroom Pesto Pasta

And I ate that along with a salad made from that gorgeous lettuce from my CSA.

Next up I decided to make a pesto.

I've been making tons of pesto this summer because I've been getting such great stuff in my CSA, and I don't want to waste anything, so pesto is a great way to use up all of the herbs and veggies that I've been getting.

So I'm starting with some of the green onions or scallions, and I'm using both the white parts and the green parts.

So I'm just chopping them up a little bit to help the food processor out.

And you can see I already have some walnuts in the food processor.

I'm also adding all of the basil from my CSA into this pesto.

I'd say I used about equal parts basil and green onions, and then I'm adding the juice of a lemon, and then I'll also just add enough water to help blend everything up.

And that's about it, you could also add some black pepper and if you'd like you can add some salt.

I personally am salt-free, so I don't add salt to any of my cooking, but you could absolutely do that if you'd like.

Another alternative would be to add a little bit of miso paste to get a little bit of a salty flavor into your pesto.

And I decided I wanted to add my pesto to pasta, and I also had some white button mushrooms from the grocery store, so I decided to saute those up to add on top of my pasta.

I chose some sort of Thanksgiving type flavors for my mushrooms.

I sauteed them with a little bit of red wine vinegar, and Bragg liquid aminos, and then I use dried sage, rosemary, thyme, parsley, and some garlic powder and black pepper.

This combination ended up being delicious.

So here's my pasta, I mixed all of the pesto in with the pasta, and then topped it with the mushrooms.

Sauteed Veggies and Fonio

This pesto did end up being a very strong oniony flavor because I used so many scallions, but I added it to the pasta when it was warm, so the heat of the pasta sort of slightly cooked that oniony flavor out just a little bit, but if you don't like that much onion flavor, you might cut back and just do more basil in your pesto.

And then this is just one more quick meal that I made one day.

I used those leftover mushrooms that I had put on my pasta earlier, and then I sauteed some more of my summer squash, and just added more of those same herbs and spices that I had used before.

So some sage, rosemary, thyme, and parsley.

And I served that along with some fonio, which is a really tiny little grain that comes from Africa.

It's really delicious, and when you cook it up it's kind of fluffy, almost sort of like couscous, but even a finer texture than that.

Second Haul and Crock Pot Ratatouille

And again I had a nice little salad with all of my fresh veggies.

And then here's another week of my CSA.

Again I had tomatoes, garlic, lettuce, basil, summer squash, and this time I also had zucchini, eggplant, and onions.

So I had the perfect combination to make ratatouille.

A couple weeks ago I did a video where I showed how to make a Crock Pot Ratatouille, and that's what I decided to do again this week.

So I will put a link for that video if you want to see how I put this together, and I'll also include the link for that recipe.

The only difference I did this week was I added a little kale to my Ratatouille soup, and I served that with some cooked rye berries.

Sweet Eggplant Dip

And finally one more recipe I made this week was with my eggplant.

I've talked before about how eggplant is not one of my favorite veggies.

Usually what I end up doing if I'm not making something like the Ratatouille I just showed you, I'll try to make a dip out of my eggplant.

So that's what I did this time.

This is a sweet potato and eggplant dip.

So I roughly chopped an eggplant and a very large sweet potato and added that to my three quart Instant Pot.

I also threw in tons of garlic, a little bit of carrot and celery, and some water.

I cooked that at high pressure for eight minutes, and you could do a quick release or a natural release.

It doesn't really matter because with this dip once it's cooked, we're going to mash everything together anyway, so you can't really overcook it.

After everything was cooked I added in some spices: nutritional yeast, miso paste, garlic and onion powder, smoked paprika, parsley, and black pepper.

And this was a really lovely dip that I ate with some toasted pita chips.

I took a whole wheat pita, cut it into triangles, and toasted it in my toaster oven.

So if you're like me and you don't particularly care for eggplant, give something like this a try.