Delicious Soup?

OK, this soup is pretty much my favorite lunch in the world. I've made it a million times, so I should have it down by now. I got the original recipe from Cynthia Lair's book "Feeding the Whole Family" but I've changed it some, mainly because I usally make it just for myself, and I hate leftovers. For those of you from Portland, whenever I make this Joe says that it smells like Hot Wok (from New Seasons) in our apartment. I made it yesterday, it was delicious as always.

The first thing I do is buy vegetables that I like. Yesterday I used baby bok choy, a carrot, broccoli, onion and garlic. Since I usually just make it for me I just buy 1 tiny baby bok choy, 1 whole carrot, an individual broccoli head, etc. I usually use mushrooms too, but yesterday I forgot and was bummed, because they are the best part. The recipe calls for tofu but I don't want to buy a whole thing of tofu and just use a little bit of it and then find a tofu monster in my fridge three months from now so I skip it. But the nice thing about this recipe is that you can use just about anything you have or want. I want to try fish, but for now am too scared and not sure if I want to possibly ruin something delicious with vile fish.

You can also add a grain, I use soba noodles which the recipe called for, but I'm sure you could use rice (especially rice you already made, since it takes forever- soba noodles only take 3 minutes) or nothing, which I sometimes do too.

So, to start off, I make my grain if I want one. I find a pot (any pot will do as long as you can cover the vegetables later). Even though I have four pots, they are all the same size, so for me it really doesn't matter what I use, except once when I used my frying pan and it turned out to use way too much liquid. Add some toasted sesame oil. I just put in a little at first, and then add more as I go if it gets to dry, so maybe about 1 Tbsp total, maybe more. While the toasted sesame gets hot (over medium high heat) I cut up my veggies. I cut them in the order they go in, so the veggies that take the longest to cook get cut up first (onions, carrots, garlic). I just cut them up into small little pieces, and I cut the carrots into discs and then in half. The recipe says to cut the carrots into matchbook size piece but that takes forever and the one time I did it they all sunk to the bottom of my soup and I never got to eat any of them. And I cut my hand. I add them when the are cut up and the oil seems hot (but not too hot or it splatters) and then keep adding things as I go (mushrooms next, then others like baby bok choy spine- the leaves go in later).

From adding the onions to the bok choy spines takes about 5 minutes, giving everything as much time as it needs. Usually I just wait until the onions and garlic start to soften, then add the carrots, wait until they start to soften, add the mushrooms, wait until they absorb some liquid, and add the boy choy. I don't think that the timing is very crucial, I always do it different and sometimes forget something until the very end. Like I did with my broccoli, although I probably wouldn't add this until the end anyways, since it would probably get most of its cooking from the next step, adding the liquids.

Now I add the liquids: soy sauce and water. The recipe calls for a lot of both, I use less. I usually put in maybe 3 Tbsp of soy sauce and just enough water to cover my vegetables, maybe a little less. That's because I don't want it to be too soupy. I want it to be halfway between soup and stirfry. But you can add or more or less as you please. Then I bring down the heat to low, cover and simmer for about 10 minutes. Finally, I add the bok choy leaves and cook until they wilt, which only takes another minute or so. (Don't forget this step- the leaves are so good!)

Pour the soup over the grains and ta da! Delicious, super easy soup that has lots of vegetables! I know from all the steps above it seems like it might take forever but once you get it down I bet it only takes about 15 minutes. Also, since you can use veggies you already have (and probably frozen veggies too) and also because fresh veggies are inexpensive this is the cheapest healthy lunch ever. Once you get the soy sauce and the oil you can buy the veggies for enough soup for one person for less than $3, sometimes closer to $1.50 depending on what you already have.

So, here's the condensed recipe for 1 person (it can easily be doubled or tripled or whatever):

1 baby bok choy, spine seperated from leaves
1 carrot (or three baby carrots), chopped
1 head broccoli, cut into pieces
1/4 onion, chopped
1 garlic clove, chopped or minced
2-3 shitake mushrooms, sliced
Soba Noodles, 1/6 of a package
2 Tbsp Toasted Sesame Oil
3 Tbsp Soy Sauce

Boil water for soba noodles. Cook as package directs.

Heat 1 Tbsp Toasted Sesame Oil over medium high heat, adding more if necessary as you go. When hot, add onion and garlic, let cook for 1-2 minutes, stirring occasionally. Continue to stir occasionally as you add other vegestables. Add carrots, let cook for 1 minute. Add mushrooms, let cook for 1-2 minutes, until soft. Add bok choy spine and broccoli, then add Soy Sauce and enough water to cover vegetables. Reduce heat to simmer, cover pot and cook for ten minutes. Add bok choy leaves and simmer until they wilt, 1-2 minutes.

Combine noodles and soup and serve!

Garbanzo beans, the musical fruit

If this recipe seems weird, it is. I found it on epicurious.com and it had no reviews. This, and my new interest in soaking grains and beans, intrigued me. And, it seemed kind of Christmasy. Plus I owned all the ingredients except raw garbanzo beans, which are CHEAP! So, here it is: Cinnamon Sugar Garbanzo Beans.

To start off, I had to soak my beans overnight. Which meant some planning on my part. I did not plan well. The first time, I raced home from work and starting soaking my beans, around 12, thinking I would make them before I went to my weekly Thursday night ritual of watching 30 Rock. But, I got antsy and left home at 6 and my beans just weren't ready. So, I left them on the counter, and they soaked overnight for a total of 18 hours. But I didn't stop there. I went to school, took a final, stayed and studied and left them on the counter the whole time. When I got home 8 hours later they had sprouted. This was worrisome. I started over the next day, putting a cup of beans in water to cover them and then actually making them in the morning. Planning ahead is the way to go with this one.

I had to do this recipe twice, in the end. The first time I made them in the toaster oven and it was just too hot for the little guys. They all got burnt, but they did leave me with some hope, if I imagined through the charred outer crust they could be pretty tasty. Take two went better. I made them in the real oven. Here's how it went. I heat the oven to 350. The recipe calls for vegetable oil, but I don't have any and I think it's gross so I used melted butter. I stirred in a couple of tablespoons of melted butter and a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and put them on the pan. They looked like little sugar-covered cereal (like Peanut Butter Puffins, to be exact) and I already felt a little successful (I love Peanut Butter Puffins). I put them in the oven and dedicated myself to stirring them every 10 minutes for the 45 minutes the recipe called for.

This is annoying. Sitting around and waiting for the timer to go off every ten minutes means you can really do nothing while your cooking. You can't read, you can't do a crossword puzzle, you can't do anything. But, despite being a slave to my little beans, I continue. After 45 minutes they are supposed to be ready. I pull them out of the oven, add cinnamon and salt as instructed. When I bite into it is pure mush. Barely crunchy on the outside; practically liquid on the inside. But, let's face it, I have my own cooking blog so I'm clearly no moron in the kitchen- I can get through this. I throw them back in the oven and keep on cooking. Probably the cinnamon will just bake in and be extra delicious.

Now I dedicate myself to stirring every 5 minutes, because they are starting to get toasty on the outside and I don't want them to burn. At this point they start to hiss. Very high pitched hissing that drives the cats into the other room. This must be the water escaping, I think, so I keep going. They keep singing along for another 15 minutes. I become worried because I really don't want another cup of burned cinnamon sugar garbanzo beans so I turn down the oven to 275. I start stirring every two minutes, literally hovering right outside the oven door so as to prevent any burning. Eventually, the garbanzo beans quiet down and I decide I'm done. First tastes indicate a need for more flavor. Since I kind of skimped on the salt in the first place, I add some more. And more cinnamon. I let them cool a bit and they develop a really "nutty" color.

Unfortunately they taste like crap. For reals. This recipe sucks. They have a gross texture on the inside (like beans!), they are bland (like beans!), and they don't taste good with cinnamon (like beans!). In other words, don't make these.

But, if you want to try on your own, or if you think you can do it better than me, here is the real recipe: Crispy Cinnamon Garbanzo Beans . And, here is what I did:

1 cup dried garbanzo beans
1 Tbsp sugar (I cut this back)
2 Tbsp butter
Cinnamon to taste (I didn't measure, I just tested it as I went until I got enough)
Salt (same as cinnamon)

Soak the garbanzo beans overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350. Drain the garbanzo beans and dry them the best you can. Melt the butter and mix together the beans, sugar and butter. Spread evenly on a pan. Put them in the oven, stirring as often as you want for 45 minutes or until no longer soft in the middle (you may need to turn your oven down to prevent burning). When done, add cinnamon and salt to taste. Enjoy?

Side note: One thing a friend mentioned to me was that you could change the seasoning on these beans to savory if you would like. This would probably be better.

Artisan pizza from the semi-comfort of my home

Artisan pizza! It comes to me on my way home today. The little wheels of mozzarella. The fresh basil. The homemade pizza sauce. There's a store on the way home. I don't exactly know what you need to make a pizza sauce, but I do know I'm determined to do it. This is not my first attempt. But it will be my first success. Not having a recipe with me will be liberating; I'm sure I know what I'm doing.

Two stops at two separate stores later and I'm home. I've got pizza dough, roma tomatoes, fresh basil and two giant mozzarella cheese balls. Just like the artisans. Now all I need to do is find a recipe that matches my ingredients. Incredulously enough, epicurious.com does not pull up any results when I type in "artisan pizza." Google is equally unhelpful. Luckily, I am very smart and can figure this out on my own. I gather sauce making ideas from a few recipes and dive in.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees, why not? Dump my dough from its plastic bag onto our pizza pan, boil some water and throw three tomatoes in. Supposedly this will help me peel them. Miraculously, it does. In fact, it peels them for me! I chop up the tomatoes into small tomato bits and end up with a watery mess. So, I drain them. That's what sieves are for. I roll out my dough with surprising ease and cut up my basil. I am an artisan pizza hero.

But, what kind of adventure would this be if there wasn't smoke? Smoke, pouring out of a hole in my stove top that I didn't even know existed. I turn on the oven light to discover a circle of goo surrounded by some large black pieces of something. Further investigation lets a huge burnt apple pie cloud of smoke into my apartment setting off my smoke detector- the loudest one in the whole world- and filling my apartment with smoke. I turn off the stove, open the door, set up the box fan in the window and decide to wait it out (and yes, it's freezing outside since it is December 3rd- Happy Birthday Dad- and I live in Seattle). Five smoke detector incidents later and I've cooled and cleaned my oven. I re-pre-heat it and decide to finish the job.

My tomato bits seem sufficiently dry, but a quick taste reminds me that I hate tomatoes. I add some salt, pepper and a sprinkle of oregano and give it a stir. It's still chunks of tomatoes. I move on. I chop up my giant cheese balls into giant cheese wheels. Just like the picture perfect artisan pizza but bigger. Go big or go home. I put some olive oil on my dough, throw a bit in my sauce for good measure and line up my toppings.

Here is where I start to worry. (Not when my apartment fills with smoke?, you may wonder. But no, it's not there. It's here). My tomato sauce is, well, just smallish pieces of whole tomatoes. With some black specks. I can't use the "back of the spoon" method to spread it out. I have to put each individual piece on the pizza one at a time to ensure that it is properly spread out. Next, the basil and finally the cheese. It looks weird, but OK.

After about five minutes I get curious and turn on my oven light. The cheese wheels are no longer. They have spread out into a giant web of melty cheese. Not as I had planned. And the basil that was on top of the pizza- it was black. Burned. Crispy. Maybe it's just time for the pizza to come out? Nope, not even close. Time basically stops at this point. I empty the dishwasher. I fill the dishwasher. I think about how gross my burnt basil, raw tomato, non-wheely pizza will be. When the crust is finally golden the cheese has spread out to cover the whole pizza, not exactly what I was going for. The good news is the raw tomato bits are covered. And the burnt bits of basil seemed to have disintegrated.

Thankful that no one is home to see my disaster, I slice up the pizza and give it a shot. The result? Well, wonderful. The basil that had remained hidden under the protective veil of perfectly melted cheese was wonderful. The crust was deliciously thin. And the sauce! Oh, the sauce. It was subtle and wondrous. Tomato chunks and all.

And that my friends, is how you make an artisan pizza.

Want to try it yourself?

Ingredients:

Sauce:
6 tomatoes
3 Tbsp olive oil (divided)
Salt and pepper to taste
1 tsp oregano

½ cup fresh basil

Dough:
Just buy it pre-made. For reals.

Cheese:
Two big cheese balls (kiwi size or a little bigger) (fresh mozzarella)

Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Boil enough water to cover the tomatoes. Add the tomatoes (whole) and boil for one minute. Remove from water, peel and chop. Put the chopped tomatoes into a sieve and drain the juice. In the meantime roll out the dough (the thinner the better), slice the cheese (the thinner the better), and slice basil. Shake out the excess juice from your tomatoes, put them in a bowl, add oregano, salt and pepper to taste, and 1.5 Tbsp olive oil. Drizzle remaining olive oil on dough, and add sauce. I only used half the sauce, but just use as much as you like. Add the basil, then the cheese slices. Bake it for 10 minutes or until crust is golden and cheese is melted.

My First Blog

I'm Christie. I live with my boyfriend Joe. And our two cats, Karen and Stan. In Seattle. I decided it was time to get online. So here I am. Telling you all about my exploits in the kitchen. That's right, I'm going to give you the delicious/dirty/daring details of my food. Why should you care? Why shouldn't you care.

"Christie, cook?" you may ask. Well, yes, "Christie cook." In fact, I even would go as far to say I cook OK. Not great, but I'm not the worst. I do know the difference between the big T and the little t, but I don't know how hot the stove is supposed to be when you saute. To put it another way, I don't own a candy thermometer but I do own garlic press.

So, welcome to my wonderful blog. It's official, folks: I'm online.