weekend vittles

I look forward to the weekends and the opportunity to spend a little more time on food. With my wonder husband present for baby distractionary maneuvers, I have a few more moments to work on my veggie slice and dice skills and put together a meal that maybe has a side dish instead of being just a big pot of soup.

Of course, first the chrisasaurus needs to whip up waffles for breakfast! We use the pancake recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance, doubled for waffle batter.
What you see before you is the king of waffle makers, the All Clad Waffler 9000. (The number is discretionary, I just sort of threw that in.) This was a Christmas gift to our clan and is a ten thousand point improvement over our old waffle maker, the Bamalator, which took about ten minutes to churn out two waffles (and a real let down in the BAM! department as well).
My husband will tell you I have no patience for that sort of lollygagging when it comes to my breakfast foods. This waffler contraption makes all my waffles in large sheets and in 1/4 the time it used to take for us to make them total. That's what I call progress. Above is my daughter's as the rest of them did not last long enough for photos.

Oh and then there was a soup. It was based on the Southern New Year's Day soup from this month's Vegetarian Times. I didn't see it on their website. So if you have the mag, check out that photo because it looks much better.

I kinda made substitutions and additions based on what I had in the pantry. You should know I am a newb at cooking and am usually not confident enough to stray from a recipe. So if I can, you can. I wanted to use up the last bit of black eyed peas I had, so I decided to roll with it. I threw in a pot:

The last glug of olive oil in my bottle into the pot. About 2 Tbs.
Chopped up half an onion
4 cloves of garlic minced
Random dash of assorted spices: Marjoram, Thyme, Sage.
Half a bunch of curly leaf kale, stems removed, and chopped into largish pieces
28 oz can of crushed fire roasted tomatoes
1 cup dried black eyed peas
1 cup squiggly pasta
Less than 1 qt of veg broth (I believe about 1 cup was used from it, then I used the rest in this soup)
7 cups of water

Heat up the oil, saute the onion and garlic, add the kale and cook for a bit until it starts wilting. Add veg broth, water, tomatoes and black eyed peas. This needs to simmer about an hour. Then I added the pasta, let it cook through about ten minutes and we ate it with Vegan Parm (recipe from Yellow Rose Recipes) and the last bit of homemade bread we had. Yum!

Besides the large hunks of tomato in the soup (neither of us are fans of eating chunks of warm tomato) it turned out really well, sort of a spin on a minestrone. The other thing I might try doing is adding less water or more broth. I really need to make some broth, we are out, and I need to freeze it so I have it on hand. I never seem to get from putting it in the fridge to cool to putting it in the freezer for storage. Any tips out there? I am always open to your experiences and suggestions.