SOUP!

I made soup! I suppose this isn’t much of an accomplishment, in theory, soup happens when you throw some stuff in a pot with water and apply heat. It ought to be easy. But the reality is that my favorite cooking methods all get as close as possible to charring something over a fire until it’s black on the outside and juicy on the inside (anyone up for camping next summer?). Part of me wants to learn how to hunt, so that I can have gotten that charred thing on a stick over a fire there myself. The reality with hunting is that from everything I’ve heard you spend a lot of time being cold and bored and holding very still. There’s a feminist rant in there for those who want to pry it out about the stupid tendency to teach girls that anything messy or violent is icky. And then they get to start bleeding five days out of a month. And we wonder why girls hate their bodies and don’t like to talk about their vaginas.

But Soup! I made some!!1!!11! Now, because of my aforementioned cooking method proclivities, I’m really good at knowing how plants and animals and herbs and spices will behave and react to one another when slightly browned from quick cooking at high heat. I don’t necessarily know how that same potato or carrot or onion or cube of beef will taste when gently brought to tenderness via a large pot of boiling water (or in the case of the onion and the beef, a short time in some sort of fat to soften it first). And I certainly don’t know how to spice a soup. How much is enough? When is it too much? Given that the broth I add with the water has salt in it, should I salt the onions while they get all translucent? Which spices should I use, how much of each, and when do they go in?

See, soup is hard.

But I seem to be coming down with something, so I wanted something soothing, and pre-made soups always disappoint. So, armed with the knowledge that I wanted to make a vegetable soup tonight, I went to the farmer’s market on my lunch break, and bought:

1 leek
5 small Yukon gold potatoes
1 bulb of fennel
1 bunch of carrots
2 tomatoes

I wanted turnips, but the only ones I found were $4 a pound, which is more than I’m willing to pay for a root vegetable. I spent maybe five dollars on those veggies, and not all of them made it into the soup.

By the time I got home, I 1) was very tired an sore and wanted to just crawl in to bed, 2) had realized that I had no idea what I was doing. So I crawled into bed with Circe (my laptop), and started searching online for recipes.

Hooray for the internet! Epicurious seems to think that the fennel, leek, and potatoes by themselves make a soup. The commenters seem to think this is a very bland soup. So I figured I’d use the recipe as a general guide in the land of steps of soup-making, and experiment.

What I came up with:

Chop one leek and one bulb of fennel (white and pale green parts only of both veggies), and heat, salted, in just hot-enough-to-melt butter at the bottom of a large pot with a couple cloves of minced garlic (or about 1/2 a tablespoon) until you finish chopping all the other stuff (aka: the leeks soften). Wash enough of the carrots that you will have half as much chopped carrot as potato (I used four. Oh, wash the potatoes, too!), and chop both up. Add some fluid to the pot before you put the newly chopped root vegetables in (a can of vegetable broth was not enough, so I added two cups of water and a boullion cube). Grind some black pepper over it, toss in a couple shakes of oregano, and what probably amounted to ¼ teaspoon of rosemary.

Realize that your favorite part about soup is the bread, which you are completely out of. Turn the heat off under the pot, put a lid on it, and trek to the nearest grocery store, where they will be out of sourdough rolls, so you pick up French Bread rolls.

Get home, shoo the Orange Fuzzy One away from the door, turn the heat on under the pot, and surf the internet. At some point, the boyfriend will come home and tell you that your soup is trying to boil over. Turn the heat down, take off the lid, and go back online. In ten minutes or so, poke your potatoes with a fork to see if they are done. If so, you have soup!

Sort of. My soup was really, really heavy on the stuff and didn’t have much broth to speak of (and most of that stuff was fennel and leek). So I pureed two food processor batches worth, which a) thickened the broth to opacity, and b) fixed the fluid-to-solid ratio to something more like what I wanted.

It was super tasty with the French Bread rolls to dip in it. I am very proud of myself for having made a decent soup without carefully following a recipe :)

A bunch of friends and I just spent the weekend at Tea's family's beach house. Technically, the season is over, but we had a birthday that needed celebrating, and we got incredibly lucky with the weather on Sunday (sunny and warm when it was supposed to be cold and rainy). Being me, and liking to feed people (and looking forward to any opportunity to play with fire) I made a bunch of different types of burgers we could grill. Some of them came out better than others (the crab burgers, for example. Though tasty, they fell to pieces when you looked at them. Luckily, I cooked them in a pan).

The one that blew everyone's mind, though, were the veggie burgers. I admit, I stole this recipe from someplace else, and then altered it just a little bit. I couldn't help it, the original were so bland, all the flavor was in the specialty condiments. I'm not a fan of specialty condiments. I don't like to be fussy with my food, and nothing seems more nitpicky than "this sauce goes with this, and that little jar is only for that dish." Build a meal that uses the same flavor palate, so I can just grate Parmesan cheese over everything, or ask for the ketchup once and squirt it both on my sandwich and a corner of my plate for dipping fries, or what have you. Long story short: I moved the spices from the condiments to the burgers. They are made thusly:

Drain and rinse a can of black beans and a can of kidney beans (15 oz cans of each). Add 1/3 cup of corn (canned, frozen, fresh, whatever), 1/3 cup of breadcrumbs, 1/3 to one half a small onion (the recipe says 1/4 cup. I might use more), 1 large egg, 1/2 teaspoon chile powder, and 1/2 teaspoon cumin. A couple or four generous twists of black pepper (or shakes, but I have a pepper grinder thing, so this is how I measure pepper), and just a tiny pinch of salt. Now, mash with a fork.

I suppose you could mash it in the food processor, but what I've discovered is that you want something coarser than that gives me. So I use a fork, and my aim is to at least puncture every bean in the bowl. You don't want to smash them to oblivion, because then it's too moist. but if you have two whole beans next to each other, they fall off the burger patty. So every skin broken, but not mashed to death is my goal.

Edit 1/24/2010: I used a potato masher tonight, and that gave me the same final texture as a fork with less than half the effort.

Form them into patties (hands work well. It is messy though), wrap in tinfoil, and freeze until ready to cook and eat. I like them with cheese, mustard, and pickles, but you can put whatever you wish on them. In any case, they are crazy tasty. They don't pretend to be meat, which makes me happy, and they don't taste like you're sacrificing anything for lack of a beef burger.

In Pursuit of Perfection

There are a lot of foods I’m horribly fond of, but don’t make myself. Oddly, most of these are things that I consider the pinnacle of their food type. Cinnamon rolls, for one, or flan. Only in the past few years have I unlocked the joy of guacamole (the secret: mash the avocados with your favorite salsa. Add Tabasco to taste. Do not salt, as the chips will provide that). But my second-favorite dip is easily hummus. Which ought to be easy to make. To whit, your basic hummus recipe:

Chickpeas
Tahini (sesame paste)
Garlic
Olive oil
Juice of a lemon
Cumin
Salt and pepper

Combine in blender, at varying ratios, until paste is achieved. Spread on stuff, or scoop up with pita.

The problem is, it never comes out quite right. I’ve tried a bunch of different combos, and it never tastes as good as store-bought. It’s flat, or there’s too much tahini (why does this stuff only come in big jars?), or the raw garlic is overpowering.

In my latest attempt, I roasted my garlic in the olive oil, then used that. It was not bad, but that would be one of the “flat” experiences. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t a “don’t come near me for three days” experience of the too much raw garlic time. But it was too legumy. If that can be said of the paste of a legume. It reminded me of unsalted organic peanut butter (yuck!). I think I need at least some raw garlic. And possibly more citrus. Maybe some of the lemon zest as well as the juice? And I’m definitely missing a spice.

So this is my working theory for next time:

1 can chickpeas, drained
1 clove raw garlic
1 clove garlic roasted in ¼ cup olive oil
Juice of one lemon
¼ to ½ teaspoon of lemon zest
¼ teaspoon cumin
Salt and black pepper to mood that day

Combine in food processor, blend until paste.

But what’s the spice I’m missing???