Soup Series 2: Rescue Orange!

Bend your ear down to this soup: it’s so orange, you can hear a tiny siren sound.

I found some neglected carrots and abandoned squash in the crisper drawer. They had some soft spots. And a few wrinkly peels. There may have been some sprouting. All right, I admit it: parts of them were brown.

My poor vegetables weren’t going to win any beauty contests; that was for sure. But they were mostly intact and I hated to throw them out. Besides, it was I who had failed them. They deserved more from me. I owed it to them. “You will look just fine as soup,” I told them.

Cooked this way, they look (and taste) exciting and delicious again! A splash of orange juice and a sprig of tarragon rescues them from the trash can.

Carrot and Squash Soup with Orange and Tarragon
Serves 6

2 T butter or olive oil
1 c chopped onion
6 c diced carrots and/or winter squash, such as butternut and kabocha
1 qt broth
½ c orange juice
2 T chopped fresh tarragon
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the butter or oil in a stockpot. Sauté the onion until soft, about 4 or 5 minutes. Dump in the carrots/squash and sauté that for another 5 or 6 minutes, until things begin to soften up and start hinting at getting brown.

Add the broth and simmer until the vegetables are tender, maybe 15 minutes.

Purée the soup in a blender or food processor. For good measure (and if you need to impress someone), force the soup through a sieve; this will make it super-smooth.

Return the soup to the pot, add the remaining ingredients, and bring it up to piping hot. Serve to acclaim.

Soup Series 1: Harira for Haters

It’s been a long time since I cooked anything interesting! My excuse? It’s late winter/early spring. And I hate it!

I hate how there isn’t anything interesting in the grocery store. Winter foods have begun to bore me and spring things haven’t arrived yet. I hate how it’s dark in the morning. Usually I hate how cold and snowy it is, but this year I hate what the drought and confusing temperatures must be doing to my flowers. My poor flowers! I hate it when winter kills my flowers.

Buh, buh, buh. All this hating and whining can work up a person’s appetite. I dug a couple of soup recipes out of the vaults, and I’ll show them to you one blog post at a time. Soup Series 1 is harira, a cheerfully yellow Moroccan dish of legumes, rice, vegetables, and meat.

As a young professional, I experimented with vegetarianism as a way to stretch my grocery dollars. I kicked the meat out of many a recipe—including this one, which originally called for lamb and chicken giblets to enrich the broth. I’m sure they would be delicious, but I’ve never made this dish with them and I’ve never missed them. You try it and see what you think!

Harira Sans Animals
I believe the original recipe came from Taste of Morocco by Robert Carrier.

1 large yellow onion, minced
1 cup lentils
1 cup chickpeas
1 t turmeric
½ t cinnamon
½ t ground black pepper
¼ t ground ginger
¼ t sweet paprika
1 pinch saffron
½ c rice
1 T dry yeast
1 fistful cilantro, chopped (minus stems)
1 fistful flat-leaf parsley, chopped (minus stems)
8 canned whole tomatoes, seeded and chopped
4 t butter
Salt to taste
Lemon wedges

Soak the lentils and chickpeas overnight in 6 cups of water.

The next day, dump the lentils, chickpeas, and water in a pot and bring them to a boil. Skim off the foam. Dump in the onion and spices, then reduce to a simmer. Cover the pot and cook until the legumes are tender, about 2 hours.

Cook the rice in about a cup more water than the package directions call for. Be careful not to overcook it. Drain off the extra water, reserving it. Plop the rice into the soup.

Stir the yeast into the reserved rice water. Then add the herbs, the tomato, and the butter. Bring the mix to a simmer and cook it for a few minutes. Add it to the soup. Add salt to taste.

Serve the harira with a lemon wedge so your diners can squeeze it onto their bowl. Yum!

Cookin’ the Farmshare

My neighbor Gwen and I share a CSA box from Harmony Valley. We are the perfect CSA companions. Everything she loves best is stuff I can take or leave. Everything I covet is something she thinks is a hassle to prepare. We think it’s a fair split if the single head of romaine goes to her house and the lone celeriac goes to mine. It’s true harmony!

Last week Gwen was out of town, which meant I got to keep the entire share. Whenever this happens, I feel a mixture of glee and guilt.
On the one hand, having an entire box of vegetables to myself is like playing with the Lincoln Logs while my brother is at T-ball practice. You mean I don’t have to split the roof slats with you? I can have all the flat logs? I can build an entire cabin the way I want without sharing?!

On the other hand, I hate to see my friendly neighbor lose out on tasty snacks. So when I opened the box last week, my heart fluttered. Much of the delivery was storage veggies: squash, sweet potatoes, leeks, kale, and beets. They would easily live until Gwen got home. But then she wouldn’t want to cook them.

“Surely, though,” I thought, “she’d like to eat them.” And since I was going to cook for myself anyway…

Leek and Potato Soup (potage Parmentier)
I used the recipe from Joy of Cooking. This soup is supposed to be white, but I used some very roasted, very vegetably chicken stock I froze earlier. I’m pretty sure the stock was made out of Harmony Valley vegetable scraps and a chicken raised by my neighbor Andrea’s mom. That chicken was really good.

Raw Kale Salad with Roasted Baby Beets
Harmony Valley sent red kale and marble-sized golden beets. I used the recipe from Kim Christensen’s “A Year to Eat Freely” 2011 calendar. I wonder if it’s still available on her Affairs of Living blog? This is a favorite recipe to which I keep returning again and again.

I scrubbed the beets, tossed them with oil, tented them with foil, and cooked them on a baking sheet in a 350° oven for an hour. When they were cool enough, I peeled them and popped them onto the salad. The next day, it occurred to me to toss some toasted walnuts on that too.

Sweet Potatoes Roasted with Apples
This one is based on another recipe from Joy of Cooking; but because I altered the cooking method, I will claim it as mine.

2 T butter
6 medium sweet potatoes, scrubbed well and sliced
3 apples, cored and cut into chunks
½ c brown sugar
A splash of water
Salt and pepper to taste

Put the butter in a large roasting pan and melt it in a 400° oven.

Add the sweet potatoes, apples, and sugar. Toss them all together in the pan to coat them. Add a splash of water to the pan.

Cook in the oven, stirring occasionally, until the liquid has boiled down and a sticky syrup remains. This will take perhaps 40 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Mmm, boy.

Beef Soup: True Enough

My friend John Reimringer has just published his first novel, Vestments. John has called it his love letter to the city of St. Paul. Indeed, the city’s presence is strong throughout the book, shaping the characters’ daily lives, their choices, their reactions to each other—just as cities do in real life.

After listening to him read from Vestments, I decided John should have some soup and it must be of beef. For this man, a steer should be hewn down in its prime and laid low with long simmering. And so I’d make stock. As an homage, the ingredients would come from the St. Paul Farmers Market.


I got beef shanks from Farm on Wheels. I put them, together with cubed beef chuck, in the oven to roast while I prepared the aromatics. First, the strong leaves of an unblanched celery plant. Yellow onions and sage would bolster John and his wife, poet Katrina Vandenberg, with their pungency. But I added bay and rosemary, black pepper and sweet carrots, too, to soften and round out the flavors; I wanted my friends to be happy. Oh, and a bit of garlic, too. They would get no less than the best.

I put the bones to bed in a crock pot, their vegetable friends tucked in all around them. Then I let slow heat work its magic, easing subtle fingers into the hearts of marrow bones, smoothing out collagen and fat, drawing out essences; leaving the souls of vegetables and meat suspended in cooking liquid.

Finally, when I tasted a bit of meat, there was nothing beefy about it anymore. I strained the broth, defatted it, and cooked it down until it was strong, velvety, and satisfying. In went a half cup of pearled barley along with the beef cubes I roasted earlier. It would take about forty-five minutes for the grain to cook. In that time, I diced some more carrots and sliced shallots, then chopped some green beans for color and fun.

The weird thing about being friends with a novelist and a poet is this: I worry that I know a lot more about them than they can possibly have deduced about me. Their jobs are to make art, and art is emotional truth. A poem, the characters in a novel: they are shards of the author’s self caught and pinned onto the page like an entomological specimen. It’s published and out there, for better or for worse. Little bits of their truths are available on Amazon.com for anyone in the world to buy and read in black and white.

I brought two quarts of my emotional truth, still hot from the stove, to another of John’s readings on a rainy night last week. Soup can’t say everything. I hope it said enough.

Roast me a chicken

When the weather turns cool, some people crave soup. But I always want a roast chicken. There's something about it that says fall, home, family, comfort, Sunday afternoon, and someone loves you enough to feed you.

Roast chicken is not hard, either. It's the dish that makes itself. You can spend fifteen minutes getting it ready, throw it in the oven, and spend the next hour lounging around reading. Perfect for a Sunday.

Since it's not quite hopelessly winter, there's still the possibility of using some fresh herbs from the garden (yours or Dehn's). I love the savory perfume that tarragon lends to a chicken. It's also fun to strew a few vegetables in the pan around the bird. Carrots, potatoes, and onions are de rigeur. Fennel ratchets it up from "bases covered" to "dreamy." Seriously, I'm going to swoon.

The really nice thing, though, is that with one more ounce of effort, you can have your soup after all. Pop the bones and trimmings into a stockpot for six hours, strain, and throw in any old vegetables in the house.

Roast Chicken Chez Amy
First off, two words: Kadejan Farms. Because happy chickens are tasty chickens.

1 chicken, about 4 lb
1 bunch tarragon
1 T butter
Salt
2 carrots
2 potatoes
2 onions
1 fennel bulb
2 T olive oil
Fresh ground black pepper
1/2 cup stock

1. Prepare the chicken: Stuff a sprig of tarragon under the skin of each thigh and each side of the chicken breast. Stuff the rest of the tarragon in the cavity. Rub the chicken all over with the butter and salt. Put the chicken breast side down in a wide roasting pan.

Oh, fine. If you will be all sad that you don't get crispy browned breast skin, then put the chicken breast side up. But if you are interested in juicy, perfectly cooked white meat, then try it my way just this once.

2. Peel the carrots and potatoes, or don't. Cut them into 4-8 pieces each. Quarter the onion. Halve/quarter and core the fennel, then separate it into pieces. Toss the vegetable pieces with the olive oil and black pepper. Arrange the vegetables around the chicken in one layer.

3. Roast the chicken at 400°for an hour. Stir the vegetables two or three times during the cooking. You'll know the chicken is done because the juices run clear when you stick a knife in the thickest part of the thigh. The chicken's thigh. Not yours, for G-d's sake!

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4. Remove the chicken to a carving board and the vegetables to a serving dish, which you can keep warm in the turned-off and left-open oven during the next part. Let the chicken rest about 10 minutes, then carve it into serving pieces. If juice runs off, try to catch it and return it to the pan.

5. Remove as much of the fat from the pan as you can, leaving any pan juices that may remain. Set the pan over the burners of your stove on medium to high heat. Pour in about a half cup of stock. Scrape up all the browned bits of chicken and vegetable yumminess and stir that stock around as it boils. When it has reduced by about half, pour this sauce over the chicken pieces and serve to acclaim.

Bonus! Chicken soup!

1. When you are done with dinner, if there are leftovers, pull the meat off the bones. Don't scrape off every scrap, though. Leave some on there for flavor. Throw all those bones, hard-to-retrieve meat scraps, and skin into a stockpot. Add garlic, an onion, a carrot if you want. Put in the stems of tarragon left over from the roasting. Add some peppercorns. Or don't. You can't do this wrong.

2. Add water just to cover. Bring to a just-barely-simmer and cook, covered, for six hours or more. When the bones have all disconnected and fallen to the bottom of the kettle; when you taste a piece of the meat and it has no flavor; then you are done.

3. Strain out the solids and discard them. Chill the stock until the fat is a hard layer on top. Remove this fat with a spoon.

4. Put the stock back in a pot and simmer it until it is reduced to about five or six cups. Add whatever you want: the leftover chicken meat cut up; noodles; rice; any vegetables. You can add these things alread cooked or simmer them in the stock until they are done.

My new favorite combination is to add two sliced zucchini; two sliced carrots; a cut-up bell pepper; some cut-up hot cherry peppers; the leftover chicken meat; and six torn-up corn tortillas. Simmer this until the vegetables are cooked. The tortillas will disintegrate and add wonderful thick body to your soup. I hesitate to call this a posole, but maybe that's the closest word for it. Let's call it posole-inspired. It is even better the next day.

Enjoy!