Carrot Ginger Miso Soup

I have a list of secrets to tell you about carrot soup.  I don't like carrots much. I'm not wholeheartedly opposed, like I am to say, beets or okra, but I'm not a fan.  I keep carrots around, I eat them raw with hummus, I add them to things, but when I'm served up a pile of cooked carrots, I'm not thrilled about it. They're so sweet and orange.  But, as a colleague of mine would say, I don't want to yuck your yum.  Maybe you love carrots.  It's really none of my business. 

So I bought far too many carrots for a stew that never happened, and they were just sitting there, staring at me.  I considered making seven or eight carrot cakes to freeze.  And I had this sinking feeling that I knew what I had to do.  Carrot soup has been all around lately.  Not so much around me, but you know, you see a friend post on Facebook that she's eating carrot soup and a colleague is microwaving something in the break room that looks like it's guaranteed to stain their tupperware and it's just everywhere.  So much so that when I asked my Facebook friends what to make with all these carrots, I was like, "Yeah, I know, soup.  What else?" And they were all creative and sweet and thought about pickling carrots and carrot salads and deep in my heart I knew the whole time I was going to have to make soup.

Vegan Minestrone

Minestrone can be anything you want it to be.  It's super flexible, adapting to what's in season.  In the summer, your minestrone can be full of zucchini and fresh tomato and herbs, and in colder months minestrone can be a refuge from thick, pureed vegetable soups while still providing an outlet for the squash, potatoes and hearty greens of winter. 

Minestrone can easily be made vegetarian or vegan.  Many recipes call for pancetta or beef both, but a dab of extra oil and a bit of sundried tomato can fill in for the rich flavor and texture provided by the meat.  If you don't use butter and don't sprinkle the top with parmesan, it's a vegan soup.  If you leave out the pasta, it's gluten-free.  Minestrone is what you need it to be.

The recipe below is an amalgam of all the recipes out there, skewed towards what was in my fridge on Sunday.  Yes, this was superbowl minestrone.  It's vegan, and while I threw some pasta into mine at the last minute, it's portioned to result in a rich soup with plenty of chunky vegetables and beans and no need for pasta.  (Though, if you'd like to add pasta, just add more stock). 

I took the head off a chicken

No pictures, but this is not a post for the super-squeamish.  Just a warning.

Like everyone in the mid-90s, I was a vegetarian teenager, which meant that I ate a lot of grilled cheese and zero beans or nuts.  I didn't eat tofu and had never heard of seitan or tempeh or any other vegan protein.  I was also once so anemic that I had to routinely drink the water spinach was boiled in for the iron (not recommended).  So when vegetarianism wasn't working for me, I went back to meat.  Sort of.

I'm the kind of meat eater who isn't looking to expand my horizons.  I have a friend who loves rabbit and duck, but the cuteness factor gets to me (my mom grew up with a pet duck).  I've never been able to eat anything on a bone, and this means Sous Chef Brian has used a fork to take meat off a chicken wing for me.  

So I don't eat a ton of meat, in overall quantity or in range. 

I'm also pretty upset about factory farming, so I try to buy meat from local farmers and feel like I have a sense of where it came from.  This is easy, with beef, we have great farms we can buy it from.  With chicken, the real limit is that at the farm stands and similar locales, most of the time you're getting a whole chicken.

So in reality, while I say I "make food out of food," what I actually do is make food out of vegetables.  I don't take meat from a non-food state and bring it to the table.  The meat I'm working with has generally been all fooded up before I see it. 

Totally Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup

I'm not posting step-by-step photos on chicken soup.  It's a classic, and I think mine probably looks like the same one you'd find in that old cookbook you inherited or picked up at the thrift store, with a couple of tweaks.  It's chicken soup.  I don't need to tell you it's good. 


Chicken soup is actually not among my top 12 favorite soups, but it's one that comes in handy sometimes.


Here's what I did (it's a two-day process). 

Vaguely Italian Couscous with Artichokes and Dried Tomatoes

It's weird how little I talk about couscous.  Couscous means quick, easy, vegetarian dinner here.  So we were having one of those nights where you sit on the couch and go back and forth with, "I don't know, what do you want to eat?" And I listed off ingredients we had handy and Sous Chef Brian was like, "Couscous!  With artichokes! And spinach!"  All irritatingly enthusiastic, and I was like, "Ok, with sundried tomatoes?" And he was like, "Yeah!" All irritatingly enthusiastic.   And ten minutes later, we had dinner.  Couscous is what we do around here when we're dangerously close to saying, "There's nothing to eat."  Are there veg in the freezer?  Is there couscous?  There's dinner. 

Oniony Brisket

My friend Laura was here last week, and she said, "I like that your blog is sort of vegetarian, even though it isn't."  And so I cooked meat.  There is another picture of meat here (nearly the same as above) but no process pics of raw meat, so read on at your own risk.


We were pawing through the food list for the buying club a few weeks ago, and looking at meat and I was like, "Oh, I could order a brisket."


I've never ordered a brisket before.   I've never cooked a brisket before.  The closest I've come to such a thing was several years ago, at a friend's mom's house for "Latkefest," which is in the fall and thus likely coincides with a holiday, eating her brisket and then repeating the recipe over and again out loud to prove I had learned it.  When I got back home, all I could remember was to use an onion soup mix packet.  So years passed.

French Onion Soup

I love this soup.   Who can beat cheese and onion in rich broth?


But like so many restaurant foods, when we started cooking at home a lot, the restaurant versions all seemed too salty.  I don't order it anymore because there is just too much risk of it tasting like a salt lick.  Soup's tricky that way.  But if I make it, I'm in control. 


There are a lot of onion soup recipes out there, with some variation.  Some folks insist you need to use yellow onions, or white, or Vidalia or red.  There's the white wine camp and the red wine camp and the cognac camp.  There's apple cider in some, and balsamic vinegar in others.  Some recipes include three hours of baking onions.   Some use chicken stock, some use beef stock and some use a mix. 


This is a fairly quick*, delicious soup.  It's hearty and cheesy and warm and rich and a bit sweet.  You could even make a vegetarian version with mushroom stock. 


Let's do this, shall we?

Vegan Garlic Mashed Potatoes

It's been a rough couple of days at Saturday's Mouse HQ.  So please allow me to complain about the pettiest little thing in the bag-of-ugly-things that the last few days has brought.


Arriving home from work, Sous Chef Brian went to get a beverage from the fridge and discovered the fridge was not working.  And immediately left for class.


I stared at it, willed it to cool, and played with the circuit breakers (I just want to say fuses, but I guess that's not right).  Then I turned on the dorm fridge we keep in the basement.  The dorm fridge is awesome.   

Vegetarian Chili

 

It's cool enough now for veggie chili, which is great, because my favorite veggie chili is the one that comes early in chili-season.  When you can still get fresh tomatoes and peppers and zucchini, you can make chili that's fresh and bright even while it's warm and cozy.


I foreshadowed this in my pico de gallo post, but I really don't believe in chili recipes (I barely believe in most recipes).  The heat of your peppers varies.  The actual number of working tomatoes you end up with varies.  Maybe you added more cayenne this time.  So this is about basic ideas, not a recipe.  Maybe this time you add some of this or that and next time you add more, or none.  Whatever, it's chili.  Beans, tomatoes, spices and then it's up to you. 


When I'm making something that's gonna cook for a few hours, I quick-soak my beans.  


This is a cup and a half of kidney beans.

Hot Tip: Roasted Vegetable Stock

You know that I'm a freezer-hoarder.  I have a lot of things in there. Including the ends and peels of every veg that passes through this house, for stock.  And I make a lot of vegetable stock.

MSNDG started saving her veg bits for stock, and then, once she had a gallon bag full, she realized she doesn't really use that much veg stock.  So what was all this freezer space taken up for?


First, it's better to keep your freezer full.  A full freezer is a more efficient freezer.


But also, you can use veg stock almost anywhere you'd use water.  And certainly anywhere you'd use chicken stock.  You can use it in place of wine in lots of dishes.   Veg stock makes your pasta, couscous, quinoa, millet, barley, whatever, a bit tastier.  Veg stock can thin a sauce without watering it down.  It's step one of soup. 


And vegetable stock is free.  Those are veg you were going to compost or toss anyhow.


So the interwebs were telling me that it's better to roast your veg first, and I was thinking, that's an extra step I'm just not gonna mess with, until I reached full capacity in the freezer.


I don't know what happened.  I have a good bit of sauce frozen, and two loaves of sandwich bread, and a loaf of banana bread, and some calzones (recipe to come), and maybe a lot of other things, as well as a gallon bag stuffed with veg ends, and all of a sudden I just didn't have room left in the freezer.  But I didn't have the kind of time it takes to make stock.


Time spent making stock isn't busy time, but you have to be home, because, you know, the stove is on. And it takes a while to cool before you can stash it back in the freezer.

So just to make room in my freezer, I roasted up the contents of my stock bag, figuring it would soften and shrink the veg ends, making it easier to store the bag of frozen veg until stock day.


So here are some up close and personal shots of my veg ends.  All of this, on a baking sheet at 400 until everything softened and browned around the edges.  30 minutes or so?

Then back into the bag (once cooled) in the freezer until stock day.   They took up half the space they used before, so I felt I had accomplished something. 

When stock day came, I opened up my bag of browned and nutty roasted veg and tossed it in an equal amount of water with some peppercorns and let it go, simmering, tasting every so often.  When it stops tasting like dirty water, start paying attention.  Mash the veg with your spoon a bit.  Give it maybe another hour.  

Strain, and if you're feeling it, run through cheesecloth too.  I freeze it in jars and in ice cubes. An ice cube is about an ounce, so they're easy for measuring and adding a bit here and there. 

So, should we roast all our stock veg?  I think so.  It has a lot more flavor than my typical stock, richer, nuttier, heartier, etc.  If it's convenient to do so, why not?

Thai Green Curry with Vegetables and/or Chicken

Yeah I said and/or.  Because the chicken was good and all, but the veg were spectacular, so you could skip the chicken. 


Tonight was one of those nights where Sous Chef Brian was on top of things, and I was not.  As we finished dinner, he looked to the pile of dishes and said, "Are you going to go blog now?"


Me.  "No.  Tomorrow is the farmshare post and I already have that written."


Him.  "Maybe you want to get this down while it's fresh."


Me. "No."


Him. "How about I get on these dishes, and you start writing."  


Thanks, Mom.  "Honey, have you blogged tonight?" "Are you getting enough blogging in?" "Have you had enough blog?"


The reality is, he's a smart boy and I have a backlog of posts of things I don't quite have recipes for anymore.  Things I just made and set aside.  Like, maybe I made this pasta sauce two weeks ago.  


So hows that for your fourth wall?


Tonight I made a Thai curry dish that we had at the house of friends a couple weeks ago.  A week ago.  In the past.  We were there, and they were cooking and they were making Pina Coladas and suddenly I realized why - there was an open can of coconut milk... there was coconut milk in the dish.  Damnit.  You never want to be the person who doesn't want to eat what they're served, but I can't stand coconut milk (or coconut for that matter) and Brian is even more opposed... the coconut he's fine with but the milk...ugh the milk.  So that's what goes in the Pina Coladas.  The drink I can't drink even though I really like: 1. pineapple and 2. drinks. 

Orange Seitan and Noodle Stir Fry

This is one of those things that happens in my kitchen on a weeknight when plans have gone out the window.  I make a list of things I'm going to cook for the week,but then the milk goes bad or I forget to marinate the whatever.  

We needed to use up the last two side servings of that slaw I made, wanted something hot and protein-y and dinner-ish with it. 

Find some veg.  

Beef Barley Soup

I'm the sort of person who makes food for people.  If you come over, I might open the freezer and suggest you take something.  "I made too much pasta sauce/pita bread/garlic scape pesto - why don't you take some home with you?" I'm like your Jewish or Italian grandmother, only much younger.  And I don't want you to eat it all now, just fill your pockets with it for later

My mother does this with groceries, so I have to imagine that's where I get it.  I still have a can of pineapple that she handed to me without explanation a few years ago, several boxes of cake mix, and I've just received a jar of banana-peanut butter.

If you live far, and something good or bad is happening in your life, I'll send food. If you live close and have something going on, I'll make food and bring it over.   For years, I've sort of had this joke about it, if there's someone who is sort of adorably pathetic - typically the younger hipsters - I say, "I want to make him soup."

Several weeks ago, I spoke to a friend about how she was dealing with her chronic illness and offered to make her soup.  Not that she's unable to eat a hamburger, or unable to cook her own soup, but you know, I could make her soup.  She seemed insulted and accepted no soup.

Fine then.   Maybe some people don't like to be described as adorably pathetic.  But I don't learn.  So another friend has been eating hospital food for several weeks now, and so I told him I'd bring soup, and that I make potato leek and chicken tortilla and such - was there anything particular he was interested in? "Beef barley."

Beef barley.

1.  I don't think I've ever had it.  It's just not something I'd choose.It's not the beef, per se, I like onion soup. I like beef stew.

2. I don't buy the sorts of things one makes beef stock out of.

Is it still considered making soup if you don't make the stock? I saw recipes for "quick" beef barley that included opening a can of stock, dropping in deli sliced roast beef and a few vegetables, and simmering 30 minutes.   Is that making soup?  Or is that adding some stuff to pre-existing soup?  Will it have the healing properties of homemade soup?

I didn't want to risk it, but I'm really not a "snout to tail" person.  I compromised.  Some existing stock, and some beef on the bone, and together we'd get something kind of made of food. 

Vegetarians look away - raw meat after the jump.

Potato Leek Soup

giant bowl of soup

It's getting to be the end of soup season.  A hot bowl of soup is so comforting right when the weather starts to get chilly and then through the winter, but as soon as there's a hint of a warm day here or there, soups can start to seem so heavy, so warm... still appropriate for a rainy day, but burdensome when the sun is shining.

But April showers, right?  We still have a couple more weeks.  Pretty soon we'll be trading leeks for scallions - until then, we have potato leek soup.

Fennel and Sundried Tomato Risotto

 

Risotto is hard.  You know what I mean.  Maybe a friend or relative has made risotto and watched you eat it, waiting with each bite for you to acknowledge all that went into it.  Maybe you've made risotto.  Maybe you've read recipes for risotto, and said, "F this" and ordered a pizza. 

Sous Chef Brian mentioned a couple of months ago that I too frequently used the phrase "with love" in the blog.  Whether I was talking about doing something fairly painstakingly, or about how you could, if you wanted to do it "with love," he thought it was too much.  So from that point forward, I've avoided the term.  Risotto is made with love, the kind of love that is so closely bound up with hate that you can barely tell the difference.   My cat Ainsley has this problem.  She loves you.  She nuzzles you.  She nuzzles you harder.  She bites.  She wants to taste you.  She doesn't know the difference between love and hate.

Neither, apparently, does risotto.  

The swearing?  That's love.  The stomping of feet and insisting that it must be over soon?  Also love.

I made risotto once before, in a an alternate reality when we lived in a cottage in the woods.  Really.  I think the memory had faded just enough for me to go at it again.

Chicken Saltimbocca

I wish dinner wasn't delicious.

What's my point here?  I guess if it wasn't delicious, I could post this as a fail and move on.  Big picture?  This blog is not about "check out my innovative new recipe you've never heard of" or "look at my impeccable technique."  It's about "look what I made for dinner."  Sure, I want it to say, "you too can make awesome sandwich bread/crackers/sweet and sour seitan," but I guess the part that follows that is "since I did it, and I'm not good at this sometimes."  I just posted a fail (there was the invisible cashew cream sauce with the chicken and black bean egg rolls) and I hate to do it again...  but this is about what I made for dinner.

Some nights I don't want to cook.  I don't know why I can't just take the tortilla soup out of the freezer and go with that, but I make something new instead.   Tonight, I didn't even have to think of something to make - it came from the comments, when I asked what to do with the leftover prosciutto from the spaghetti squash, Cheryl said "saltimbocca."  I've stuffed chicken before.  This is not a technique that I'm unable to handle.  But somehow, everything about it was.

How to defrost peas

Let's say you're making pasta, and adding frozen veg.   Like maybe your sundried tomatoes turn out to be the unchemically processed kind, and you discover they should have been in the fridge, not the cabinet, and you're out of fresh veg, because it's the end of the week, and you're like, "Well then, peas it is."

Here's my hot tip on defrosting.

Make pasta.   Add frozen peas to colander.  

Drain pasta over peas.  Voila!  Defrosted peas.

This translates to corn as well.  Less so to broccoli and leafy greens and not at all to meat.

Dinner:  garlic, wine, stock, chicken, red pepper flake, pasta, peas, parmesan.

Email me with your own hot tip, or a suggestion, or complaint, or whatever.

Dal Makhani, sort of, and rice

Let me preface with this, I have no effing clue what I'm doing.  I had to Google half the words in this recipe to even start.

Tortilla Soup with Kale and Chicken

I don't really make soups.  I'm not good at viewing a soup as "dinner."  Put a grilled cheese sandwich next to it, and I'm all set, but just soup sounds like a beverage.   But this is different.  This is borderline stewlike.  This has stuff it it, and if you want to put different stuff in it, that's ok too.  Like pizza, pretty much, you can clean out your fridge into tortilla soup.

Collards and Beans and Rice and Such

A warning for those of you who need it - bacon ahead.


We've discussed my disinterest in recipes - spoiler alert - no recipe today.  How long do I simmer it?  Until you're done with that other thing you're doing.  Seriously.  How much onion do I add?  I don't know, how much onion do you have handy?


That's how I cook most things.   As is convenient.  Baking is different and I don't do much of it.   The lack of planning and disdain for mise en place does get in the way sometimes, but I can't imagine I'm the only one who cooks up a half-crappy dinner now and again.   Do I want to stress myself out to do that slightly less often?  Probably not.


So dinner is as it comes together.  Oh, we have some more of that?  Add it in.