Vegan delights: Black beans, squash and potatoes to celebrate the winter season

While Kirstin and I were in graduate school in California, we missed the changing seasons. It was nice to study in a maritime paradise for a while, but I’ve always loved the ways that autumn leaves, winter snow, spring blooms and summer swelter lend rhythm to our lives.

Here in Bloomington, we feel fortunate to get to experience such a wide range of weather. But there’s a strangeness still: even as the seasons cycle outdoors, it’s easy to feel unmoored during our visits to the grocery store.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to go back to the days when there were only two varieties of apple to choose from, and mostly canned vegetables through the winter! But it can feel strange to walk into the produce section and see the same things year round.

Previous column: Cooking up some kid-friendly fun vegan recipes

There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance involved in modern life, especially at mealtime — part of the problem is that it’s so difficult to feel steadily connected to the world we live in. Maybe you drove through snow to reach the store, but then, on the shelves: strawberries? Surely this disconnect does strange things to our minds!

So I’ve been attempting to cook more squash this fall. Even though my family won’t be eating any more food from our own garden this year — our house is just outside the official fallout zone from the recent lead ash mishap — maybe it’ll help my kids associate the changing seasons with the foods we eat.

And we’ll try to mark the cycle of time in other ways. Because of the pandemic, we didn’t go caroling last year, but now that everyone in my family has been vaccinated against COVID-19, it shouldn’t endanger our neighbors if we tromp about to sing from a few of their doorsteps. Kirstin has put together a songbook for us with holiday classics, some Mr. Rogers, and a lovely song from Cardinal Stage’s upcoming “Frog and Toad” musical.

Because, as much as I love seasons, winter can be hard. As the sun angles lower in the sky, and sunset starts coming noticeably earlier each day, I find myself thinking about how scary this time of year must have felt for ancient humans living at high latitudes. The sun was leaving and they didn’t know why! People must have known that the sun had always returned previously, that after each previous year’s winter solstice the days began growing longer again, but without an explanation, it must have seemed possible that this would be the year that the sun kept sinking and left our world cold and dark forever.

And so they threw festivals.

And we do, too. We join together with family, with friends, with our entire community to recognize all the blessings we already have. Then rejoice when the sun comes back — or, for those of you who celebrate Christmas, when light enters our world in other ways.

More: Transforming veggies, transforming ourselves

Bean soup served inside a squash, with a side of roasted small potatoes, might not appease the fading sun — or our Earth’s axially tilted geometry, for you astronomers out there. I suppose this is where I should offer a big shout out to space rock Theia, whose tilt-causing crash into early Earth gifted us with both seasons and the moon. In any case, we’re wishing you a cozy, tasty holiday!

Roasted Potatoes

The thing about roasted potatoes is that they are a delight every time: slightly crispy on the outside and delicious with just the lightest touch of salt and oil. We’ve been using small, thin-skinned potatoes, whose flavor and texture are positively festive. Plus, certain members of our household enjoy saying the name of this particular potato almost as much as they enjoy eating them.

1 pound peewee Dutch potatoes, sliced in half

1 tablespoon olive oil

Up to 1 teaspoon coarse salt

½ teaspoon black pepper

½ teaspoon paprika

Combine everything in a mixing bowl and shake it all together. Spread the potatoes in a single layer on a cookie sheet (we often cover this with an old sheet of parchment paper, to make cleaning easier), then bake for 20 minutes at 425 degrees Fahrenheit. If your oven is like ours, you’ll want to set the timer for 10 minutes to rotate the cookie sheet halfway through.

Black Bean Soup Served in an Acorn Squash Bowl

We went to Panera on a visit with my mother recently, where Kirstin introduced the children to soup in bread bowls, celebrating the dish as if it were the greatest thing since ... well, you know. Swapping the roll for a roasted acorn squash takes the idea from homey to fancy and pairs wonderfully with a green salad topped with walnuts and pomegranate seeds.

This recipe is for a child-mild soup, and we also blended half the beans to make it almost as thick as hummus. If Frank wasn’t cooking for kids, he would have left the soup thinner (no blending) and flavored it more lavishly, probably with an extra teaspoon of salt along with a teaspoon each of allspice, cumin, garlic powder and chili flakes. Not that we’ve tested that — we would have such irate children if we even tried to serve a soup like that for dinner at this point — but it seems like it should work!

1 acorn squash per person (we used four!)

Cut off or break the stem so that the acorn squash can balance on its bottom. Cut a slice about 1/3 of the way down from the top. Scoop out all the seeds and gloopy stuff, then bake with the cut side facing up for 45 minutes at 425 degrees Fahrenheit. (We baked both the bowls and the cut tops, planning to incorporate a bit of squash from the tops into our soup.)

2 cans of black beans (15 ounces each), drained and rinsed

1.5 cups water

2 tablespoons olive oil

8 ounces grape tomatoes, sliced in half

1 zucchini, quartered lengthwise then cut into thin slices

1 teaspoon table salt

½ teaspoon cinnamon

0.5 ounces basil leaves, rolled into a cigar shape then chopped into thin strands

A few scoops of acorn squash, the remnants from the excised lids of your bowls

Combine the water, 1 can’s worth of black beans, the acorn squash remnants from their tops, salt, and cinnamon in a saucepan and heat on medium low for about 10 minutes.

Put the sliced zucchini in a nonstick or well-seasoned cast iron pan and toast on medium for about 10 minutes, until the sides begin to brown.

With an immersion blender, grind up the black beans in the saucepan until you have a thick paste. Or don’t. Ask yourself: do I live with people who are likely to shout “Nooooooo, soup, I won’t eat soup!” — or not? If not, then you can skip this blender step. And feel lucky. I know that we’ll feel all nostalgic once they grow up and become soup-eating BIG KIDS or even (gasp!) adults, but right now, it makes cooking hard.

Add the tomatoes, the second can of black beans, and the zucchini to the saucepan. Continue to heat for about 10 more minutes. In the last two minutes or so, add half the basil, reserving the rest to use as a tasty garnish.

To serve, scoop some soup into each baked squash. And bring the saucepan to the table, because it turns out most people will probably want more soup than just one serving’s worth to go along with that squash.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Vegan recipes: Black bean soup in acorn squash bowl & roasted potatoes