Lundi Gras! Fat Meatless Monday -- UPDATE

So it is Fat Monday which calls out for some sort of toothsome feast, but it is also Meatless Monday, so I wanted to make something delicious and delightful but still adhering to my Meatless Monday ethos. I mean we call it Fat Monday and Fat Tuesday of course, but the feeling that the end of the carnival season evokes shouldn't necessarily be literal fat (though, mmmmm FAT!) but a feeling of abundance and pleasure in food! This recipe is spicy and rich and even vegan! I am adapting it from the blog FatFree Vegan Kitchen by preparing it with my pressure cooker AKA the appliance I love more than even ruby-red nail polish. Which is to say, A LOT!

I am also making a roasted butternut squash soup, and right now I am caramelizing some onions to go on top of that.

I peeled and chopped up the butternut squash and then put it on a baking tray and sprayed the squash with olive oil and sprinkled it with salt. I let it roast at 350 degrees for half an hour, then flipped them with a spatula, then let the roast another 30 minutes. I will toss the cooked cubes with some fresh ground pepper, cinnamon and rosemary. Then I will toss them in a stock pot with some homemade vegetable stock and combine them with an immersion blender and then stir in some sour cream. I serve the soup topped with caramelized onions.

SO, things don't always turn out the way you hoped it seems. The soup came out fantastic! I made some "poppin fresh" breadsticks to go with that portion of the meal, by taking a package of breadsticks and brushing them with a combination of melted butter, oregano and grated parmesan cheese before baking. These were wonderful. My brown rice cooked perfectly and tasted great. My beans SMELLED wonderful! However after an hour of pressure cooking and simmering they were hard as a dang rock. It happened. I got some bad beans. I am so disappointed!! If your beans are too old they can be very tough and may never soften. I left the beans on simmer while I took the girls out for chicken nuggets because at this point it was nearing bed-time and they were still hungry despite squash soup and breadsticks, OH, also my lettuce had frozen (got put in the wrong drawer!) and so there was no salad. Anyway, check the dates on your beans before you buy them and choose the freshest ones. I forgot to do that and I paid the price today.