Huge pot o' veggies

This is along the theme of the veggie pot I made last weekend. I just throw in whatever veggies I have, and add greens, beans, and seeds to make it have optimum nutrition, following Dr. Furhman's advice. We've been getting these giant broccoli and cauliflowers at the co-op. We had them twice this week with a guest, i.e., 6 servings, and still had a lot left. Here's what I had in the fridge from the co-op, all fresh and local:

broccoli

cauliflower

zucchini

beets (sweet!)

onion

eggplant

carrots

And from the garden:

kale

chard

1 collard green (decided I'd leave the rest for other meals this week)

tomatoes,

dill

basil

parsley (italian and curly)

I forgot to check for green peppers in the garden.

Here's a picture of the garden haul. There's a lot of kale under there:

I also had cooked up some white kidney (cannellini) beans. As I assembled the ingredients I realized I didn't have enough beans, but luckily found a can of adzuki beans in the cupboard.

I cooked this all in the pressure cooker. Some veggies take longer than others so I did it in two stages. The first stage was the eggplant, carrots, onion, beets, and kale, all cut up of course. I washed and then chopped the kale in the food processor. I cooked these up for 1 minute. It's such a big pot, it takes a few minutes to reach full pressure so it actually cooks longer, and it continues to cook while it's cooling and I'm preparing the other ingredients. Then I added the other ingredients except the beans, cauliflower and herbs. I cooked the cauliflower separately and then blended it in the blender with a bunch of hemp seeds and walnuts (portioned into however much you want per serving.) This made a nice creamy sauce. raw cashews would be even tastier than the walnuts, and a little sweeter. I added this to the final result, along with the beans and chopped herbs. pretty good! Next time I will juice the carrots and beets and it will be even tastier. This made 5 large servings (over 2 cups each), which I can then have each day this week. This will be a side dish to the corn at lunch and maybe at dinner too. Here's the result. It's more purple in real life from the beets. I froze 3 of the containers so they'll be fresher later in the week. Plus my plans might change.

This took about 1.5 hours to prepare because of all the chopping. But it was a fun thing to do on a Sunday afternoon when it was raining outside. And now food prep will be very quick the rest of the week.

One lesson learned from the pressure cooker: I'm finding if I use bean juice as my liquid, it's easy to burn the bottom. So I need to make sure to use plenty of water as my liquid, at least 1 cup for this big batch.