Bread

Variations of Knödel

When there's too much bread the obvious solution for Germans are Knödel!

Here's a suggestion on how to prepare vegan Knödel:

1. Cut the old bread in small cubes (this is actually the main work)
2. Take hot water and put the spices of your choice in, then pour it over the bread cubes
3. Mix the bread and the liquid until you have a nice sticky dough (no need to aim for homogeneous consistency)
4. Form fist-sized Knödel and boil them in water until they swim
5. Enjoy!

Having experienced that bread is the product we almost always happen to have too much of, we got pretty creative with our Knödel approach. Here are some variants:

• Take Knödel dough and mix it with cut fruit (and maybe sugar) and put it into the oven to make a sweet casserole.
• Take Knödel dough, put it on a tray and add whatever you want to make a wannabe pizza.
  (We did one with steamed spinach and salad - you know the prewashed/precut ones from the dumpster, you never know what to do with... - and used the water from the veggies to prepare the dough. It was amazing!)

Simplified sopa castellana

Also called garlic soup, as it mainly consists of garlic, old bread and water. In the more original recipes meat broth and some additional jamón serrano is used, as well as eggs, which are boiled in the soup, but the super basic vegan version is as follows:

• Take as much garlic as you have or want and cut it up finely
• Break some old bread in bigger chunks
• Roast the garlic and the bread in a bit of oil in a big pot until it all has some color
• Add water
• Season as you see fit
• Boil until the concistency of the bread seems right to you

Fruits

Dumster-dived a lot of fruit that will soon go bad? No problem at all as soon as you have a blender!

• Just prepare a nice and healthy smoothie and make use of any kind of fruits, berries and even leafy greens you find.
• If you have a freezer you can also cut the fruit, freeze it and blend it frozen to get delicious ice cream. 
• In case of ridiculous amounts of fruit there are also the possibilities to cook jams and compotes, or to make juice or wine.

Sweet warm breakfast

This recipe may sound a bit decadent, but we actually had loads of saved chia seeds, cocoabutter and chufli, so we needed to come up with things like the following:

• Melt the cocoabutter and melt it. Then add one cup of chufli, water and some fruits like apricots, bananas (makes it sweeter) and grapes and cook it.
• The chufli can feel a little bit like sand in the mouth, but not when you add one cup of chia seeds and enough water.

Stews

Some things need to be cooked before they are ready to be consumed. In some plants there are natural insecticides that will protect the plant from being eaten. most of those substances can be neutralized by heating the food. There are several ways of doing this. I (fr4nk 0nf1r3) prefer steaming and boiling with water. Why? You can keep the temperature from getting too high. temperatures from over 130 degrees will cause fatty acids in the food transform into trans-fatty acids.

More info in English
More info in German

These trans-fatty acids can cause problems in your cardiovascular system. Water cannot reach temperatures over 100 degrees at normal airpressure and will change its aggregate condition instead. Besides that I try to heat things as little and as short as possible. nutriens such as vitamins will be destroyed too if you cook things too long and too hot.

When preparing a stew you should also take into considerration that ingredients need different amounts of time to be ready. So most of the times it makes sense to start the pot with the things that will take the longest and add the rest in an order so that everything is ready simultaneously. You can alway add fats like vegetable oils after cooking to make things more tasty and rich in energy. I like to put oils on the table so people can also adjust this own their own.