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• Mountain Biking: Rubber side down

  • Time for a Turnaround
    Well, my friends, things are finally looking up, and good timing, too, since I’m sure you’re all sick of me bitching. Recent bike build, including wheels… fun! In what feels like a fairly short time, I’ve come from sitting around … Continue reading → […]
  • This Raised My Pulse
    Hey, baby… wanna ride? I may be injured, but I’m not dead yet. I can still have racy thoughts. Here’s more info. In other news, UBI was an awesome success! I had a blast. I highly recommend it. Overhaul day…. … Continue reading → […]

• Edgy Veggie

Vegetarian recipe: I choo-choo-choose chorizo tomato taco soup

 

The tomato soup and an accompanying lemonade.

There’s really no better way to save money on food than a slow cooker, and I’m a firm believer that crock pots can result in food with a lot of flavor and heft. Combine that with a desire to cut way, way back on meat consumption for environmental reasons (boy, I’ve come a long way) and you’ve got yourself an easy urban challenge: What’s the tastiest thing I can make in the magic money-saving machine?

In the winter, I make a vegetarian taco chili (maybe not as fancy as the Breadworks vegetarian chili with chocolate, but it does the trick). This is a thick, beany, Super-Bowl-watchin’ number. Very tasty and filling (and works great on baked potatoes and Smart Dogs, too!), but not too appetizing when it’s 95 degrees outside.

So in addition to shopping for ingredients for one of the very summery, very healthy and tasty-looking potato salads in this month’s ReadyMade mag, I set out to pick up stuff for a modified tomato taco soup, adding soy chorizo to the mix.

I’ve used SoyRizo before and found it to be pretty excellent — most of the value of real chorizo is in the spices that make it what it is. SoyRizo pretty well nails those flavors in the same way that Morning Star’s veggie sausages do the trick for breakfast sausage (FYI, you can get that veggie sausage with any meal at Dot’s Diner!).

The soup ended up being plenty spicy (we like our food hot — the base recipe would be quite mild, so we chose a hotter taco seasoning and could have put in some chilies), and tempered with the recommended sour cream (actually, Tofutti sour supreme) and avocado, it was delicious. If we’d had tortilla chips around to crumble into it, I think that would have been worth it, too.

So, go ahead, take this recipe and make it yours. Easy on the pocketbook and the stomach.

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Like what we're doing? Got a spare sawbuck? Help us pay for site maintenance and reporting and we'll think happy thoughts about you sometimes. $100 gets you a personal, paperless thank-you video from Dave and Laura! $500 gets you... five personal, paperless thank-you videos from Dave and Laura and a tote bag!