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Posts from the ‘Soups and stews’ Category

Oct 5

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Creamy parsnip soup with crispy prosciutto

Before I dive into this recipe, let me start you cold-weather climate folks with a counter-productive warning: Think about February.

Think about February, a gray day in February, cocooned in your warmest coat, trudging to the grocery, keeping that hope alive that you might find something green, something crunchy, something fresh that won’t break your budget. You’ll be more than ready to emerge from your steady diet of squashes and root vegetables, eager to peek out from under the soil and up into the light.

This is the image that is keeping me from eating squash, sweet potatoes, and parsnips all day every day, despite my excitement about their arrival. We are locked and loaded for a quick turn of seasons here (36 degrees and the slightest hint of snow yesterday morning – a short cold snap, but still NO JOKE), and while everyone around me seems to be jumping joyfully into a diet of starchy and subterranean vegetables, I’m trying to ease myself in for fear of running out of steam far before that cold, gray grocery store trip in February. Believe me: I’d gladly fill my meals with all matter of squashes and roots and everything else wintery – but I’m trying to remind myself that I have plenty of time. Where asparagus and berries and corn and tomatoes seemed to have come and gone in the blink of an eye, these root vegetables and I have a long, cozy winter to look forward to.

Parsnip_soup

We can get through this, people – we just have to pace ourselves. Read more

Jan 25

Sauerkraut and sausage stew with dumplings

If I were to grade our adaptation to this whole winter thing, I’d give us a pretty solid A-. We’ve outfitted ourselves fairly well, aside from decent gloves and sufficient quantities of wool socks, and our busy schedules have distracted us from the fact that we can’t go outside. We send each other and our friends pictures of our snowy faces and red cheeks and frozen neighborhood, and I’ve even learned how to at least partially participate when the people around me want to discuss the weather (a conversation topic I’ve never really understood). Warm beverages and heated rooms and a good fuzzy blanket have an entirely new appeal, and I’ve found myself actually loving the shock of cold air on my face when I bundle up and go out.

And while I spent most of our time in Southern California figuring out how to get as much winter-weather cooking into a few weeks of merely chilly weather, I’m now faced with the expanse of stews and roasts and hot toddies and everything else I’d been looking forward to in moving here.  

Sauerkraut_sausage_stew_3 Read more

Nov 21

African chicken peanut soup

So. Monday. We’re going abroad for four months. No big deal.

Leaving at the tail end of Thanksgiving weekend has its pros – like: time with friends and family before we leave, and a good All-American sendoff – and its cons – like: my god, we better not have forgotten to purchase ANYTHING for this trip, because going out into the world on the weekend after Thanksgiving to buy travel-size bottles of shampoo might actually be what hell is like.

It’s a weird feeling, knowing that we’re going to be away for that long. I suppose we did about four months on our Canada trip, but we still had phones and our car, and we didn’t need to carry everything on our backs (proof), and we were still cooking quite a bit (proof). I’ve never really traveled abroad before, other than one- or two-week vacations, and I’m not really sure what to expect.

But if I keep talking about all of this, we’d snowball pretty quickly into a big dose of Bowen Neuroses, and no one needs that now. We all have enough things to worry about.

But here’s something to not worry about – what you’re going to eat this week.

soup1

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Jul 30

Summer blended gazpacho

Summer in Oregon isn’t exactly the summer I’m used to. I grew up in the rainy, humid, sweltering summers of the Midwest, then spent most of the last decade’s summers in the dry, oven-like heat of inland Southern California. I’m not used to these overcast mornings and cool evenings, where dinner the backyard is more comfortable with sleeves. But don’t take this as a complaint – I’d take chilly over sweaty any day, and am always more comfortable in a sweatshirt than in shorts.

I just say this to point out that gazpacho isn’t quite as necessary here as it is in the sort of summer that keeps you out of the kitchen at all costs – but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t perfect for a post-travel light summer meal, and that I didn’t happily eat it in the backyard with a sweatshirt on.

gazpacho1 Read more

Feb 20

Chili beans with shredded greens

The weather here has been really lovely lately – a little unpredictable, but generally warm, sunny, and clear – and … wait. I think I’m breaking some cardinal rule by broadcasting what the weather is like here in Southern California in February.  I also probably shouldn’t mention that on Valentine’s Day we had lunch outside without jackets. But now it’s done, so I think we should just recognize that winter weather in Southern California is generally pretty awesome, and then move on.

What I was going to say was that on Saturday my good friend Nika drove up from San Diego and the weather was absolutely perfect for a somewhat challenging little hike in the Claremont Wilderness Park.  The recent rains left everything much greener than normal, and it was even warm (and uphill) enough for a while to hike in just a t-shirt.  We hiked around and talked about work, and travel, and college memories, and it was a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

Onion

Shredded_greens

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