Dinner Bowl #20

 

I was in one of those averse-to-obvious-protein moods, so I made a veggie soup and cornbread, a meal infused with various protein boosts.

The soup is Veggie Society's vegan potato soup recipe, which has nutritional yeast, cashews, and peas, all of which layer a bit of protein in. For me, it's not enough for a meal on its own, but they do help. This soup was nothing spectacular, but it was soothing and flavorful. I added parsley and crushed red pepper as a garnish as directed, but found that a bit of seasoned salt elevated it significantly, too.

Alongside it, I had some herbed tofu cornbread, from a recipe I found in Starting Over: Learning to Cook with Natural Foods by Delia Quigley and Polly Pitchford. The book is from 1988, and thus, is a look back in time at what prior generations ate in the realm of vegetarian/vegan foods and also what they thought was healthy.  I gather that Delia and Polly were the hosts of some sort of local TV show that aired out of Florida. They seem to have been stereotypical 1980s health nuts, with Polly teaching aerobics and Delia owning a health food store.

I bought the book at a used book sale, but you can also access it online via the Internet Archive, at least for the moment (there have been some legal challenges, apparently, to the Internet Archive's controlled digital lending program). There is something both amusing and endearing about their approach, so unapologetically outside the mainstream. Vegetarian food wouldn't have been all that challenging in the 1980s, but they went the natural foods route, which likely would have been confusing to a lot of people then.

It's a kind of dense bread, but tasty, making a batter out of tofu and cornmeal with baking powder and seasonings and then folding in carrots, onions, and corn. I could easily see having it as a loaf with veggie sides and some gravy, if I were to tweak the recipe a bit. But for this meal, it served its purpose, which was to be the main protein source without looking like the main protein source. And all these old cookbooks have the added bonus of not asking me for specialty ingredients. (Case in point: It just told me to use tofu; it did not say what kind of tofu. Silken? Firm? Who knows. I used extra firm, which may be why my bread was dense.)