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Posts tagged ‘soup’

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

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.

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Jan 3

West Coast Wild Rice Soup

WildRiceSoup

I love grocery stores. It’s probably rare that anyone has been that emphatic about such a place, but in my case this excitement is in no way overstated, fleeting, or insignificant. I was raised on the luxury shopping experience of Minneapolis-based chain Byerly’s/Lund’s thanks to my caterer grandmother and the fact that it was by far the closest store to my house, and it wasn’t until moving to Claremont that I realized the average grocery store didn’t have chandeliers and wall-to-wall carpet, nor as wide and as high-quality a selection of items.  This is not at all an indicator that my young life was full of gourmet foods or fancy lifestyle habits, but rather that my family enjoys to have their Doritos and cases of Coke brought to their car for them and that Saturday lunches meant the store’s hearty selection of free weekend samples from the time I was 6 years old. Read more