Attempting Italian: Minestrone

Last night I played the Single Lady while Jonno was away doing boring work stuff in Hamilton.  I think it was the first night I had spent truly alone in a few years, and it was, hmm, let's call it 'semi-glorious'.  Let me break it down:

• Not so glorious: stayed at work late, then went to the gym and had to wait 20 minutes for my bus home.
• Glorious: got to watch whatever the hell I wanted!!  Which was Bones, of course, followed by some Rookie Blue and then FlightTV purely because Richie McCaw was in it.
• Not so glorious: attempted to make minestrone from Cook's Illustrated, which I used to consider a paragon of foodie delights.  Used to!  Took bloody ages to cook pancetta, saute vegetables, get 10 cups of stock + water boiling, then cook it all together for 45ish minutes.  Then it was too hot!  I should sue.  Also, the recipe called for literally half of my poor basil plant, looked it's all shivering and almost naked in this photo!

  

  This minestone will rue the day it was born!

• Glorious: I finally got a huge chunk of my current sewing project knocked out.  It's going to be a baby changing mat for a very tiny soon-to-be human.  And then once she outgrows it, maybe a chew toy.

My sewing machine is my third best friend.

• Not so glorious: the minestrone that took foreeeeeeever was blah.  Like really blah.  The thing I could taste the most was the cabbage, and there was pancetta in that bad boy.  Pancetta!!  If you can't taste the pancetta, what's the friggin point, hey?
• Addendum to the point above: I want to know why this recipe failed, it really taste like hot tomatoey (but not tomatoey enough!) cabbage soup.  It called for 8 cups of water, 2 cups of chicken stock, and 1 1/2 cups of V8 tomato juice, along with the aforementioned pancetta, some veggies of the not-so-cheap variety (courgettes/zucchini?  Hello money down the drain!), and a rind of parmesian cheese.  Isn't minestrone supposed to be a hearty, rich, tomatoey vegetable almost-stew of a soup??????  Next time, I'm making Ree's version!  She hasn't lead me wrong yet!
• Glorious: I got the cats all to myself, and the bed, and I stayed up as late as I wanted.  One a.m., what was I thinking? 

Gratuitous cat photo!  Spice sleeps off a hard day of sleeping.

Husband comes back tonight, wonder if he'll mind sleeping on the couch from now on?  :)

Seasonally Challenged: Vegetable Soup

I fed my husband vegetables last night, lots of em.  Six different veggies, to be accurate.  And no meat, potatos, pasta or rice.  Miracle?  Nah, just starve him til he'll eat anything!

Shooting from the hip vegetable soup!

Disclaimer: I know that it is coming on spring, and this recipe is mostly tinned and winter veggies, but I have said that I am seasonally challenged, so I'm just living up to the hype!


This was last night:

• Cheeky pint with workmate and his lady.
• 6:30 @ home: husband dishes out a snack of pita bread and hummus.
• 7: 00 Cracked a bottle of wine - the alcohol held off hunger for a while so I could catch up on Grey's Anatomy.
• 8:00, me, "oh, guess it's time to make dinner!"  I checked the recipe for the Minestrone I had planned to make.  $h!t, it takes hours.  We didn't have hours, the growls coming from Jonno's monster of a stomach were drowning out the rugby game, that's when you know it's bad!
• Delivered bad news to husband, he takes it stoically then astonishingly is still able to think on his feet: "isn't there some soup frozen in the freezer?  Just throw that in a pot, she'll be right!"
• Sure enough in the freezer there is an ice cream container full of what looks like chicken soup - we're saved!
• Not so fast - the soup is only chicken broth, left over from when I roasted a chicken and then thriftily used the bones to make stock.
• Me: "Didn't I buy some chicken the other day?  I'll just cook up one of those and chuck it into my already-defrosting stock and we'll have chicken soup.  Boom!"
• Nope, I didn't buy chicken, I bought pork chops.  Fail.
• In a strange twist of fate, I had just bought celery, which I never buy because we both hate the flavour of raw celery.  It tastes like sweet grassy nothingness, you know it's true!
• Bonus: other actual vegetables in the house (as opposed to frozen ones, usually reserved for stir-fry), so boom!  Vegetable Soup!
• 8:45 Put Round 1 of veggies in the pot, then go back to Grey's and another glass of red.
• 9:00 Round 2 of veggies plus herbs, more Grey's.  Possibly more wine.
• 9:20 Grey's is done, I remembered that I was supposed to feed my husband, dish some out and actually sit down and talk to husband for the first time that day. 

Lesson learned: label what you freeze!  I also discovered some kind of dough in the freezer, and I have no idea what it's for.  Could be pierogies, bread, pie.... 

And maybe I should start reading recipes before I plan them for the week?  But come on, who has time to actually read things, especially when the rugby is on, which it is constantly right now.  Thanks Rugby World Cup, for usurping my husband and stalling our lives for six weeks.

Oh, oh, but wait - RWC you make up for all your time-stealing by giving us ships to explore this weekend!  Ahoy mateys!  Five grey Navy boats (ships?) are currently gracing our office view and taunting us with their cool gadgety-looking things.  So.  Cool.

Spontaneous Vegetable Soup

Serves: 6 at least

Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 L chicken stock or broth
• 1 tin cannelini beans or kidney beans
• 1 large kumara, sweet potato, or white potato
• 2 carrots, peeled and diced
• 3 celery stalks, chopped
• 2 medium onions, diced
• 1 tin sweet corn
• 2 tsp chicken or vegetable boullion or stock powder
• 1 tsp thyme
• 1/2 tsp rosemary
• salt & pepper

1. Defrost frozen stock or bring liquid stock to a rolling boil in a large pot.
2. Round 1 of veggies: beans, kumara/potato, carrots - into the pot for 15 minutes.
3. Round 2: celery, onions, corn, plus the herbs and stock or powder.  Season with plenty of salt and pepper.  Let simmer for another 10-15 minutes. 
4. You could also through in some pasta in this last step, but don't cook too long so that pasta doesn't get all soggy and floppy.
5. Serve to an unsuspecting yet starving family.

Soup and Soldiers Night – Pumpkin Kumara Soup

I wish I had made this realization about10 or 15 years ago, but oh well, such is life. Yesterday I decided to leave writing my blog post til the last few minutes at the end of the day, when normally I will take a 15 minutes break in the morning to write, and then finish it up at lunch time. It turns out that my muse must be on a strict schedule – I was coming up with great ideas all morning, thinking that I’d remember them and just throw it all down on paper later. Muse said nope, no way, ain’t hap’nin. I stared at my screen for the full block of 15 minutes that I had allotted myself for writing, slightly drooling like an idiot. I got nuthin’.



I can only imagine how much easier it would have been to write all those papers in college and grad school if I had known that my muse likes the before-lunch timeslot!


Back to the issue at hand - soup and soldiers. Now, I grew up with ‘Soup and Sandwich’ night, but when I met Jonno, I was introduced to the beautiful thing called “soldiers” – toast cut into four thing strips. Perfect for soup dunking! Who needs to go through the extra steps of making something to go in a sandwich when all that does is reduce the amount of soup you eat. Unless it’s bad soup, then it’s your moral obligation to eat something with it that will cover up the bad soup taste. And you do have to eat your soup, otherwise the Boogie Man will get you, right? Guys, right?


The view out of the office window, depressing and gross.

The weather since Sunday has been absolutely horrid, with all kinds of gross wet stuff falling from the sky. In our little Hataitai valley close to sea level, we’ve only gotten rain and a pile-up of sleet, while pretty much everywhere else in Wellington and the Hutt Valley has gotten snow. The in-laws called on Sunday night crowing about the four inches they had on their lawn out in the Hutt.


Crappy weather = hot soup night. Power flickering while shopping at PacNSave and also cooking dinner = husband prepares Emergency Kit, complete with beer and chocolate, just in case it’s a real emergency. Priorities, people!


Torches, batteries, matches, candles, chocolate and beer.  The Complete Emergency Kit!

Soup! This is adapted from Mrs. Cake’s recipe, who got it from Alison and Simon Holst's Very Easy Vegetarian Cookbook.


Soften up an onion or two and some garlic. I’m pretty sure this is only to get your kitchen smelling good so that you can tolerate staying in your kitchen for a little while longer.

Get your spices together: curry powder, coriander, chilli powder.

Pretty spices!

Add them to onions and garlic once they’re translucent. Chop kumara and pumpkin.

Drain and rinse a can of lentils and put them in a bowl of hothot water to soak and soften. Mix up 4 cups of chicken stock with your sword. What, you don’t have a sword handy? Maybe a nice spear?

Throw it all in with your spicy onion/garlic mix and bring it to a boil. Let it simmer for 15 minutes, or until the pumpkin is easily mashed with a spoon. Add a heaping big spoonful or two of peanut butter and mix it in a bit with the rest of the soupness. Souperness. Souper!

Puree the heck out of it with a hand blender or mixer. Try not to make a mess! And please for the love of cheese, turn off the power switch and unplug your hand blender after you’ve finished with it, because it’s way too easy to shred yourself with those ninja blades. I might know from experience. I might have had to throw away a batch of pie crust I was trying to pulse because blood may have somehow gotten into it. Maybe.


Add your drained and bathed lentils. Go make your soldiers and let the lentils soften up a little more in the soup.

Now serve it up quick and get out of the kitchen! Go find the warmth!


Here's the printable on Tasty Kitchen.
 
Pumpin Kumara Soup
 
Ingredients:

• 250-350g pumpkin
• 1 large kumara 
• 1 tin lentils (can also use Cannellini beans or Kidney beans)
• 4 cups chicken stock 
• 2 Tbsp peanut butter
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 1 onion
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• ½ tsp curry powder
• ½ tsp ground coriander
• ½ tsp chili powder
• ½ tsp salt

Directions:


1. Finely chop the onion and garlic.


2. Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add onion and garlic and cook over low heat until soft and translucent. Add the spices and stir in the stock.


3. Drain and rinse the lentils, and then leave to soak in a bowl of hot water.

4. Chop the kumara and pumpkin and add to the saucepan.  Bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes or until the pumpkin is mashable.


5. Add the peanut butter.  Puree with a hand blender until smooth.

6. Add the lentils.  Let the soup simmer on low while you make the soldiers.

7. Serve warm!  The soup also keeps well for a few days in the fridge.