
I come from a long line of dessert lovers. When I was growing up, my family ate dessert every night after dinner, and my parents still end each day with a bowl of ice cream (though my mother opts for an artificially sweetened one now). It’s a hard habit to break and one I’m afraid I’ve passed down to my daughter. But our typical dessert isn’t ice cream or even Soy Dream but fruit, plain and simple. Of course, if sugary vegan goodies are around, we’ll jump on them like a pack of starving dogs, which is why I try to keep them out of the house entirely.
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Near the end of the first week of my KISSS healthy-eating plan, calamity struck–or at least what passes for calamity when you are trying to cook and eat healthy soups every day. I went to the pantry and found that I had no onions. No onions! Take a look at almost any of my savory recipes and you’ll see the same first step: “Saute onions in a non-stick pan.” Onions provide the flavor base on which all of my soups are built, and without onions, I definitely couldn’t cook the soup that I had planned to.
It was almost dinner time, so rather than make a trip to the store for one item, I took a look in my freezer and pantry to figure out what I could make with what I had on-hand. In the freezer I had a package of Cajun-Style Mirepoix blend (onions, green peppers, and celery) and several bags of mixed vegetables, including a gumbo blend. Using them and canned tomatoes and beans from my pantry, I managed to make an amazingly good gumbo in under a hour, and the only vegetable I had to chop was the garlic.
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