Category Archives: Soup

Leftover soup

08 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by in Food, Soup

≈ 7 Comments

One of my standard strategies for using leftovers is to toss them into some chicken broth and call it soup. This is a fine strategy and results in some pretty decent soup, usually. But yesterday’s soup… well, I was in the stirring and tasting and making thoughtful “hmmm,”s stage, when S’s stepson said, “What do you think? Does it need something?”

I replied, “This soup is kickass. I’m pretty sure it’s perfect as is.” After eating a bowl and serving it to other people, my conclusion remains solid. We discussed over the soup what it might have wanted — a squeeze of lemon? A swirl of Greek yogurt? A sprinkle of herbs or green onion? And the group consensus was that it needed nothing and it was time for another bowl.

So, for my own future reference, perfect leftover soup for a cold day (mildly spicy, thick and solid):

In a little butter, sauté an onion in the bottom of the instapot until it is golden brown. Then, because you’re tired of standing around the kitchen, add a tsp or so of Ras El Hanout, even though it’s too early. Mix it in with the onion impatiently, instead of letting it bloom,* and wait another minute. Drain and rinse two cans of chickpeas, and add them, then cover them with chicken broth. The quantity of chicken broth should be enough to cover the chick peas, but not much more than that. Close the instapot and turn on the Soup setting. When it beeps (or sometime later), open it and use an immersion blender to lightly blend the soup until it’s creamy but still chunky. Some of the onion and chickpeas get blended but not all of them.

Then add leftovers. In this case, the leftovers were a chopped-up chicken breast and some roasted carrots and sweet potatoes, so perhaps they were the perfect additions to the chickpea-onion-Ras El Hanout base, but some rice, some pasta, some sausage, some greens would all have been good, too. Let the soup simmer on the Keep Warm setting of the instapot while you wait impatiently for your dinner companions to get home from work. Eat. Say yum!

*The link takes you to an earlier soup recipe where I explain blooming spices in more detail.

Cozy days

26 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in Campground, Chicken, Food, Soup, Sous Vide, Travel

≈ 6 Comments

I woke up yesterday to a gray, rainy, chilly day and thought, “I have got to get out of here.”

I woke up today to a gray, rainy, mildly chilly day and thought, “Oh, what a good day to snuggle down into my cozy nest and write a lot.”

I’m really not sure what the difference is. I had a nice lake view yesterday and you’d think that would have satisfied me. I’m speculating, though, that green is the color that matters. Yesterday’s campground was gravel and dirt, gray tree trunks, dead brown leaves, slate water, overcast sky. Today’s campground is some of the above (although not the water), but also spring green grass and forest green pine trees. Plenty of brown in view, too, but it doesn’t feel Gothic.

Another difference might be technological. I had no Internet connection and no cell service at yesterday’s campground. I’ve actually quite enjoyed being without internet at points in my travels — it pushes me to be present, to appreciate where I am, instead of mindlessly browsing FB or reading news stories that I instantly forget. But only, I suppose, in places where I feel safe. In general, I like knowing that if I need help, it’s a phone call away.

So, yes, today’s cozy nest includes internet browsing and probably some texting with friends. It also includes some cooking. I picked up chicken breast on sale at the grocery store yesterday, and I’ve already got my sous vide churning away. Two experiments: one with lime juice, yogurt, and mint, and the other with parsley, cilantro, garlic and olive oil. The danger with sous vide chicken is having the flavors be too strong, so I’m a little worried about the garlic version, but if I hate it, Zelda will be very happy to have my leftovers.

As soon as I finish cooking the chicken, I’ve got some corn-on-the-cob ready to go in. I’m quite excited to try it. I thought the sous vide corn I cooked last summer was close to the best corn I’d ever eaten, and it was late summer corn. This is, I hope, very early summer corn, nice and fresh, so it ought to be even better. I’ll see, I guess!

I’m also debating a scallop soup. I’ve got bay scallops in the freezer that need to be used up, but so far I can’t decide between a spicy ginger-lime scallop soup — maybe with rice noodles? — or a chowder-style soup with coconut milk and maybe some curry. But I bought a mix of gluten-free cheese biscuits at Aldi a few weeks back and I think the soup winner might be whatever would go best with the biscuits. The nicest part of mildly chilly days is that using the oven doesn’t cook us, too.

So, yep, cozy day in Mississippi ahead of me. And with some good words on Grace to go, too!

Acorn Squash Soup

10 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Food, Recipes, Self-publishing, Soup

≈ 6 Comments

acorn squash soup

Acorn Squash Soup

I have wandered around the country hand-selling Instant Pots to people by cooking for them, but I never remember to tell them to use my affiliate link, drat it. I’m so bad at trying to make money from my blog. I did make $12 in August somehow, though. I think it was from people clicking the link to 36 Questionsand then buying other things. I say that because the affiliate link fee for a .99 ebook is .04, and I didn’t sell anywhere near 300 copies of 36 Questions, from links or otherwise.

Let’s see… yeah, total copies sold, 92. So that’s not how I earned my $12. Hmm, I’m not sure I should have looked that up, because it makes me a little sad. Zero copies sold this month. I’m guess I’m not surprised, really. I wouldn’t buy it now, either — a bunch of reviews that say it’s too short doesn’t exactly constitute the kind of social proof that sells. But hey, $12 is $12, so I should not complain. And this is not a soup recipe, so let me get back to what I meant to write…

I’ve owned two Instant Pots. I’m using affiliate links so if you use them to buy, I’ll get 4% of the purchase price. Feel free to not use them, of course, but if you do decide to buy an Instant Pot from Amazon, please consider at least using AmazonSmile so that a tiny percentage of your purchase price — .5% — will go to a charity of your choice. And yes, a blog gets $4 out of a basic $100 purchase, a charity gets .50. Not exactly fair. Hmm, this blog post keeps getting off-track. Back to the point!

Anyway, the first one IP I owned was the 6Qt and I was perfectly happy with it, except that it was impossible to store in the van. It didn’t fit anywhere. In August, I traded it to my friend P for a Instant Pot Mini 3Qtwhich is less usable for some purposes, but fits in one of the overhead storage cupboards. If I lived in a real house and I cooked for other people, I would definitely want the bigger one, but the small one works fine for my purposes.

And yesterday’s purpose was squash soup! I debated buying pre-chopped squash at the store and if you’re not on a budget, you can save time by doing so. But it averaged out to be about twice as much, so I saved my $3 and bought a whole squash. I cut it in half, and pre-cooked it in the IP on high pressure for 12-15 minutes with a cup of water. (Because I have the small IP, I had to cook the two halves separately — I did the first one on 15 minutes and it was falling apart, so I did the second one on 12. I bet I could have gotten away with 10 for both of them — basically, this is just pre-cooking it enough to make it easy to scoop the meat out of the skin.)

I poured the water from the IP into a cup to save it for the soup, then turned the IP onto sauté, added a little olive oil and half a white onion, chopped. When the onion was lightly browned, I added about a tsp each of turmeric, cinnamon, and ginger, plus half a tsp of paprika, to the onions and swirled it around briskly. This is called blooming the spices and it goes terribly wrong if they burn, so you might need to add some more oil first or a little of the reserved water. I didn’t add oil, but did add some water when they looked dry. I gave them a minute, then scraped the squash out of its skin into the IP, added a chopped apple (not peeled), and the reserved water, plus a cup of chicken broth, then closed the pot. I think I set it to 12 minutes on high pressure.

I then had a lovely conversation with my son, so when the IP dinged, I ignored it and let it go to its Keep Warm function. One of the great things about the IP is that you really don’t have to pay attention to it. None of the water is escaping, so your food is not going to burn or dry out. You can let it stand for hours and when you finally look at it, it’ll be warm and still tasty. But eventually, I got off the phone and opened the IP. I would usually add coconut milk, but I bought some sour cream a while ago and have been trying to use it up, so instead I added about a cup of sour cream. I squeezed in some honey, probably equivalent to a couple of tablespoons, and then sprinkled the top with salt. And then I used the immersion blender until it was a level of creaminess that I liked. If it had been too thick, I would have added more sour cream or maybe some more chicken broth. If it had been too thin, I would have been sad and probably added some stuff to it, i.e. leftover rice or quinoa.

I then sprinkled some parsley on the top so it would look pretty when I took a picture, but honestly, the parsley was my least favorite part. It was too bitter to go well with the sweet creaminess of the soup. Cilantro might have worked and mint or rosemary might have been nice, but a little swirl of greek yogurt and a sprinkle of cinnamon would have been terrific. Short version, don’t do the parsley, it’s not a net good.

So, could I make this soup without the IP? Sure. I could roast the squash in the oven, cook the soup on the stove. It would take forever — the oven roasting would probably be an hour at least, and I’d have to wait for the squash to cool before I could scrape it into the soup pot. I’d have to pay careful attention to the soup while it was on the stove so that it stayed at a low simmer and never boiled. And the van would get crazily hot from the heat of the oven and the stove. It would be a project. With the IP, soup’s not a project — it’s the kind of thing you can cook after a long day of driving, when you’re feeling lazy and tired.

Brrr…

10 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Boring, Campground, Food, Soup, Vanlife

≈ 2 Comments

Zelda and I had the shortest morning walk we’ve had on this trip (except maybe for times when I’ve been sick), because it was seriously cold. The degrees didn’t look bad — 46, I think — but the wind had a chill to it that cut straight through my coat and my scarf. And it was a moving day, so I had to disconnect the water. The hose was stiff and unyielding, and the metal of the connector was so cold that it felt like it was burning my hand when I was unscrewing it. It was nowhere close to freezing, but felt like a definite warning/reminder that my van life is not compatible with a northern winter.

I’ve sort of been figuring that out anyway. It’s been a while since I whined about dirt here, but it’s still my least favorite part of van life. And the combination of cold weather, limited water, and abysmal campground showers means that I’ve spent a lot of time recently feeling Not Clean. I used to fantasize about baths, but now the combination of a hot shower and clean sheets has almost as much appeal. I’m again thinking seriously about joining Planet Fitness and planning my travels around their locations, at least once a week or so. Real showers, plenty of hot water, and (at least sometimes) the ability to overnight park in their lot is probably worth $22/month. Plus exercise! That would be nice, too.

Meanwhile, though, I’m in Nebraska, at Blue Valley Camping Area. It’s basically a parking lot with electric hookups. When I drove in, along a curving dirt road, I thought I might be the only person here, but actually there are three other campers in a fifteen or sixteen site lot. The campground is truly a parking lot — one site lined up next to the next, minimal space between them — but there appears to be a pretty nice park around it. I’ve been sitting in the van, watching the leaves fall from the trees, and considering exploring, but… well, brr… I know it’s cold out there and I’m finding the cold very un-motivating.

Plus, it was one of those long days, in the way that travel days can be. I didn’t make it very far, but I wanted to find a Target, because Target reliably has gluten-free shampoo and I a) left my shampoo behind somewhere, probably Albuquerque and b) had to buy non gluten-free shampoo the last time I bought shampoo, which is generally not the best option for me. So! Target. As best I could tell, the closet Target to my Kansas location was about two hours away, in Kearney, Nebraska. Nebraska hadn’t been on my travel plans, but why not, right?

Then I needed gas. Then the dogs needed to be walked. Then I needed some minimal groceries — fresh salad greens and fruit, basically. Then I needed to find a place to camp. And suddenly, the day is essentially over and I’ve really only traveled a couple hundred miles away from my starting place. It doesn’t feel like an impressive set of achievements.

On the other hand, I’ve got an acorn squash in the instant pot, which I’m planning to turn into soup before the end of the day. I ate scrambled eggs with sautéed mushrooms, green onions, sweet potato and avocado for breakfast. I’ve washed all the dishes, the van is mostly clean, I tweaked a few lines from a previous chapter of Grace this morning, I wrote morning words, and here I am, writing a blog post.

camper van under a tree

My campsite

And while I dread the moment the dogs need to go out again — it’s cold and dark out there! — my campsite is really quite pretty. It’ll be a nice place to try to write tomorrow.

PS Made the soup, ate the soup, shared the soup with the dogs. And somehow it pleased me greatly that Zelda chose to first lick up all the squash soup before eating the bites of chicken I’d dropped in her bowl. It’s always nice when the audience is appreciative! I liked it, too — for future reference for myself, I used turmeric, ginger, cinnamon and paprika, plus onion, acorn squash, and an apple; chicken broth and the water from pre-cooking the squash; finishing it off with sour cream, honey, and a sprinkle of salt.

Seattle Update

17 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by in Personal, Soup

≈ 8 Comments

People keep making suggestions about other jobs for me to be doing. The Best Brother Ever thinks I should become a personal chef for someone who has a lot of food restrictions and can’t handle the challenge of eating within them. My friend E thinks I should be packaging my granola and selling it for ridiculous prices. (Someday I am going to do a cost analysis on my granola — I suspect it’s not any cheaper than the ones that companies do sell for ridiculous prices, because I put a lot of good ingredients in it. But it is tasty.)

And my friend P now says I should become a home organizer, traveling around and helping people de-clutter their houses. That’s because I spent the last three days working on her kitchen. I wish I had taken before photos, so that a before-and-after would make sense, but when I first got here, she had no available counter space on which to work. I don’t think I complained too loudly, but I muttered, and eventually I did wistfully say, “I wish I could organize your kitchen.”

To which she replied, “Knock yourself out.”

In my defense, I then asked several times if she was serious. Did she really want someone else going through her stuff? Deciding on the right places for useful things? Pushing her to get rid of the stuff she never used?

Patiently, she answered, “Yes, yes, yes.”

So I did. Her dishes are now stored above her dish rack, so that you can put them away without taking a single step. Her pantry items (formerly stored on a bookcase outside the kitchen) are now in what used to be the dish cupboard; snacks on the bottom shelf, soups and pasta on the next, rices and grains on the third. Her spices (formerly stored in a drawer in living room) are now alphabetized and in an angled double row on an open shelf next to the stove. The tea cups she uses are on the bottom shelf on the sink side, also an open shelf; the cups her guests most often use are stored within reach on the third shelf. The teas are in order — chai, ginger and herb, black — on the second shelf.

Eventually I stopped asking as I moved items to the “to be donated” pile in the living room. We all have those things: the inefficient jars for storing baking staples; the cute plastic dishes for little kids; the hand-me-down second or third crockpot; the fondue pots. She had three of the latter — she’s keeping the mid-size one, letting the other two go.

Or the chipped dishes that have been around forever, the glass jars that might come in handy someday, the abundance of plastic leftover dishes that somehow seem to multiply in the drawers. She still has an abundance of plastic dishes, but only enough to fit neatly into two drawers and she’s going to have to start her glass jar collection anew. The chipped dishes will happen on their own, of course.

I’m not entirely done. I left a pile of stuff on a small table needing to be sorted and one counter was still topped with many glass bottles needing to be recycled last night. But I’m pretty close. And P, whose kitchen was cluttered and overflowing with stuff, now has several entirely empty cupboards that she can start filling.

P tells me I could make a lot of money at it, but I don’t think I actually want to start cleaning out people’s houses for money. Maybe this is just the Floridian in me, but I suspect the jobs would mostly be getting rid of stuff after someone had died and that would be seriously depressing as a way of life. But it was highly satisfying few days.

And it gave me a new piece of my travel plans — I’m not sure what the next week or so will bring, whether I’m going to drive south into the path of the total eclipse coverage, whether I’m finally going to connect with my other WA friends — but at some point after the 28th, I’ll be back here in Seattle. I’m going to tackle P’s teenage daughter’s bedroom once she gets home from her summer vacation with her dad, and I am quite looking forward to it.

In other news, I’m getting a little obsessed with insta-pot soups. The combination of an insta-pot and an immersion blender make vegetable soups trivially easy. Last night I was feeling awful — either a gluten reaction, a mold reaction, or the beginning of a cold — but I threw some onion, carrots, curry spices and chicken broth into the insta-pot and hit the soup button, then when it beeped, added some coconut milk and blended. I wish I’d had some leftover rice, but since I didn’t, I topped some gluten-free bread with butter, a little minced garlic, parmesan cheese, and cilantro, toasted it, cut it into crouton-ish sized pieces and dropped it into the soup. It was delicious. Oh, I added some salt at the end, too.

Given that I felt terrible (and still do, alas), it was a lovely, low-effort meal. I will be eating leftovers for lunch. Maybe with some left-over quinoa instead of toast. If I’d remembered the quinoa yesterday, I would have used it then. Carrot, curry and quinoa soup — doesn’t that sound fancy? It was really just the only non-nightshade vegetable available to me, and I felt too lousy to go to the store.

And that’s a terrible note to end on, but I do have to get to the store today and I can tell already that it’s going to be a very low-energy day. Simple goals: a shower, the store, some more time spent staring at Grace, wondering what Noah’s motivations are. And the dogs, of course, will want to be walked. Huh, I’m feeling tired already. Maybe I’ll start with a little more coffee.

Oh, but since I have no photos — how about a link to an incredibly adorable set of baby photos? Kyla, who comments here sometimes, had her baby last week, and he is gorgeous. If you get a chance, stop by, say “aw,” and wish her well!

Chowder (non)-recipe

11 Thursday May 2017

Posted by in Food, Recipes, Soup

≈ 4 Comments

Bay scallop chowder

Bay scallop chowder. It was delicious, even better the second day!

I love reading cookbooks and recipes, but I don’t actually follow them when I cook any more. Mostly, I make stuff up. It’s more fun that way and since I’m mostly cooking for myself, I don’t worry about screwing up. And when I cook for other people, they’re always people who love me enough to be appreciative, whether or not I’ve screwed up. 🙂 *

That said, this is a pretty solid outline of a dairy-free chowder… well, process. Not exactly a recipe, more of a strategy for creating your own ideal combination of tastes and flavors in a chowder.

Ingredient list:
A cooking fat — butter is nice**, olive oil is fine, coconut oil works…
Spices
Vegetables
Chicken broth — (or seafood broth or maybe veggie broth, but not beef broth, that flavor would be wrong)
Coconut milk — the high-fat kind that comes in a can, with plenty of cream and richness
Seafood
A green herb, preferably fresh — cilantro or parsley or maybe rosemary. Probably not mint, though. Basil could be interesting.
Salt & pepper, to taste

If you like real recipes, you’re looking at that list and making faces right now. What quantities? What types of spices or vegetables or seafood? But it depends on how much soup you want to make and what flavors you like. And how you think the flavors will blend together. Shrimp is great with curry, but for the bay scallops I used just ginger powder, because I didn’t want to drown out that ocean flavor they have. A boring white fish might be good with red pepper, but you’d want to be more sparing with your quantity of red pepper (vs, say, ginger powder) so as not to overpower the other flavors. I could make guesses but this is really a process recipe, not a prescription.

So…

Heat/melt your cooking fat over medium heat. Add your spices to the fat and warm them, but don’t let them brown. Sort of swirl them around in the fat for thirty seconds or a minute or two, until you see the fat bubbling around them, in a pleasant but not overly energetic sizzle. (That’s called “blooming” the spices and it enhances their flavor.)

Add your vegetables and saute them in the spiced oil. You want them lightly browned and carmelized, because that enhances their flavor, but the timing will depend on what vegetables you’ve used. The basics of onion, carrot, celery, and potato are good, but I’ve also tried cauliflower, mushroom, zucchini, squash, sweet potato and broccoli. If you want to use leafy greens, you might wait to add them until the end (unless you’re using kale or chard or one of the tougher greens that need more cooking time). And the broccoli… well, that might work with fish, but I didn’t like it with the bay scallops much.

Add your chicken broth and your coconut milk and gently stir. I think I generally use about two cups of chicken broth to a can of coconut milk to get two servings of soup. Coconut milk sometimes separates, which is annoying, but stir it thoroughly or blend it to get it smooth again.

Lower the heat and let the soup simmer for long enough to thoroughly cook your carmelized vegetables. Your timing on that is going to depend on what vegetables you used. Potatoes cook slowly, zucchini might be cooked after the sautéing. But somewhere between ten to twenty minutes of simmering is about right. This should also be reducing your broth, so making the soup thicker.

Add your seafood and let it cook. Usually that’s five minutes or so. It depends on whether your seafood is frozen, obviously, and how much of it you’ve used.

Take a spoonful of the chowder and let it drip back into the pan. Is it thick enough for you? If not, you can let it simmer for longer, or you can ladle some of the broth and vegetables into the cup of an immersion blender and blend it, then return the blended soup to the pan and stir. You could also make a roux (a mix of flour and fat used to thicken sauces) but that always seems like a lot of work to me, plus I no longer use flour, so the blended veggie route is my preference. Or just appreciating the soup as a lighter chowder, to be honest.

If you decided to use leafy greens, toss them in now and give them a minute or two to soften and wilt. Don’t let them cook too long, though, or they’ll turn into weird sludge.

Taste your soup. Does it need salt? If yes, add a little.

Put the soup into a bowl or bowls, chop up your green herb and sprinkle it on top, also maybe some black pepper. Why the herb on top, not mixed in? Because that way different mouthfuls have different tastes, instead of all the flavors blending together. I don’t want my chowder to taste entirely like cilantro, but a little cilantro flavor (or parsley flavor) in some bites makes for a nice contrast. (Bites seems like the wrong word for soup, but swallows sounds wrong, too.)

I feel like I should give credit now to some soup recipe somewhere — it’s not as if I didn’t follow lots of them in the past. Mostly, though, this is just my trial-and-error process, developed by making myself soup for lunch on a regular basis. I cannot promise it will work for every or any combination of seafood and spices and vegetables: I don’t personally think, for example, that I would try cinnamon shrimp broccoli chowder. That doesn’t sound appealing. But I could see a cinnamon squash chowder, maybe with chicken instead of seafood, and with the veggies definitely blended to make it truly thick? Hmm, now I want to go cook that. It sounds yummy. Also, I love citrus flavors but citrus and milk — even coconut milk — have not worked well together in my experience. I don’t think I’d try a lemon-y chowder.

But the ginger bay scallop chowder was delicious, curry seafood chowder has also been great, spicy shrimp, also great. And it’s fun to experiment, of course. This process is a great framework for playing in the kitchen.

*I feel like I should add, with the exception of R, everyone I cook for is perfectly happy to have me do the cooking. R lived with me while I learned to cook, starting from “able to burn hard-boiled eggs” (true story) to where I am today, so he still always votes for restaurants. But he’s eaten variants of this chowder recipe many times and always approves!

**Edited to add: also, obviously, if you’re going the non-dairy route, don’t use butter as your cooking fat.

Monday mornings

08 Monday May 2017

Posted by in Food, Randomness, Seafood, Serenity, Soup

≈ 5 Comments

sunrise on Cedar Key

Sunrise from the bridge leading into the town of Cedar Key.

I’m sitting outside Serenity watching a giant white bird — I think a great egret, but maybe a snowy egret — stalk its breakfast in the water and wondering why those birds are so cool. Partly it’s the color, of course — it’s such a pure, almost shocking white. But it’s also the mix of awkwardness and grace. They look so ridiculous when they’re standing still or when they’re just beginning to fly — legs too tall, neck too long — but their movement can so quickly become beautiful. And their stillness has such an expectant, waiting quality to it. A predatory peace. Hmm, that feels like the beginning of an idea. Probably just because it’s alliterative, though.

My weekend was glorious. The storm brought a cold front in and the temperatures dropped, into the 50s at night, only up to the 70s during the day. It was delightful. I baked cornbread and made a bay scallop chowder, grilled pork chops with a spice rub and chicken marinated in yogurt and garlic, made salad dressing with my homemade yogurt… I also took some nice long walks with Zelda and wrote some good words, but really, it was the cooking that made me happy, I think. Well, or vice versa — I was happy so I was cooking. But either way, I had a lovely couple of days.

Yesterday, though, I looked at the weather report for the week coming up and thought, ugh. Back to the high 80s by Tuesday. Then I looked around me at the open spaces in the campground and thought, hmm… so I strolled over to the office and asked about moving to a different campsite. The ones I asked about were already booked, but the campground host suggested another one. My old site was on the water, but in the direct sun most of the day. My new site is not on the water, but it’s got trees all around it. Also, a concrete pad and a gravel driveway, which I didn’t know enough to care about until I realized last night that Zelda was no longer bringing a handful of sand into the van with her with every step. Yay for gravel and concrete! And trees. It also still has a lovely view, which could disappear if someone moves into the site across the way, but for the moment at least, this campsite is all good things. It’s in the very center of the campground, too, which I probably would not like if the campground was crowded, but in its two-thirds empty state, it just means that we’re getting to meet all the dogs that wander by. I’ve counted either eleven or thirteen this morning. (I’m not sure whether there are two sets of people with two labs each or whether those were the same labs being walked by different people.)

My summer plans have reverted to their previous state, which means I’ll be heading up to PA in June, down to North Carolina in July, with destinations along the way to be determined. R, in a move that I find both amusing and also somewhat gratifying, turned his summer internship into a tutorial, applied for funding, got it, and now has his transportation issues resolved without relying on me. My lecture on settling still feels appropriate — I really think he underestimates himself — but I think he would argue that I just think he’s great because I’m his mom. I’m pretty sure he’s great, though. But I’m looking forward to my Pennsylvania blueberries and my North Carolina beach days, so no complaints.

Bay scallop chowder

My bay scallop chowder. Next time I wouldn’t use broccoli but might add some bacon. The mushrooms, eh. Not sure about those either. (Made with no recipe, obviously, just what I had on hand.) The bay scallops are amazing, though. I might have to buy some more before I leave.

Soup

23 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by in Food, Randomness, Soup, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

I have done many good and useful things this week. Few of them involve writing books, unfortunately, but in my (weak) defense, my kitchen is under construction and it’s vastly distracting. It turns out that for me, it’s easier to do my taxes while people are smashing things in another room than it is to write. Live and learn, right? But hey, at least my taxes are basically done. I’m still waiting on forms, but the hard part is over.

What does that have to do with soup? Not much. Except the aforesaid kitchen issues means that at the moment, I have no kitchen sink, no stove, no oven, no dishwasher. And a very restrictive diet that does not permit simply settling in for delicious take-out for the next couple weeks. I thought feeding myself on this diet was already taking too much time — little did I know how much more challenging it might get.

However, I think I’m also just maybe being a little crazy about it? Yesterday, I decided to throw a chicken in the crockpot. I chopped up an onion and a lemon and threw those in, too, and then sprinkled the whole thing with Italian seasonings and garlic salt. Then I ignored it for eight hours or so.

When I finally went back to it, the meat was falling off the bones so I spent a pleasant fifteen minutes pulling all the meat out, ignoring the plaintive eyes of the three dogs clustered at my feet. When I was finished, I looked at all the bits left in the crockpot — bones and skin and onion and bits of meat too small to get — and thought, ugh, how am I going to clean this without a sink or a garbage disposal? Much to the dogs’ sorrow, I did not think it would be safe for them to do the job. But I also realized, hmm, this might make a nice broth.

So instead of tossing the whole mess into a garbage can, I covered it with water, plugged it back in, and left it alone all night. This morning, I spent another pleasant quarter hour carefully filtering the liquid from the rest. When I was done, I had two Mason jars full of chicken/onion/lemon broth.

Well, broth means soup, right? But this was weird broth, plus no kitchen. I do have a barbecue, though. Unfortunately, it looked like it might rain. So of course I did what any sensible person would do — I went rummaging around in the refrigerator/pantry to see what I had that could be turned into soup, without violating the rules of my crazy grain-free diet. No rice, no noodles, no orzo… but I had artichoke hearts. And parsnips. And spinach…

I chopped up some onion, put it in a saucepan on the grill, sauteed it for a while, added some chopped-up parsnips, kept sauteing, added some chopped-up artichoke hearts, kept sauteing, added the broth, threw in some chicken, brought the whole thing to a nice simmering boil, tossed in the spinach, and took it off the fire when the spinach was still bright green but wilted. It needed salt, but otherwise… yum.

Of course, my dish problem has not gone away at all — in fact, I made it even worse. But it still looks like it’s going to rain, so I’m thinking I’ll line up the dishes in the grass for a first rinse. (Kidding. Sort of. The bathtub is probably a lot more efficient.)

But it made me think about soup. I want to say that it’s hard to ruin soup, but I have, in fact, ruined soup more than once. It’s very easy to ruin soup if you add too much of something — too much salt, too much hot sauce, too much of an overpowering flavor. It’s also easy to ruin soup if you start with a bad base. I’ve made bone broth before that for whatever reason turned out disgusting. Disgusting broth makes disgusting soup. (I think it was because I forgot about it and let it boil. Also garlic in broth can be very overpowering.) But if you start with a broth that tastes good and you add ingredients that taste good and whose flavors complement one another, then even if its weird — and let’s face it, parsnip artichoke spinach chicken soup isn’t showing up on any gourmet restaurant menus anytime soon — it works out okay.

And all of that is a really good metaphor for writing. I’ve lost track of how many unfinished projects I have going on. I need to start trusting that my broth is okay and my ingredients are at least interesting, so my soup is going to be fine, and stop second-guessing myself all the time.

I’ve been reading a lot this week, too — telling myself that as a writer, reading is practically part of the job description, while playing WoW is not. (Every time I play a little WoW, a part of my brain does a rebellious, back-of-the-brain, lecture about how WoW is story-telling and I could be learning from it and how it’s actually stretching my creativity, but the rest of me knows that’s BS.) Anyway, if I get ambitious tomorrow, and/or stuck on the current story again, I may write about the things I’ve learned from watching successful writers break the rules, because I have been thinking about writing, even while not doing it. Meanwhile, though, I think I’ll go eat some more soup. And contemplate the dirty dishes.

Making home-made soup, entirely from scratch, with no sink or stove or oven — I think that ought to be a metaphor for something, too. I’m just not sure what. Or maybe it’s not a metaphor, just a symbol.