oyster and bacon soup

So this is not your every day soup. With 5 pounds of muscles that don't even make it into the final product, not to mention 36 oysters, this is definitely one of the spendiest dishes you're ever going to see on Garlicus Maximus. That being said, Andrew Carmellini's bacon oyster chowder is delicious and would be an excellent addition to a special occasion type meal.

andalusian gazpacho/cold tomato soup with corn guacamole

Gazpacho is a little tricky. You might think that you could just throw some peppers and onions and garlic and bread and a whole bunch of tomatoes in the blender, let it chill in the fridge for a couple of hours and call it dinner. But if you're not careful, that's when you get bland watery gazpacho, or a pulpy granular mash with very little liquid, or gazpacho so potently pungent from raw garlic and onions that you'll be scrubbing the taste off your tongue for days. With something so simple as a raw soup, it's extremely important that you strike a nice balance with your ingredients, because it's the simplest things that are easiest to mess up.

caldo verde

My friend Tony suggested I make a caldo verde soup with all my food co-op kale. My only regret was that it took so long to follow his advice.




My family came over for dinner after work one night back in July, right before I left for a glorious two and a half weeks of vacation in the California sun. I thought that this soup would be super easy and ready in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, the potatoes decided to be difficult and take two hour to cook, which was bizarre, but other than that this dinner came together quite nicely.

Caldo verde is a Portuguese soup or stew, and I used this recipe from Mario Batali. I spent the night before simmering a big pot of chicken stock and getting all my potatoes and kale chopped up and ready to go, so the next night all I had to do was chop and sautee the onion and garlic, and then add the broth and potatoes and let that pot go to work.

butternut squash and apple soup/carmelized onion and blue cheese bruschetta

It's funny. I've been blogging so infrequently these past few months that everything is cycling back around. I've still never written up my Hanukkah latkes or my Christmas prime rib, and Easter and Passover are just around the corner. Similarly, this dinner was something I whipped up when my good friend Faye was in town back in December, and she'll back in New York late next week!

Faye was my roommate in college for two years, but after graduation she pulled a bit of a disappearing act when she joined the peace corp and ran off to Morocco for two and a half years. When she came for a visit in December, it was the first time I'd seen her since May of 2008!

In honor of Faye's return, I hosted a small dinner at my apartment with a couple of our friends. It was a light meal, just a nice butternut squash and apple soup with some crostini with caramelized onions and crumbled blue cheese. We also had some beets tossed in argan oil, which was a special gift Faye brought me from Morocco. I will try and tell you more about argan oil in a later post.

I used this Ina Garten recipe as a jumping off point for my soup, but I ended up adapting it quite a bit. I left out the curry powder and apple juice, subbing in my homemade chicken stock. I also roasted the butternut squash before adding it to the soup, in the hope that made the dish more flavorful.




To start, I cooked the onions in butter until nice and soft, and then added diced squash and apples, chicken stock and water. I let it all cook together for a half an hour or so, and then blended it to make it nice and creamy. This soup was a bit unusual just because it was so sweet, but it was definitely nice tasting.

As that was cooking, I slowly caramelized some onions in butter for my crostini. I toasted up a nice crusty loaf of whole wheat bread and while it was still warm I layered each slice with a large spoonful of onions and some crumbled blue cheese. This was easy and delicious, and went really well with the soup.

All in all, this was an easy and light dinner, but no one went home hungry and everyone was certainly happy to see Faye. However, I do think I'd like to try a more ambitious menu when she's back in town later this month!

tomato soup with grilled cheese

big bowl o' soup

I can't believe how quickly this year is just flying by! Thanksgiving has come and gone, this is my 27th consecutive day of blog posting, and I've been at this since January! I am surprised at how long I've stuck with this, to be perfectly honest. A hundred and fifty three entries! I think it's about time I make up a logo and dress this baby up a bit. Some actual site design is long overdue.

Today's entry is actually a bit of a throwback. The blog's third entry was for tomato soup with grilled cheese, and so again we have this classic combo. A nice creamy soup with a gooey sandwich is always a winner, but there are about a million ways to put such a meal together. Last time we used a Cook's Illustrated recipe, but this time I pulled up a recipe from the Food Network's Tyler Florence.


cheddar monterey jack grilled cheese

And believe it or not, oven roasted tomatoes with homemade chicken stock, bay leaves, onions, butter, basil and a splash of cream makes for a pretty damn good tomato soup. Who'd've thuk, huh? And a buttered grilled cheese sandwich pressed on a griddle? Divine. There's a reason it's called comfort food, my friends.

The Tyler Florence recipe calls for fresh tomatoes, but our first go around of tomato soup came from Cook's Illustrated or America's Test Kitchen, (I can't remember which), and that only used canned tomatoes, so you don't have to wait until good tomatoes roll around to make a soup like this.


pot o' soup

There's not much else to say, except that I am watching Julie and Julia while writing this post, and I am starting to feel bad for poor Nathan. I'm not nearly as awful as Amy Adams was to her husband, but I know that he's getting a bit impatient with me writing these entries every night. I plan to continue to with writing regular entries come December, (and it can't come soon enough), but without the daily deadlines I hopefully won't be accused to ignoring him any longer.

So, in summary: tomato soup = yum, grilled cheese = it's perfect mate, and blogging every day = good for the three people who actually read this, but bad for the boyfriend. It's all about balance, and come December, I hope to find a better one.

corn pepper soup/tomato paella

Here's more of what I did with my late summer corn:


corn pepper soup

I made this back in September on a Friday night. Lauren and Hannah came over for dinner and I made this soup. I used homemade chicken stock and lots of corn, pepper and onions. I sauteed the peppers and onions, added the corn and stock and let it all simmer. I blended it all up and topped it off with a hefty sprinkling of cilantro and freshly cracked pepper.

I have to say that while I like both corn and peppers, I had been getting tons and tons of them from the co-op at that point in time. I think I must have been pretty sick of them because I don't really remember that much about this soup. It was sweet and peppery, but at the time it just wasn't the most inspiring flavor combination. Whether I was sick of those particular veggies, I didn't showcase them to their best advantage, or if it just wasn't to my taste, this soup was still relatively tasty and markedly better than the other component of the meal.

I also made Mark Bittman's tomato paella. The way the blogosphere tells it, this summer tomato recipe is just divine. Crispy arborio rice, juicy ripe tomatoes and a rich yellow color from a few precious strands of saffron. All the flair of a fancy seafood paella, minus a great deal of work and expense. Sounds like a story that guarantees a happy ending, no?


Mark Bittman's tomato paella

Well I have a different tale to tell. One of dry, chewy rice, overly herbaceous tomatoes and saffron that was sadly completely undetectable. It didn't taste bad, persay, but either I am way out of step with the online foodie commmunity, or something went really really wrong with this recipe. I totally wanted to love it, but it was a total flop.

Although it was great having Hannah and Lauren over for dinner, I think I owe them a more inspiring dinner!

cucumber and roasted red pepper soup

cucumber soup with roasted red peppers

I will tell you up front that I didn't like this as much as my other cucumber soup. It wasn't bad, but the flavors just didn't meld together as well as the previous soup. This probably had something to do with the fact that the other soup was a tried and true flavor combination, and this soup was just me throwing whatever food co-op veggies I had left in the fridge in the blender and hoping for the best. Sometimes improvisation can be a recipe for success, but in this case it was a rather forgettable endeavor.

Basically, I roasted, peeled and seeded a sweet red pepper, and blended it up with a cucumber, a couple of scallions, peeled seeded tomatoes, a slice of jalapeno, sour cream, plain yogurt, dried cumin and garlic powder. It was fine, but a little strange. I probably should have added a lemon or something, because it was a little dull, aside from the hint of heat from the jalapeno.

Though this was ultimately a forgettable meal, I do want to show you something I am currently so, so happy not to be doing: straining my foods for bits of skins and seeds too large to enter a wired shut jaw.


a laborious task

For four long weeks, this time consuming task went hand and hand with eating. Scraping a spoon back and forth for what seemed like an eternity, coaxing little clumps of pulp and fruit flesh to pass through the fine mesh strainer so I could finally eat. It was by far the most frustrating part of the whole experience and delayed my meals considerably. It's no wonder I didn't have the patience to go back and add lemon juice after such an ordeal!

Right now, I am still on a soft food diet and cannot chew, but straining is thankfully a thing of the past. Hopefully, the coming week will see further improvement and allow me to eat more substantial foodstuffs. Fingers crossed!

release/cream of mushroom soup

So, today I was finally cut free, the wires locking my jaw in place replaced with the far more forgiving rubber bands. I still can't really chew, but I can open my mouth and that is enough! On the down side, the past month has NOT been good to my poor teeth. I couldn't stop crying when I was finally able to open my mouth and see just how disgusting they had gotten. I am terrified that this is going to have a long term effect on my teeth, but hopefully a prompt trip to the dentist once the rest of the wires and rubber bands are removed will reverse all the damage. Say a prayer on that one.

Anyway. Nasty teeth and blackened tongue aside, today should be a day for celebration, as much as they dampened any enthusiasm I was initially feeling. I took the rest of the day off from work, and I'm going to see Salt with Paul at 5:20. Then, at 8:00, I'll meet Jess, Grace and Laura for whatever soft Mexican food I can gum down at Toloache, which is celebrating its third anniversary with live music and $3 margaritas. I was hoping to try the manchego cheese quesadilla with truffles and huitlacoche salsa, but I'm not too sure that'll work out in this stage of recovery. Even so, more foods are possible for me this afternoon than they were this morning, and despite the general unpleasantness of a liquid diet, I did eat some good things this past month.


cream of mushroom soup

For instance, this soup was the most delicious and perfect of all those that I made during my mouth's incarceration. For those of you who are counting, that includes zucchini basil soup, corn soup, tomato soup and broccoli chard soup. It also includes sad soupy guacamole, runny hummus and pureed ratatouille, overly oniony gazpacho, and overly green-tasting spinach and carrot soup, not to mention one horrendous experiment with liquefied pork fried rice that you should count yourself lucky to have never ingested. Considering how poor so many of those eating experiences were, you might think this soup is only good by comparison, but I assure you that is not the case. This soup is genuinely delicious, liquid diet or no.

Because my mom is awesome and thoughtful, she bought some mushrooms and made some chicken stock before I arrived home last Thursday, with the idea that I could make a mushroom soup. I love my mom.

If I had known what she was up to, I would have brought home some of the gorgeous dried porcini mushrooms Nathan had brought me back from the San Lorenzo Market in Florence. I'm sure they would have upped the deliciousness ante, but this soup was singing with mushroom flavor even though we only used lame generic white button mushrooms from the supermarket. Using the smitten kitchen as a general guide, we came up with a deliciously light and creamy mushroom soup that was quite similar to the mushroom ravioli dish I made in this blog's infancy.

Anyway, first I sauteed some onions with salt and pepper in hot olive oil. Once they were nice and soft, I added a package of mushrooms, which I had cleaned with a paper towel and sliced thinly. I also tossed in a couple of cloves of minced garlic and a small knob of butter. I cooked all that for about 15 minutes, which is probably why everything tasted so strongly of mushrooms in the end. They got nice and brown, even though I probably could have given them more space to breath. (You know, "don't crowd the mushrooms!" and all that.)

At that point, I added my mom's chicken stock, which she had reheated in a separate pot. She says this is to kill off any bacteria that might have been breeding in there. Normally I just dump frozen stock into the pot, so maybe I should rethink that!!! We really didn't cook it much longer after that, to be honest. After about ten minutes at most, we added some half and half, and then it simmered for maybe another 15 while we finished the dinner for the rest of the family.

The soup went into the blender with a couple of sprigs of parsley. A few quick pulses emulsified everything and took care of the oil slick that had formed on the top of the pot, since I probably used too much olive oil. After that, you're good to go, unless you're me, in which care, it will also need a good straining. So glad those days are behind me, with more and more solid food on the horizon!

As pleased as I am to be off the restrictive liquid diet, this is one recipe that will still be welcome in my kitchen. Rich but light, earthy and creamy and a snap to make, this soup is a definite keeper!

soup revisited

As you probably know by now, having your jaw wired shut jaw really limits your dining options. Milkshakes and smoothies get pretty tiring after awhile, which is why it's good to switch it up with some nice savory soups. Today I'd like to talk about two different soups that I've made in the past couple of weeks. I've actually covered both tomato soup and broccoli soup before in the earliest days of this blog, but in both cases I did some things differently this time around.


a roasting pan of tomatoes

For the tomato soup, I put some of my beautiful food co-op tomatoes to good use by rubbing them with olive oil, salt and pepper and roasting them on a baking sheet in the oven at 375° for 45 minutes. I also roasted a handful of garlic cloves, two sweet Italian peppers and almost all of a jalapeno, which was cut open and deseeded.


tomatoes and peppers from the food co-op, and garlic

I neglected to photograph everything after it's stay in the oven, but rest assured that everything was deliciously shriveled and blackened. If I wasn't reduced to only the smoothest of purees, I might have been tempted to stop at that. Roasted tomatoes are a beautiful thing. However, under the circumstances, soup was my only option, so I plowed ahead without even so much as tasting one of my roasted beauties.

While the tomatoes were roasting, I started the soup on the stove top, sauteing onions in some hot olive oil with salt and pepper. Then I added a can of whole tomatoes, and let that cook. Then I added a couple of cups of homemade chicken stock, which has been a big part of my liquid diet and will be covered separately eventually.

Once my pan of tomatoes had cooled off a bit, I set aside one of the sweet peppers and two garlic cloves for hummus, but added the other red pepper and all the tomatoes to the soup. I discarded the jalapeno, because I could tell just from smelling everything that a good bit of its heat had run off into the pan juices. This proved to be a wise move, as the soup was almost spicier than I could handle as it was. I can't even imagine the damage that any jalapeno solids would have done, if the juices alone were that potent. Unfortunately, the red pepper kind of got lost amid all the juicy tomatoes and the heat of the jalapeno. If I made a tomato soup with peppers again, I'd probably use almost as many peppers as tomatoes.


tomato and red pepper soup with fresh basil

To finish things off, I added a large handful of basil leaves and then went to town with the immersion blender. Because I didn't peel or seed my tomatoes, I had to strain this soup in order to drink it. This is often the case, and it's definitely a pain. However, this soup was good enough that I didn't resent my time spent straining.


a spicy soup

The second soup was a broccoli and swiss chard soup, and it was very easy. Just some garlic and onions cooked in butter, and then chicken stock with broccoli and chopped chard. Once everything was nice and soft, I blended it all up and put it through a strainer. I also added some grated romano cheese. I lost a great deal of the broccoli when I strained the soup, and what was left separated from the broth, which actually turned green from the chard stems. It was definitely not the world's prettiest soup, so I didn't take any pictures.

Interestingly, I eventually doctored up both soups with some cream, albeit for very different reasons. As I mentioned before, the tomato soup, while tasty, was just a little too spicy for my liking. Some heavy cream smoothed things out quite nicely. The broccoli soup suffered from a very different problem. It tasted like bad health food or something. It was just "green" tasting, with no richness or other flavor. Some grated cheddar and half and half made a HUGE improvement. The soup that I'd been struggling to stomach was suddenly tasty! Dairy really does make all the difference.

liquid food....

...sucks. I am getting the wires replaced with rubber bands tomorrow, I think. I hope. I haven't been able to lick my lips or unclench my teeth in nearly two weeks. It's been absolutely awful. I've been mostly drinking ensure mixed with ice cream, yogurt, sour cream, berries and juices. I am getting used to the kind of gross taste, actually.

I've mixed up a couple of savory things, but there's just something utterly unappealing about straining pureed spinach or avocado through your teeth, even if you've mixed it with black beans, sour cream, red onion, cilantro, lime, tomato, chicken broth, olive oil, cumin and garlic powder. It tastes good, but the act of drinking quickly kills any enjoyment of the meal.

Nathan actually liked my avocado drink and used it as a dipping sauce for a grilled cheese sandwich with black beans and avocado.



Boy would I kill to bite into something as simple as a grilled cheese sandwich.

I've also been drinking a lot of corn soup. I had frozen the disappointing watered down soup I made a few weeks ago, so when I got more corn I simply defrosted it and added more corn kernels. It's much richer and sweeter with the extra corn, but I'm sick of it too, to be honest.

Here's a picture:



I can't even eat the cilantro garnish. What an utter bummer.

as promised, zucchini soup/balsamic glazed green beans and the perfect ear of corn

In my last entry, I made orzo with summer squash in pesto sauce. This was because Nathan does not have a blender, and I couldn't make what I had initially planned, which was this gorgeous zucchini basil soup.


zucchini soup with basil

Originally from Gourmet, (surprise!), this soup is a snap, and totally delicious. I used two zucchini, and two yellow summer squash, plus half of one large, fresh, food co-op onion and vibrant green basil. I chopped the squash into fairly thick rounds. Then I realized I was supposed to have peeled the zucchini and julienned the skin, so I had to peel each round individually. That was a pain, so I only did the zucchini and not the summer squash. (I also figured that the green skin would be more visually striking than the yellow.)

I put the zucchini skin strips in a small colander with a spoonful of salt and let that sit while I made the soup. This is supposed to make sure the skin doesn't turn to mush when you use it to garnish the soup. It didn't, so I guess it worked.

To make the soup, I sauteed the sliced onion in olive onion until soft, and then I added the chopped squash and a teaspoon of salt. I let that cook for five minutes and then I added three cups of water and simmered for 15 minutes. Finally, I added a third a cup basil and went to town with my immersion blender. To serve I blanched the thinly sliced skin in boiling water for one minute. I added plenty of black pepper to the soup and topped it with my julienned zucchini. It was so great. The basil really added a delicious kick to what was already a delicately creamy delight. What a great summer treat! The perfect way to use up that bounty of zucchini!

I also made some green beans because I got a huge bag of them from the food co-op. I sauteed the other half of my onion, (possibly in butter or oil, but I think it was a spoonful of bacon grease), and then I added my green beans, ends trimmed and chopped in half. I stirred it all around for maybe five minutes or so, and then I added a healthy splash of balsamic vinegar. Maybe three tablespoons or so. I let that cook down for maybe ten to fifteen minutes, until it boiled away into a nice syrupy glaze and the beans were cooked through. Seasoned with salt and pepper, this was a pretty tasty side dish. Nothing I would jump at the chance to make again, but definitely not a dud either.


balsamic glazed green beans with onions, and the perfect ear of corn

I rounded the meal out with a perfect ear of summer corn. Where last time I tried to do too much with it, this time around I decided to let the corn stand alone, and boy did the flavor sing. I simply shucked it and dropped it into a pot of salted boiling for like 8 minutes or so. I didn't even butter it. It was so good. I hope you get to have corn this good this summer. One of us should, seeing as I can't. What a waste I am now. Never break your jaw kids.

minestrone

As I've discussed, kale is my least favorite food co-op veggie. I never know what to do with it, and it's always disappointing to get it from the food co-op.

I volunteered for a couple hours during distribution recently, and there were actually several people there lamenting the lack of greens this season. While I was in a different co-op last year, and was not among the members who complained about getting too many greens, I had to admit that I shared their sentiment. When I explained that I never knew what to do with all that kale, one woman suggested cooking it in oil with lots of garlic, adding chicken stock, red pepper flakes, cannellini beans and pasta to make a minestrone soup. When she put it like that, it sounded pretty good!


minestrone soup

I did pretty much exactly what she told me to. I used kale and beet tops, (which made it turn pink) as my greens, and threw in some carrot rounds as well. Nathan told me that minestrone is supposed to have tomatoes in it, so I tossed in some leftover tomato sauce. Then after it had been simmering for awhile, we tasted it. Nathan was worried that the chicken broth was too bland, so I told him to add some more red pepper flakes. He did NOT stop dumping them in when I said and thus the soup was far too hot, but STILL managed to be a little bland. Not terrible, but not that great. Next time I'll use a legit recipe, or maybe just add some onions. Also, I used canned beans and Nathan convinced me not to rinse off the bean gunk. That was probably a mistake. I think the beans tasted a little funky, especially on the reheat, and I've never had that problem with canned beans that I've rinsed.


spicy minestrone topped with grated romano cheese

chilled cucumber soup

chilled cucumber soup

After my huge pot of borscht, I am a big fan of the cold soup. It is cool and refreshing and filling; the perfect thing for the oppressive heat wave that has kept wrapped New York in its hot little hands for all of this month.

This cucumber soup came about after one of our recent CSA shares included three cucumbers of tremendous proportions. I'm generally not crazy about cucumbers, but I liked the idea of turning them into a light, chilled, creamy soup.

I very loosely adapted my soup from this Emeril Lagasse recipe. I had my three gigandor cukes, a large fresh food co-op onion, a scallion, and a sizable handful each of parsley and cilantro. I chopped that stuff coarsely, and then threw it in the blender. I was worried about pureeing all that food, but I needn't have been. This was really easy to make because Laura's parents bought her an incredibly kick ass blender for Christmas. It pureed everything to perfection. I barely had to chop anything at all; it was great.


cucumber soup with a sprig of parsley

Then I scooped in about half a container of sour cream and probably an equal amount of plain yogurt. For spice I added a fair amount of salt and pepper, some of my cucumber dill mix, dried chili powder, cumin, garlic powder and I think oregano. For acidity, I put in the juice of half a lemon, although I'm sure lime would be awesome too. I blended again to combine, and then ate it right away. All the ingredients save the spices were straight from the fridge, so it was reasonably cold to start with. It was more chilled after a night in the fridge, and the flavors stronger and brighter, but it was good immediately after its tumultuous journey through the blender, served with a juicy steak and white rice.


a cool and refreshing summer meal

Speaking of cucumbers, I'm finding they have a fairly short shelf life. In general, I haven't had to toss much of my food co-op veggies out. I mean, sure, when I'm eating salad or greens in the later part of the week, some of them will be a little bruised or wilted, but only the worst of them get tossed in the trash. So far, I've wasted very little of my produce, but cucumbers have been the exception. I've had a couple of them turn to absolute mush in a plastic bag in the fridge. Any storage tips? Or exciting recipes that I will want to make immediately, thus avoiding the problem altogether?

sugar snap pea and carrot soup

sugar snap pea and carrot soup

So, with this post, I'll have reached the end of sugar snap pea season. It was definitely a good experience, and opened my eyes to the joy of farm fresh peas. My last week of peas sat in the fridge longer than they should have, so I figured making them into a nice soup would be good, since they were no longer as sweet.

On a tip from Tenli, Nathan's mom, I shelled my peas and then sauteed the pods in butter. Then I added some water and let that boil away to make a nice broth. I strained out the pods, and was going to discard them, but they were actually surprisingly tasty, so I decided to incorporate them into my soup after all. This turned out to be a good decision since it imparted further pea flavor and it helped keep the soup from being too watery.

Meanwhile, I had sliced up some onion and carrots, and got those cooking in a little more butter. Once I had my pea broth, I added that and some frozen chicken stock, and let that all cook together. Then came the peas. Once everything was nice and soft, I added the pods back in and went to town with the immersion blender.

This only made two or three cups of soup, (it was only a pint of peas), but once properly seasoned, it was delicious. Sweet but hearty, it was a simple and successful meal. Topped with sliced scallions and paired with bread and butter, it was SO GOOD. Pea soup is always the best, isn't it? Will have to make split pea soup in the winter.


a summery soup of peas and carrots

borscht

beet and cabbage soup

In my ongoing attempt to get rid of my food co-op beets, I made borscht. This is easy, and tastes pretty good. I had made a borscht last summer too, but I didn't remember which recipe I used, so I started my search afresh.

I found this great website about supporting Ukrainian orphans that looks like it is straight out of 1997 and has a whole section devoted to the world's best borscht. I explored their collection of recipes, and got a pretty good sense of what I wanted to do: Beets, cabbage, carrots, celery, onion, potato, parsley and dill. The ingredients varied from recipe to recipe, but those were the most common across the board.

I started off with the mire poix of carrots, celery and onion. I had saved the water that I boiled my syrian beets in, so I poured all that in after everything had started to brown. I would have added some chicken stock also, but I accidentally defrosted pesto sauce instead, and started to add that instead before I realized my mistake. Near disaster! Haha. Then I added half a head of cabbage, a small bunch of chopped parsley, some minced dill and a handful of small red diced potatoes. I let that all cook for a while and then I added three GIANT peeled and diced beets.

I cooked that all for long while more and then tried to mash it all up a bit since there wasn't much liquid. It was pretty chunky, but when I tasted it, it was good. It's common knowledge that soups are better after a day or two when the flavors have had a chance to meld, and borscht is no exception. Two days later, topped with dill flavored sour cream, thinly sliced radishes, scallions and fresh dill, it was a delicious meal.

I still think beets are kind of boring, but making them into a hearty borscht is not only tasty, but a cool refreshing lunch for the dog days of summer.


borscht topped with radishes, dill and scallions

ghetto black bean soup

black bean soup with cumin crema

I made this a couple of Thursdays ago while I was watching an evening's worth of NBC comedies. I was kind of cranky because I think some plan for the night had fallen through, leaving me with nothing to do and nothing in the house to make for dinner. As I sat there vegging out and gradually growing hungrier and hungrier, I decided it was time to do something with some of those black beans from the food co-op that I had sitting in the pantry. I threw a large handful of them in a pot with some water without much thought, and eventually wound up with the soup pictured above.

This tasted quite tasty considering I was pretty much winging it. I have no idea how long I cooked this for, as I kind of started without realizing what I was doing. I improvised a lot. I didn't have any ham or peppers, like my mother would have used, or any chilies, red onion or lime, like this recipe suggested. However, beans are of themselves pretty rich and hearty, so I guess that the bulk of the flavor is already there, and all the add ins are less essential.

Basically, what happened was that I had the beans boiling away, and I kept adding more water, and then after awhile I added a cup or two of my homemade stock. Then I sauteed up some yellow onion with salt and pepper and a healthy sprinkling of cumin, and tossed that in the pot as well. I cooked this all on a really high boil because I was hungry and didn't want to wait a million years for dinner. In lieu of the ham, I diced a slice and a half of bacon, (a terrible brand to boot), and threw it in the frying pan. Once it had crisped up I added it into the soup with the pan drippings. I checked the beans every once in a while, and when I decided they were soft enough/I was too hungry to wait any longer, I went to town with the immersion blender. If you cook this the proper amount of time, blenders are unnecessary, but I was already taking a lot of liberties with the dish, so I decided to expedite my dinner.

The one ingredient I strangely did have was cumin seeds, which I toasted in a frying pan, ground up as best I could with my muddler, and mixed into some sour cream. This "crema" is a Bobby Flay recipe, and it probably would have been delicious had my sour cream not somehow frozen in the back of the fridge. In case you were wondering, it does not defrost well. At all. However, you could tell this was good.

All in all, the soup came out way better than I could have reasonably expected. I would have topped it with a little fresh cilantro, but I didn't have any. I needed something green for the photograph though... Spinach. I tore up some spinach. Like I said, ghetto black bean soup. Good, but ghetto. Will definitely have to try making this again properly, because it's one of my favorite soups, and mom has a GREAT recipe for it.

celeriac soup

celeriac apple potato soup

This is a 100% food co-op inspired dish. Before joining my CSA, (short for community sponsored agriculture), I had never even heard of, let alone eaten or tried to cook with celeriac. Also known as celery root, this knobby root vegetable has a tough, woody looking peel that hides a plain looking white interior. Back in the fall, it was included in one of our weekly veggie deliveries. When I made my way past the lettuce and carrots, what I found was a box of dirt. Skeptically, I dug my hands in a pulled out two scrawny and filthy roots. Like much of what we get at the CSA, that day's celeriac was much smaller, misshapen and dirtier than anything that you'll find at the grocery store, or even at a farmer's market. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised when I successfully transformed such an utterly unpromising vegetable into a delicious soup. It was so good that I was inspired to make it again from the giant celery roots on sale at the Union Square green market, and that I am about to tell all of you about it!

First of all, I only discovered this soup via the magic of teh internets. Every time I would come home from the co-op with a strange and intimidating vegetable, (fennel, kohlrabi, rainbow chard, cardoon, garlic scapes, lambs quarter...), the internet would have the answer I was looking for. In the case of celeriac, there were multiple answers, but the one I settled on was a celeriac, apple and potato soup. Although it sounded tasty, I was a little worried about how the sweet apples would stand alongside the savory stock and starchy potatoes. However, the celeriac really brought it all together. If you're still scared, know that Hell's Kitchen's Gordon Ramsay does his own variation with stilton cheese.

The two recipes are very similar: saute onions in melted butter with salt and pepper until soft. Add chopped potatoes and celeriac and cook for about ten minutes. Pour in stock (I used about three cups), dry or fresh thyme, the juice of half a lemon, and one large chopped red apple, (not red delicious, the good kind). Bring to a boil and then turn down the heat and let it simmer for a half hour or so. At this point, I went to town with the immersion blender, but you can also use a blender or a hand masher and sieve if need be, because everything should be nice and soft. Once it was nice and creamy, I added some crumbled blue cheese in lieu of the stilton, and if I had parsley, I definitely would have chopped it and tossed it in for color, as this soup is not the prettiest. The first recipe suggested adding cream, which probably accounts for her soup being lighter than the yucky gray color that mine is, but I didn't have any. I topped it with crumbled bacon and sliced scallions (because I didn't have chives) the first night, and tossed in some extra blue cheese upon subsequent reheatings.

What I can tell you about this soup is that having exact quantities isn't all that important. The first time I made it, I had the tiniest tiniest of celery roots, and a big old bag of baby purple potatoes. The second time I made it, I had a big ass celeriac, and three or four itsy bitsy red potatoes. I would say to try to use more celeriac than potatoes, because the flavor of the celery root is really what makes this soup unusual, but if you're a bit short it will still be good. I'd also say that you shouldn't waste your time peeling your potatoes or apples, as it all gets blended together in the end.

Serve this soup with some crusty bread and a nice salad, and you've got a first rate dinner!

broccoli soup save

If you ever kill perfectly good broccoli by steaming into oblivion, fear not, there IS a save:

creamy broccoli soup

I destroyed the broccoli I made to go with our mushroom ravioli, but before I went to bed that night I transformed it into to a perfectly good meal. This salvation soup was my mother's genius suggestion, and this epicurious recipe served as my guide. Should overcooked broccoli happen to you, simply saute the soggy florets with a little garlic and butter, and then mix in a spoonful of flour or two, (I used gluten free bread mix, which was fine in such a small dose). After the flour is properly cooked, add stock and let simmer. Puree it up with an immersion blender and then add half and half, with salt and pepper to taste. I then grated in what was left of my parent's white cheddar cheese and almost all of their romano cheese. This became a lovely and not overwhelmingly cheesy dish.

To prove to you the restorative powers of this preparation, I'll recount my brother's initial skepticism and ultimate conversion. I offered some to Matt when I was heating it up for lunch, and he gave me a look you would expect from a picky four year old. Broccoli is not without its detractors, and that is probably due in large part to how bland and tasteless it becomes when it is terribly, horribly overcooked. This soup, however, completely rescues a dead vegetable. When I finally convinced Matt to try just a spoonful, he was all "wow, Sarah, this is DELICIOUS!" and helped himself to a big ladleful. So lest you think I'm biased, know that this one has the Matt Cascone stamp of approval!

tomato soup

creamy tomato soup with a cheerful sprig of parsley

Generally, I am not that crazy about tomato soup. I don't dislike it, but it isn't something that I really get all that excited about most of the time. However, even though I didn't really grow up eating a lot of tomato soup, it still has those homey comforting connotations that are particularly attractive in wintertime. So, when I stumbled upon this America's Test Kitchen recipe for grilled cheese and tomato soup on the Smitten Kitchen blog, which I've been all about this week, it suddenly became the perfect thing to make for dinner.

I would definitely recommend this recipe. It had a really deep smokey flavor, a product of de-seeding and oven roasting the canned canned tomatoes with a little salt, pepper and olive oil until all the liquid evaporates. The recipe called for sprinkling them with brown sugar, but I decided not to because I've always been kind of grossed out by adding sugar to tomato sauce, and I'm not the only one.

Other than that, I pretty much followed the recipe as it was written: chopped up shallots or onions, an cooked them for a bit in butter with tomato paste. Added a spoonful or two of flour, cooked that off, and then gradually added ice cubes of my frozen stock, and then the tomatoes and the extra juices, which I strained to remove the seeds. After that cooked for awhile, Nathan blended it all up with the immersion blender, and then I added the cream, the brandy, some salt, cayenne and cracked black pepper. This could easily be gluten free if you just used the right flour!

While this was going on I made up the buttered grilled cheese sandwiches in the cast iron skillet. Normally, I "grill" my cheese sandwiches in the toaster oven, without butter, but if I was doing the classic soup and sandwich combo, I was going to do it right. Also, Nathan would have pitched a fit. As it was he was skeptical of my choice of Italian bread, and kept asking charming lovely little questions like, "have you ever MADE grilled cheese before?" Shut up Nathan.

Despite his hating, I fried up those babies just fine, and let me tell you, they were delicious dipped in that tomato soup. We served them with some vinegary tomato pasty cabbage, but Nathan took the lead on that one so I'll let him write that one up later.

Here's a shot of our soup on my kitchen table to close with.

kitchen table in the bronx