Soupy Sunday: Autumn Root Vegetable Dumpling Stew

This past week I hit a bit of a breaking point. I suddenly felt so incredibly burnt out. I've been spending so much time working - for a paycheck, on personal projects, on my social life - that I've neglected something I've always believed to be of great importance. Relaxation. So I've spent some time recharging my batteries and today inspiration finally returned.

At IKEA of all places.

I was buying some furniture with my mother and wondered around the little food mart near the store's exit. There is actually a surprising amount of vegan foodstuffs for sale at IKEA. I picked up a few things I'll be using later on but, somewhere between the lingonberry jam and mashed potatoes, I was struck by the desire to make a Swedish inspired stew for this week's Soup Sunday.

The only problem was, however, that most Swedish dishes are heavy on the animal products. Heavy to the point of being terribly difficult to veganize. As a result I present to you a Southern-Swedish fusion masterpiece: Autumn Root Vegetable Dumpling Stew. (Root vegetable soups and stew are fairly common in Scandinavian cuisine and dumplings are, well, pretty darn southern.)

Autumn Root Vegetable Dumpling Stew

Makes 6 Servings

Ingredients

For the Stew

2 tbsp olive oil

1 small onion, diced

2 carrots, sliced

2 parsnips, sliced

1 small beet, cubed

1/2 celery root, cubed

2 cloves garlic, finely diced or pressed

8 cups vegetable broth

2 tbsp arrowroot starch, dissolved in 1/3 cup cold water

2 tbsp ground flax

1/3 cup each fresh thyme, rosemary and chives, very finely diced

For the Dumplings

2 cups chick pea flour

4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup unsweetened soy milk*

In a medium sized mixing bowl, combine dry dumpling ingredients. Add milk and mix until a dough forms. Set aside.

In a large soup pot, heat olive oil over medium heat. Sauté onions until they begin to become soft and are aromatic. Add carrots, parsnips, beets and celery root. Cover and cook over low heat for 20 minutes. Add garlic to the vegetable mixture for the last 5 minutes of it's cook time. Add broth and bring to a full boil. Spoon bite-sized balls of dough into the boiling stew**. Turn heat to low, cover and let simmer for 15 minutes. Add dissolved arrowroot and flax. Stir stew until it thickens, ensuring it does not burn***. Once stew is thick, remove from head and add herbs.

* Or rice milk. Or almond milk. Or which ever milk you prefer.

** As the dumplings begin to cook, your stew will get all kinds of foamy and strange looking. If it doesn't, you're doing something wrong.

*** I once burned a stew by adding some flour and then walking away instead of stirring continuously. It wound up tasting like a pot of pureed cigarette butts, which wasn't exactly what I was going for...