Winter Eats: Slow Cooked Vegetable Stock, Winter Fruit Salad & Homemade Pita

Tags

cold weather food, eat drink and be vegan, homemade wheat pita, Nourishing Meals, vegetable stock, winter, winter fruit salad

Homemade vegetables getting ready to be made into stock!

In addition to making yogurt, I’ve been making a lot of homemade stock lately.  I make a wide variety of soups all winter long, many from my two favorite cookbooks Let Them Eat Vegan and Nourishing Meals.  Here is a wonderful vegetable stock I made last week.  I cooked it on low in my slow cooker for about 12 hours.  It called for a lot of nontraditional stock ingredients such as greens and turmeric root and I loved the results.  I used it in a beloved sweet potato miso soup and it really elevated the flavors.

Beautiful winter salad with berries, citrus, pomegranates, cacao nibs, hemp seeds, nuts, pears…

Here is a beautiful winter fruit and nut salad that I’ve been making for the past month.  The recipe and inspiration comes from Ali Segersten at Whole Life Nutrition.  If you don’t have their book, Nourishing Meals, yet – you must get it! There are so many delicious and incredibly healthy recipes, plus invaluable information about nutrients and children’s health.  I consider Ali and her husband, Tom Malterre, MS, CN, to be forward thinking and love their nutrient dense approach.

I use Ali’s recipe as a base, but then I add a drizzle of honey and grated ginger.  I think the ginger makes this perfect for winter, since fruit can be cooling but the ginger warms it up.  I usually add avocados to this salad, but for some reason they were missing when I took this picture!

Homemade whole wheat pita with samosa filling

I’ve had a whole wheat pita recipe on my Pinterest “Savory” board since I signed up for the site.  I finally gave the recipe a try earlier this week and loved the results! They were really easy to make, and I am not the bread maker in our house (my husband is).  There were a few steps, and the dough took about 30 minutes to rise, but they puffed up in the oven just like they were supposed to and tasted great.  The best part is that I used 100% whole wheat from a local orchard, North Star Orchard, that had a few batches of freshly milled wheat berries available at our local market last fall.

I hope you are enjoying warming foods this – very – cold winter (at least it’s cold here in the Northeastern US)! If you make any of these recipes, do let me know how you like them!