Autumnal Soup

I thought I'd walk through how I make a soup, especially one as healthful and tasty as this one!

I was working from home yesterday, and Seattle has briskly turned from warm summery days to overcast, drizzle, and cool. Perfect soup weather!

I had bought a smoked ham hock from the lovely ranchers at Skagit River Ranch, who sell at my local farmer's market. I threw that in my 6 qt enameled cast-iron dutch oven (aka heavy pot), and covered it with water to begin simmering while I got to work.

When I make a giant soup, I usually start by emptying out my refrigerator of suitable produce, as evidenced below.


Yes, that is a LOT of vegetables, all from my CSA box over the last couple of weeks.

I got to work, and started cutting up stuff. Kale, chard, and beet greens were first up. Below is a picture showing them stuffing the pot, along with a small amount of "already open" onion, garlic, shallot, and a mild pepper I had hanging around.


I had to add more water, some salt, pepper, garlic Tabasco sauce, and a splash of white wine, and I covered the pot to continue simmering.

Below you can see my rock. I use it to smash things open, usually garlic or shallots. It's just a granite river rock I picked up in the mountains one day, but you can find such things at kitchen stores, too. I grew up with a rock. My mom still has it. I think she found it outdoors, too. It has worn even smoother from decades of use whacking at things. My favorite rock is still my mom's.

See the carnage to the right of the butternut squash? That was a small part of food waste that went into my building's food waste bin. In fact, I filled up a paper grocery bag with odds and ends of food waste! It is amazing and delightful to me that I can divert all that waste into Seattle's giant compost piles, and it will get reused as mulch and compost for city parks.


Ah... I added a few blue potatoes (from the CSA of course). You can see that the giant mass of kale and chard has cooked down considerably. I bet I used at least a couple of pounds' worth of vegetables. You can see the ham hock peeking through the pot, too. I added some more water before covering again.


After the potatoes pierced easily with a fork, I dumped in a final bowl of corn kernels (off two cobs), and baby bok choi. I turned off the heat and covered the pot for a few minutes. These two items cook extremely quickly, and I did not want to lose the sweetness of the raw corn.


Finally... here is my serving! Hearty and delightful. I promise, you won't even miss the grains. (Yes, there are two ears' worth of corn in here, but they are spread out over several bowls' worth of soup. This is more of an exercise in me cleaning out my fridge than anything else, and that small amount of fresh corn shouldn't cause stomach distress in most people).

....Mmmm....

My Lunch: Roast Chicken & Salad

Dinner tonight? Home-roasted chicken and salad.


First up, the salad. Don't tell me you can't make one. I used to think all the additions were the key - load up on cut veggies - but then I realized that a good salad has a balance between leaves and chunks.

What did I add? Celery, carrot, onion, cucolo (some farmer's market cucumber / melon hybrid - basically a sweet cucumber), red pepper, broccoli, arugula, and mustard greens. Topped with blood orange-infused extra virgin olive oil, and white balsamic vinegar. All the vegetables were organic. I purchased the arugula, mustard greens, and cucolo at the farmer's market today. The rest of the vegetables, except for the celery, were from my CSA box. The celery was from the store.

Roughly 3 packed cups of vegetables in this bowl!

Next up, the chicken.

It's been a while since I set off my fire alarm! :)

I had bought a frozen pastured chicken (a broiler / fryer) a few weeks ago at the farmer's market. Yesterday, I put it in my fridge to thaw. Today, I took it, used scissors to cut up one side of the breast bone, and essentially broke it's back to allow it to be butterflied and lay out flat on my pan. (Sorry; it sounds brutal, I know). Then I cut up a nob of good butter, and shoved that under the skin as evenly as possible. I then took some plain extra virgin olive oil, poured it over the skin, and rubbed it in. A generous sprinkling of salt and pepper on both sides followed, then I put it in my oven, breast up. My oven had been set to the "Broiler" option.

Once the skin on top browns to a lovely mahogany color, use some tongs and flip it over for another 10 min or so.

And I forgot to take pictures before I tore into it!

Oh, the carnage!!! Oh, the Huge-Manatee!

Here is a picture of portion sizes. My dinner & lunch for Monday.

Roughly 4 oz each, not counting bones. Or delicious, crispy chicken skin... om nom nom.

I had enough left over to make one more generous portion. The chicken was luscious - flavored from the butter, oil, salt, and pepper. It tastes like chicken! If I have it, I love shoving lemon zest and garlic underneath the skin, too.

The whole chicken cost me about $12 - not much more than buying a pre-roasted chicken at the store, and it was certainly of a higher quality, and tasted much better. And I got 3-4 meals out of it, so an amortized cost of $3-4 per portion of meat. If you are really enterprising, you could take the bones and use them in a stock. I don't have the patience for two dishes tonight, though!!

The rest of my lunch for Monday? A couple of containers of fruit - green grapes, red & golden raspberries, and blueberries. All organic, everything but the grapes were from the farmer's market I attended today.

Eat Your Veggies: Virgin Bloody Mary

Now, I should qualify the title to this post. Yes, Bloody Marys are based in tomato juice. But add vodka, and it's all over!

So, the solution? Squeeze it's legs shut, and make it a virgin! (ha).

A disclaimer: this is not equivalent to eating, say, a bowl of spinach or kale or roasted beets. BUT it's vegetables, and far better than not eating anything at all!

I made one tonight as part of my Lazy Woman's Paleo Dinner. T-bone steak and a virgin Bloody Mary.


Bloody Mary Method:

- large tumbler
- ice cubes
- tomato juice (my lifelong favorite is original V8)
- celery sticks
- additions!

What do I mean by "additions"? Well, this is where restaurants and the like get creative. Some common additions are: Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, garlic, olives, other pickled vegetables, spices such as celery seed, and spice mixes (like Old Bay).

For my VBM tonight, I added a few drops of Garlic Tabasco sauce, a shake or two of Old Bay, celery sticks, and two garlic-steeped olives. Yum! I really like the celery taste in my Mary's, so if I had some, I would add some additional celery seed. I also love pickled vegetables, and I have noticed some restaurants add what looks like a salad attached to the top of your drink (no harm, no foul!). I would have added some pickled okra or pickled green beans, if I had them.

A note: ordering one of these is also an excellent option when you go out with a bunch of friends to a bar, and don't want to drink anything alcoholic.

Cheers!

Eat Your Veggies: Chard

Growing up, I had some great food prejudices. These were mostly due to ignorance!

I should back up briefly: my mother grew up in Panama, and while you'd think the tropics are brimming with fresh produce, it's mostly fruit. She didn't grow up eating a lot of vegetables, at least the way she tells it, and they were almost always cooked.

She tried, though! A large portion of my childhood involved stir-fries: chicken or pork, cooked rapidly in a wok, followed by a heap of vegetables, then some soy sauce, and a side of white rice.

Later on, my parents became a lot more interested, and informed, about the health benefits of various vegetables. Since I was also interested in cooking, we searched for recipes that helped mitigate the perceived "weird taste" of certain vegetables. Bitter greens were first up on the, er, chopping block.

In this blog, I will warn you, I will not often provide recipes that include specific amounts of ingredients. Why? That's not how I cook. I am very comfortable in my kitchen, and I cook using all my senses, though smell is probably primary for me. I keep tinkering till something smells "right", because it is my belief that if it smells good, it's going to taste good!

Now, back to the Chard. Check out a nutritional profile of chard. Not too bad, eh? :)

I am going to share a method of cooking various greens, rather than specific recipes. I apply this to whatever happens to be around - chard, kale, etcetera. (I prefer raw baby spinach to cooked, but if I have "adult" spinach in my CSA box, I'll cook it this way as well).

First off, admit to yourself that these greens might very well be a little bitter. Bitterness is one of the main tastes of food (the others are Sour, Sweet, Salty, and Umami, or the dominant flavor in soy sauce or beef broth - that rich mouthfeel. Here is a better discussion of Umami).

The idea is to balance these different flavors, and come up with something that is complex-tasting and tantalizes your palate.

Here's how I cook bitter greens:

- Find your major categories of ingredients. I use aromatics (garlic, scallions, onions, any other spices I choose), fat (olive oil or bacon fat), a salty meat or cheese (bacon, salt pork, feta cheese), and nuts (I usually go for pine nuts or walnuts).

- First, cook down your meat, if applicable, in the pan you'll be using. (A one pan dish!) Take the meat out of the pan.

- Put your aromatics into the pan with the fat, and cook them down a bit until almost-translucent or translucent (depending on if you want a sharper flavor or a more mellow flavor). Leave the aromatics in the pan.

In this particular version, I have garlic and shallots in the pan, and to the side I have the chard stems separated from the leaves. The stems take a little longer to cook, so I often add them in before the aromatics are really done cooking.



- Put your greens in! Remember, greens greatly reduce in volume as they cook. This means you might have to add them in batches to your pan, but you can start with an insurmountable pile of greens, and end up with only a few servings for dinner!

- Turn the heat down after you add the greens. I like to add a couple of splashes of liquid to help the greens reduce - this could be a white wine, a beer, or some kind of vinegar (I like unfiltered apple cider vinegar).

- After the greens cook down a bit (maybe not all the way), add your meat back into the pan. I like to add some salt and freshly ground pepper at this point. If you like your food spicy, feel free to add some red pepper flakes, or other spices.

- Before you take the greens off the heat, if you like, add some feta cheese for extra creaminess and a great sharp flavor! Toss some nuts in, and you have a great side dish!

(For this one, I added Parmeggiano Romano, grated finely).