Lentil Stew

So, I had this jar of dried little French lentils sitting in the back of my cupboard. Before I moved to Arizona a year and a half ago, it was sitting in the back of my food shelf in Washington. I'm pretty sure it traveled around to at least three different places of residence with me over the years. Anyway, I rarely cook with lentils.

It may be because they do not share the American culinary ubiquity of, say, black beans or pinto beans or chickpeas. Lentil burritos? No. Refried lentils? No. Lentil hummus? No. But I'm actually inclined to believe that my reluctance to use them originates in my childhood.

We had dried lentils in our pantry, too. They were in an old cylindrical plastic food container, opaque with scratches, with a yellowed snap-on lid. A little paper label on the front read, in my mother's handwriting, "LENTILS." I don't know how long they'd been there (probably about as long as my French lentils stayed unused in my own supply).

It was afternoon. I felt adventuresome, and I wanted candy (bear in mind, not that it changes the story, but I was about 5 or 6 years old at the time, and my parents weren't the type to freely give candy to their offspring). Bored with my usual crime of grazing on pinches of flour out of the container, disillusioned by my recent experience trying to eat baking soda (it looked like flour), and probably running dangerously low on tubed decorative icing nabbed from the spice cabinet, I remember distinctly that I decided to broaden my horizons a bit.

"Lentils," I wondered. I didn't know what those were. I evaluated the shape of a lentil. It was notably comparable to the shape of an M&M. But lentils were smaller, and relatively colorless. "Flour has no color," I thought. "Flour tastes good." As it often does, my sense of exploration overcame my trepidations. I took a small handful of lentils, and I ate them.

The texture was unpleasant. Hard, stale, and simultaneously crunchy and chewy, they had no satisfying give when masticated. The lentils tasted like old, musty rags. I remember making a face and thinking something along the lines of, "yuck," as I grabbed a second handful and swallowed those whole. Positively gag-inducing; certainly no better than the first bunch and likely a little worse. I remember tossing back another handful and a few more individual lentils before deciding, with great disappointment, that this venture was better abandoned.

I don't remember what went on for the rest of that afternoon and evening, but I do recall with clarity the feeling of nausea. The continual aftertaste of musty rags. A dull, building headache. Rolling discomfort in my stomach, and the wrenching quease that never brought relief. I tried to bring them back up to no avail. I didn't want to tell my parents because, well, it's embarrassing when you intentionally eat a bunch of dried lentils and then feel shitty. Besides, I was pretty sure I wasn't supposed to snack on dried goods out of the pantry.

(Looking back over this experience, it seems apparent that, as a child, I had some sort of eating disorder.)

In any case, lentils have never really enchanted my adult self like other legumes. I got the French lentils during some crazy scheme I had one day to have available in my own personal store, every type of dried legume on which I could get my hands. You know, just in case I needed them for something.

After about four years (read: a few weeks ago) I decided to finally cook up my lentils and serve them in a coconut-squash soup. I was excited, because it sounded good, and it's soup season. This is all really beside the point, because it took about 2 hours for the lentils to mostly cook, and the soup didn't really turn out that well.

I don't like giving up on myself, though. I got more lentils (regular ones, this time) and made a soup in which to put them, using neither squash nor coconut milk. It turned into a stew, but whatever. It's amazing when it's cold out. And cheap, which is good when you're living more in the red than you've ever lived before.


LENTIL STEW

1 cup dried lentils, rinsed and picked and then cooked
cooking oil
3 stalks celery, all chopped up
3 carrots, all chopped up
1 onion, all chopped up
2 lbs potatoes, all chopped up (1/2 inch cubes is great)
5 cloves garlic, all chopped up
1 tbsp oregano
1 tbsp dried thyme
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
2 bay leaves
few leaves kale or spinach or other green, all chopped up

1. Cook the lentils in 2 cups of water until the water is absorbed and the lentils are thoroughly hydrated and not at all crunchy. This can take anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour, depending on how old your lentils are. Stir every so often toward the end, and add some sea salt to taste.

2. While the lentils cook, toss the carrots, celery, and onion in a little cooking oil in the bottom of a stockpot and put it on medium-low heat. I was going for a sweetening-of-the-onions effect, but I didn't consider the fact that the carrots and the celery were hanging out too and they got kinda bored in the pan. That, and I didn't even have a whole onion to work with like I'd planned. Just half. So... that didn't really do anything. Make sure to stir them every so often.

3. While the vegetables are cooking, you can cut up the potatoes. I like red potatoes. You can leave the skin on, and the texture is nice, and they don't fall apart too much.



Look. Look at that relative uniformity.

4. Maybe, by the time you're done chopping, the vegetables will have relaxed rather a lot in their pot. They cooked in there nice and slowly for about 20 minutes. Maybe more. I don't remember, to be honest.



5. Toss the garlic, oregano, thyme, paprika, salt, and red pepper flakes into the cooking vegetables and let that cook another minute or two.



6. Add the potatoes to the pot, and cover with water. I think I added about 6 cups total. Add the bay leaves. Give it a bit of a stir, cover, and turn the heat up to medium-high to bring to a boil.



7. After it's boiling, reduce heat to medium-low again and cover the pot just partially. Let it simmer away until the potatoes are tender, then stir it every few minutes for 10-20 minutes more, so some of the potatoes break up and thicken the stew. Yeah. Then it gets good.



8. Dump in the lentils. Stir it up a final time, and taste for salt. Add if necessary. You can add your green bits at the end. I leave them out altogether and drop them in when I'm heating up individual portions for leftovers. They should really only be hot for 5 minutes or so. Otherwise they go rather limp and become somewhat gray. Not appealing.

Cooked lentils are easier on the stomach than are dried lentils, come to think of it. They're a lot more palatable in general. There's nothing to fear from lentils in a stew, anyway... especially this one, since it's amazing. Slightly spicy, but it's cold out so that's warranted.

That's really all I have. Go forth and consume more expensive things in my stead.

Miso Soup

I think I have discovered my new sick soup.

I wanted to say something about my memories of Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup from childhood sick days, but I cannot. I begin to rant. This blog is not [supposed to be] about what is wrong with the world, it is about what is right with food, and cooking, and experiments in the kitchen.

Grilled Cheesus, how I love experiments in the kitchen!

Anyway, I did have miso soup once or twice when I was in third grade, and a girl in my class brought in miso soup for show-and-tell. It sure drove my carriage. (What does that even mean?) The umami of it all. That sweetly salty pungent miso flavor. That broth. The little seaweed bits.

For whatever reason, it is only now that I embark on the quest to find the perfect miso soup. Or at least, make the perfect miso soup. OK, just make some miso soup. I took ideas from all over the Internet, ingredients carefully imported via care package from Seattle's finest Japanese market (Uwajimaya), and my obsession with fat Udon noodles. I definitely took a good look at this recipe for miso soup with udon noodles, which featured an egg poached into the soup. Hey, when you don't eat land-flesh, you might as well get your B-12 where you can, right?

I must preface this with saying that I am not Japanese. I still don't know anything about Japanese cooking. It is also my understanding that green onions (scallions) are commonly used in miso soup. Alas, Whole Foods was not carrying green onions this week. (Really, Whole Foods?) So I used red. Very different. Still an onion. And I don't know if it's really all that common to use noodles in a miso soup - I always thought of it as tofu and seaweed and green onions in a delicious broth, but I finally found Udon noodles I like and I couldn't pass it up. As for the egg, I'd never seen that before, but I love poached eggs, and I love taking in all that good egg nutrition.

That said, this is my miso soup.


MISO SOUP
some udon noodles - however much you want to put in 4 cups of soup
couple of 3-6 inch pieces of kombu (dried kelp)
4 cups water
1/4 cup bonito flakes (these are dried flakes from a block of specially aged tuna. Mine came in little packets of about that 1/4 cup, so I used one packet)
3 tbsp miso (whatever kind you like - I used shiromiso/yellow miso)
6 oz tofu, cut into cubes
1/2 cup sliced green onions (or other onions, if you have no green)
few crumbles of wakame (a type of dried seaweed)
an egg or two



1. Cook your udon noodles according to the instructions on the package they came in. Mine took 11 minutes at a rapid boil, no salt. The brand I like is made in Australia by Hakubaku, but I cannot find it anywhere on the web. It is in a plastic-lined white paper package with a lot of Japanese characters on it, and in tiny letters at the top it says "The Kokumotsu Company" and underneath that in larger letters it says "Organic UDON" and has a drawing of a stalk of wheat. It is not the same product as this. Anyway, it's delicious, look for it in your local Asian market, in your grocery store, wherever. They get all fat and slippery when they cook. Just as they should. After they've cooked an appropriate amount of time, drain them and set them aside.



2. You can now make what's called "dashi," a kind of broth. Google it. There's a lot of info from people a lot more knowledgeable than I am. Start with some pieces of kombu. Another Asian market find. They are wide and flat and dry and brittle.



Wipe them clean with a damp cloth (I don't know why, but everyone says to do it, so I did) and put them in a pan with 4 cups of fresh, clean water. After 5-10 minutes they should rehydrate and become larger.



Put the pan on medium-high heat and sit tight nearby. It will take several minutes, but when the steam starts rising from the pan, you can take out the kombu. Set it aside, use it in something later, snack on it while you cook, make second dashi from it, whatever you feel like. But don't boil it.

3. You can now add the bonito flakes to the pan.



Give it a swirl to make sure they're all touching the water. Keep the pan on the heat and wait for it to come to a boil, and then take the pan off the heat. Let it sit tight for 10 minutes or so to allow the bonito to calm down and sink to the bottom.



Once that happens, strain the liquid through a sieve lined with paper towel (or a paper napkin) into a bowl. You can save the bonito flakes for second dashi, or discard them.

That liquid you have? See that? Smell it?



That's your dashi. I don't know how it smells to most people, but to me it smells like Maine. I could've held my face over that bowl of dashi for a long time and been quite happy. But then I'd never eat dinner, so I decided to soldier on.

4. Return the dashi to a clean pan, on the stove, over medium-high heat. Take out a few spoonfuls - doesn't really matter how much - of the dashi and mix it in a separate bowl with your miso, until the miso is all dissolved-looking and it's pretty thick and uniform, but liquid. Keep that handy. When the dashi simmers, add however much already-cooked udon you want in your soup. Stir it to break it up if it clumped together while sitting, and let it simmer for 5 minutes. The udon and the dashi will exchange flavors, and the udon will get even fatter and slipperier.

5. While the dashi simmers, you can chop your tofu. It can be firm or soft, silken or not. I used firm. It was good. I just cut it in pieces that were large enough to provide some kind of feeling on the tongue, but not so big that you'd not taste anything else.



You can also hydrate your wakame. And believe me, you don't need very much. You see these crumbles?



After a few minutes in water they became this.



I think that's plenty for 4 cups of soup.

6. After the udon has simmered enough in the soup, stir in the miso-dashi thick liquid, the tofu, and the onions.



Simmer all that together, over medium heat, for 3 minutes or so.

7. If you want to use an egg, now is the time to slip it in. The trick to poaching an egg without it getting messy is this. First crack it into a small bowl, make sure the yolk is intact. Check your cooking water to make sure it's not simmering too fast, or it will toss the egg around. But it does need to be simmering, or the egg will cook very slowly and just get really firm and unpleasant. Take your bowl, with your egg in it, lower it down all the way to the water, and slip it right in. Don't plunk it in, don't drop it in, don't crack it in. And once it's in, don't mess with it for a minute.

8. Cover the pan, turn down the heat to medium-low, and wait a minute to a minute and a half. Then you can peek. Lift up the egg, wherever it's hiding, with a spoon and see if the white is cooked. If not, cook it longer. If so, it's ready to eat. I left mine on an extra two minutes and it cooked too much. Boo. When the egg is cooked, carefully stir in the wakame.



9. To serve it, just get some of everything in a bowl (don't be stingy with the broth!), and put the egg on top. If you had green onions, like I didn't, you wouldn't have to garnish with chives to make it look cute. Although you still could, I suppose.







I had trouble selecting a picture I liked, so there. Have a bunch.

My thoughts on this soup are this. Leave out the egg, use scallions instead of red onion. Noodles are fantastic, especially if you're ill and need noodle soup. The broth tastes amazing. Definitely good to make your own dashi. It doesn't take that long if you have in mind exactly what you need to do. Nothing about it is difficult. Miso is wonderful. Go get some.

In other news, I didn't do a video blog this time (obviously). It's a lot of work for so few readers. Maybe next time?

Chickpea Stew

I thought I'd throw together a little stew this week. I haven't made it before, and there wasn't a recipe. So goes cooking, though. Recipes can be tedious if that's all you ever use when you cook.

Part of the inspiration for the stew came from the failure of central Arizona to enter a proper autumnal phase, after the equinox, like all the other states. I guess I thought that if I invoked the power of butternut squash and russet potatoes (autumn) to draw the life out of tomatoes and corn (summer), somehow a new season would float in and we'd all be saved.

Alas. The forecast for tomorrow is 104 and sunny.

My stew, on the other hand, was very good. Eating it almost made me believe that I was warming my bones on a cool September evening.

I only call it "chickpea" stew because I don't know what else to call it. It was supposed to be focused on chickpeas, as the "chunk" factor, but I piled so much other stuff in there that they're just one element now. And I like the word "chickpea." Like, a lot. I always used to call them garbanzo beans, but saying that makes me feel heavy-footed and trollish. "Chickpea" makes me feel like a bird. A bird that perches on things and sings sweetly.


CHICKPEA STEW

1 cup dry chickpeas (or 2 cups cooked)
3 fat cloves garlic
1/2 large onion
2 large celery stalks (leaves are fine)
1 medium butternut squash, cleaned but not peeled
3/4 lb russet potato, or red potatoes
Sea salt
Cooking oil
1 tsp red pepper flakes
2 tbsp dry crumbled oregano
2 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp powdered mustard
2-3 tbsp red wine vinegar
28 oz can diced tomatoes (fire-roasted are best, as always!)
4 oz frozen chopped spinach
4 oz frozen corn kernels
Tabasco sauce
Handful fresh basil leaves, roughly chopped
Handful fresh cilantro leaves, roughly chopped
Smoked cheese for topping
Hard, aged cheese for topping

1. Soak the chickpeas before you cook them. To do this, cover them with water by an inch, and let them sit for 3-10 hours. If you don't have that much time, do what I did. Cover them with water, to start.

Bring to a boil. Let it boil for 5 minutes, and then take the pan off the heat. The chickpeas have already begun to take in water.



Cover it, and let it sit for an hour. It's still an hour, but it beats 10 hours, right? After they've soaked they should have swollen a bit more.



Drain them and re-cover them with water by an inch or two. Bring to a simmer, partially cover the pan, and let them cook for an hour or more, depending on their age. Mine were old and took 3 hours. I didn't eat until 11pm.

2. Meanwhile, though, you may prepare the other ingredients for the stew. Garlic needs to be smashed and roughly chopped. Onions need to be sliced. Celery needs to be cut into bits, and set aside with the onions, but separate from the garlic. You can do this however you see fit, but this is my method.



3. And now you can cube the squash and potatoes. Some people like theirs peeled, but I don't know why. It's not like the peel tastes bad, or gets in the way, or is ugly. It has nutritional value, and adds fiber. And it will take you twice as long to prepare your vegetables if you peel them. But suit yourself.

I tried to cut the squash into 1/2-inch cubes and the potatoes into 3/4-inch chunks. To simplify things, I cooked them together, and potato cooks fast; I didn't want it to cook faster than the squash and then fall apart. Plus, with all the stirring I knew I was going to be doing, I didn't want the potato to completely disappear into mush, so I thought it had ought to start out in larger chunks than did the squash.



4. Once your starchies (read: potatoes and squash) are cubed, you can cook them. You will be cooking them in water - the very water that will become your soup water. I used filtered water, because I want to believe that it makes the tap water of Phoenix taste acceptable. It doesn't, but who can afford that much bottled water? And who wants to waste that much plastic?

Anyway, cover your potatoes and squash with water in a large pot. Maybe a half an inch to spare. Add a fat pinch of sea salt and bring to a gentle boil. A hearty simmer, if you will.



5. Let them simmer for 20-30 minutes, until both squash and potatoes are cooked but not mushy. I believe the term is "fork-tender," but I don't really like it. It seems fleeting and faddish.

The water will look slightly orange and cloudy, and that's OK.



Set the pot aside and bring out a frying pan. Or, if you have more than one large burner, as I do not, you can bring out the frying pan while the stockpot is cooking the starchies. It's all up to you.

Add some oil to your pan, over medium heat. When it heats up properly, add the celery and onion that you set aside earlier.



Stir it up good, and continue to do so for about 3 minutes. Maybe 5. Definitely not 4.



6. Stir until the celery is popping and the onion is limp and threatening to brown if you stop stirring. (If it does brown, I don't see what the big deal is. Mine always does when I stop stirring to take a picture, and I haven't suffered from it yet.)



Toss in the garlic, spices, and oregano. Stir that up and keep at it. The moment you see the spices stick to the pan and start to smell amazing on the cusp of burnt, douse it with some red wine vinegar. Or maybe wine; I haven't tried that. It'll hiss at you something fierce. Respond by dumping the entire can of fire-roasted diced tomatoes into the pan and mixing the whole shebang together. That oughta hush things up.





7. Now everything will be coming together. Take the frying pan off the burner and return the stockpot with the starchies. Keep the heat on it - medium is fine - while you add things. You can add spinach and corn now. Stir it gently to distribute everything, but try not to pulverize the potatoes in the process.



You can also drain, rinse, and add the chickpeas to the stockpot, assuming they've cooked by this point. Add the tomato mixture.

This would be where a wand blender comes in very handy. To thicken the stew so it's not just chunky seasoned water, I used the wand blender to blend just a little bit of the contents of the stockpot. Most things were left intact, but enough squash and potatoes and onions and spinach got pureed that the stew developed a really hearty base. Desirable in a stew.

Season it with sea salt - and really, you need a fair amount for it to not be bland and tasteless. Just keep adding a little bit and tasting until you get the right amount. If the stew tastes like hot water, add more salt! And Tabasco sauce, of course. Just ploonk a bunch in until you get the right amount of zip.



8. You can take the (hopefully simmering) stew off of the heat, now, and stir in the chopped fresh herbs.



Bowl it up, grate on some cheese, and eat your heart out.

Despite the lengthy ingredient list, this is not an expensive stew. It uses no broth, no cream or butter, and I had at least 75% of the contents in my pantry/refrigerator already. It is a great way to use things you don't know what to do with.

Let me tell you right now, the stew was really good. It may be a temptation (at least, it was for me) to serve it over rice or some other kind of grain, but I would advise resistance to this particular hankering. Most of the calories (although they are few) that come from this stew are carbohydrate calories; you don't need more added from a grain, even a whole one. I would be intrigued, however, to try this stew ladled on a piece of sturdy white fish (cod or halibut, perhaps). It may compliment nicely.

Of course, you are welcome to do what I did and simply enjoy a bowl by itself, as 11pm is rather late to be eating a large meal.




(Oh, and I'm still on the fence about this whole video thing. My arms are really beefy. And it took me 8 hours to edit all this stuff and make an entry.)

Collard-Potato Soup

Because nothing calls for a steaming hot bowl of soup like a 105 degree July evening in Arizona.

Times like this, I think I must be out-of-touch with my environment. I used to love going for ice cream during winter in Seattle. Or does that make me in-touch with my environment? Perhaps I just want to be feeling on the inside what I'm feeling on the outside. Helps with intra-body communication. Or maybe body-to-Earth communication. Either way it gets everyone on the same playing field, and I'm starting to sound like a communist, so I'm going to move on.

It was a stock-up-for-the-week cooking day. Earlier on, I made pinwheel cookies for the first time. I used the recipe from The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins.



They were crisp and light, but the chocolate flavor was strong. To be fair, I used vanilla extract instead of the bean like they called for, but I don't know if a bean would have mellowed out the chocolate any better. I used Dutch cocoa... maybe next time I'll use natural and see if it helps. Or add some almond extract. Or peppermint. Or orange. But no. Digression.

Supposedly I'm blogging about soup today, so here goes. This soup is so... bistro. Every time I make it, I plan my future as the owner and sole employee of a small cafe, where I serve a soup of the day, which is usually this (I think I'd sell a bowl for $4.5, and maybe a cup for $2.5), because none of my other soups are very trendy. Fortunately, this is a soup that bends as easily as your whim, so to speak. If you don't want to use collard greens, you can use broccoli. Or asparagus. Or kale. You could probably even use celery. Or carrots. Maybe even eggplant. Hmm, that would be interesting.

I have to give Robert credit for this soup, really, as it was originally mostly his idea.

Mostly.


COLLARD-POTATO SOUP

Olive oil
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 bunch (1/2 to 1 lb) collard greens, washed and stems separated
2 cups sliced yellow onion
4 medium red potatoes, sliced thinly (4 cups, maybe?)
2 fat cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
Water
1/2 cup heavy cream
Fresh chives for garnish

1. One thing I really like to do with making a pureed soup like this is to roast at least part of the star vegetable ahead of time. It adds a hint of a charred flavor to the soup, which I like. So the first thing you should do is preheat the oven to 375°F. Cut the collard stems into sticks a few inches long and toss them with some olive oil and salt and pepper. Spread them in the bottom of a glass baking dish, which you will then put in the oven when it's preheated. Keep it there for 30 minutes while you do the rest of the soup.

2. Start your pot. You'll need a relatively large pot - not because you're making a lot of soup, but because greens start out large and get small after they cook, and you need to give them space. I used a big honkin' stockpot. Anyway, the long and short of it is that you need to slice your onions - however you want is fine - and chuck them in the pot with a little olive oil over medium heat.



You should then slice your collard leaves. This might seem like a pain, but it doesn't have to be! I stack a bunch of them together, roll them tightly, cut them once hot-dog-style right down the middle of the roll, and then slice the roll the fat way in about 1/2-inch slices. So you get a bunch of leaf pieces. It should take less than a minute to do the whole bunch. Toss them with the onions.



3. Let the onions and collards cook for several minutes so the greens can reduce, but stir them a lot so the onions don't burn on the bottom of the pot. In the meantime, you can smash your garlic and slice your potatoes!! This is so exciting. To smash garlic, keep the skin on and whack it hard coming straight down with a mostly-full bottle of olive oil. Then cut off the ends, peel (quite easily, I might add), and roughly chop. It will be simmering in water for awhile, so you don't want it too fine lest the garlic flavor cook out.



Ooh, potatoes. So all you do is slice each potato in half the long way (so you get two elongated flattish halves) and then lay the flat side down and slice thinly from the end. It goes pretty fast. The thinner you slice, the less time it takes to cook. I would go anywhere from super-duper thin to maybe 3/16 of an inch. Or just eyeball it. Or use one of those mandolin slicers. But mind your fingertips if you do use one, as they may slice off and will subsequently get lost in the potatoes and then become rubbery with cooking and ruin the texture of the soup. At this point, your greens and onions should look something like this, and start to be leaving a residue on the bottom of the pot despite your efforts.



4. This means it's time to add water. Add potatoes, add garlic, a hefty pinch of sea salt, and add enough water to just cover everything. Probably more water than I did, because I had to add more later.



Turn the heat up a bit to bring it to a simmer, and then turn it back down to keep it simmering gently and cover the pot partially with a lid on cockeyed.

5. Let the pot cook like that for 15 minutes or so, stirring every few minutes to make sure everything's getting cooked evenly. If ever you notice a lot of things poking out of the water, either add more water or push them back under. Your roasting collard stems will probably be ready around this time, so take them out of the oven. They should have gotten some nice browned edges.



Take the most even-looking half of them and cut them into very short pieces and set aside to use as garnish. The rest of them you should cut into 1-inch segments and toss into the simmering water.

6. When the potatoes are tender (take a piece out and eat it and decide if they're cooked or not), then you're in the home stretch. Everything should have mellowed out together in the pot, like so.



Take it off the heat and whip out your immersion/wand blender (that's the hand blender on a stick which is so handy in situations such as these). If you don't have one, you can use a normal blender and do it in batches, but that's a pain. Or you can use a food mill, which is also a pain. A food processor probably works too, but I have never used one for this purpose, so I don't know. An immersion blender is a good tool to have around. Put it in your pot of soup and start whirring it around. In a few minutes it should look like a comic book swamp.



This is good. Taste for seasoning, and add salt and pepper as needed.

7. The final steps are thus. Add your cream, in a drizzle (why? I don't know. because it's fun.). I didn't measure how much I put in, but it was probably about half a cup. Blend it some more, until it gets evenly pale green. Taste again, adjust as necessary. If it's really thick, don't add more cream, add more water.

8. So now you can put it in a bowl. Add some of your chopped roasted collard stems. And some chives. And then eat it. OM NOM NOM this is a really awesome soup. I mean it, it's really good. You should try it.

So, if I were changing anything about this recipe, I'd make it more often. That is all. I mean, really - it's an organic soup that contains probably 8 servings for under $10 for the whole pot. Good. Deal.


I also want to dedicate this soup, and the blog post, and the recipe, to my late great uncle Bym. I always associated this particular shade of green with him, and I thought of him when I made it. And I think maybe he would have liked it.

Dutch Potato Soup

I'm back! I'm here, home, and I survived Costa Rica.

Boy, do I have some interesting food to post about. I never knew rice and beans could be served so many times in a single day. Week, even. I think I consumed an average of 15 meals featuring rice and beans per week. Maybe more. And fried plantains? Oh boy. We United Statesians don't know what we're missing.

But I'm not here to talk about rice and beans. Not today. I just want to present to you, my delicious (albeit a little plain looking) soup. And tell you that I'm becoming more of a locavore! If there's one thing I learned abroad, it's that food doesn't have to come to you from 1000 miles away. So I've been haunting the farmer's markets, running around Puget Consumer's Co-Op with my little pad of recycled paper and a pen, jotting down prices and names of local producers.

So when my dad and his wife presented me with the Cafe Flora Cookbook, I was delighted - a cookbook from one of Seattle's own vegetarian restaurants. YAY! Seattle food. Local food.

I know, I know. Bear with me. I go on these kicks sometimes. You know, gluten-free, vegetarian, organic... local...

So I found an awesome-looking potato soup recipe in this book that used relatively few ingredients, was pretty cheap to make, and I substituted some things for what I could find that was available this time of year, and used what I already had on hand. It turned out quite yummy. Especially since I (sorta) made my own vegetable stock. Except it was a little too salty. But that's not the point.

DUTCH POTATO SOUP
from Cafe Flora Cookbook, at least mostly, and tailored to what I had available
2 tbsp olive oil
1 bunch (about 3 small) fresh bulb onions with the green part still there, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 head fresh garlic, minced with greens removed
1 1/4 lb russet potatoes, sliced but not peeled
4 cups vegetable stock
1 tsp caraway seeds, toasted and ground
3/4 cup lager
1 cup heavy cream
6 oz smoked gouda, grated
salt
black pepper

1. Heat up your oil in the bottom of a stockpot over medium heat. Add the onions and salt. I used both the green and white parts from the little onions I had, and it worked out fine. It hurt my eyes less, too. The recipe calls for a medium yellow onion, but... I like my way. Saute this for about 10 minutes, until the onions turn translucent, and stir it frequently to keep them from browning. Or, if you're me, forget to stir them and have half of them browned and the other half crunchy and undercooked. It's really a matter of taste.





2. Add the garlic, all chopped up. It should smell really good right now. The garlic I found was fresh - not the kind with the dry papery outside. It was all usable, the skin and everything, it was firm and evenly hydrated. I couldn't have separated the cloves if I'd wanted to. Cook this for another minute.



3. Dump in the sliced potatoes and stock. You'll be lucky if your stock is as good as mine. Mine was pretty awesome. I made it with kale and carrots and the tops and hearts of celery and carrots and onion and garlic skins and fresh thyme and dried oregano and salt and pepper and a little paprika and tomato paste. But that's beside the point. You can just use one of those aseptic packages of Pacific vegetable broth. It's delicious. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat, then cover and cook for 10 minutes, until the potatoes are soft. You should be feeling pretty good about yourself. At least I was.





4. Meanwhile, ready your food processor/blender and a separate container for the soup. When the potatoes have cooked, remove from the heat and let cool off for about 10 minutes with the lid off. When it is less hot, puree it in batches in your appliance of choice. Just don't fill it more than halfway, or it will start to leak. That's not really what we want. While it's blending, grate yourself some cheese.





5. Return the pureed soup to the heat, add the caraway seeds and beer, and bring back to a boil. Slowly stir in your heavy cream. And oh gee. I had some good heavy cream. Courtesy of Golden Glen Creamery... it was so rich and white and non-homogenized, and came in this adorable little glass bottle. It made me grin. Stir your concoction constantly until it comes to a simmer again.



6. Add cheese, a little at a time as you stir, until it melts completely. Season to taste. ¡Buen Provecho!





PROS: flavorful, rich, filling and warm
CONS: a tad bit fattening, plain-looking

So there we have it. Maybe my next post will have something to do with gallo pinto. Or a restaurant review. You'll just have to wait it out.