Finally, soupe au pistou

This is one of the few non-baked foods I bother to make from the recipe. Most of the time I end up improvising something or other no matter what I'm making. Not in this case, though. Instead, I follow Elizabeth David's version, which she got from a 1926 Eugéne Blancard cookbook. It is worth it. Of course, none of the things Elizabeth David makes are really going to be BAD, but still. You can find the original in French Provincial Cooking, which you should definitely read whether you make the soup or not. It's totally at the library.

Soupe au pistou is clearly one of the delicious gardeny things you make when the yard is starting to overflow into the house and you not only want but in fact NEED to eat it. The fact that my garden is currently confined to a bunch of pots on the windowsill is irrelevant. The end result is completely green-tasting and intense, with a medium-bodied broth and all kinds of interesting chunks to discover. John was all, "this broth tastes like it has meat!" It doesn't actually taste Like meat; it just has complex flavors and actual body. We speculate that this is because of the tomatoes.

It also makes a cubic ton of food, and for maybe five bucks.

Soupe au pistou

olive oil
yellow onion
two tomatoes
pot of cooked white beans
zucchini
handful of green beans
three potatoes
salt and pepper
thin pasta in the spaghetti/linguine/vermicelli area
fresh basil
garlic

You have to do the beans in advance, as you know.

Chop up your onion and stick it in a big soup pot with some olive oil. Let it soften while you deal with the tomatoes. We're going to skin them.

Skinning tomatoes sounds horrific but is in fact easy. You just have to know the trick. Fill a little pot with water and set it on to boil. Then score an x into the bottom of each of your tomatoes. Don't cut deeply, just part the skin. When the water is boiling or nearly, add your tomatoes. Let them sit for a minute or two, making sure to get hot water on all sides. Then fish them out and run cold water over to stop the cooking. The skin will at least have split a little, and may actually be coming off of its own volition. When they're cool enough to touch, peel off the skins with your fingers. Then core them and chop them into dice. See? Totally easy.

Add the tomatoes to the onion and cook together until the tomatoes go liquid. In the meantime, chop your beans into inch pieces, and your zucchini and potatoes into dice. I used red potatoes, but any boiling ones should work fine. Add a pint and a half of water to the pot and bring it to a boil. Then add the vegetables, white beans, and some salt and pepper. I put in a little cayenne too, since I am like that. My white beans were just normal cannellinis. Tthe first time I made this, however, I used tiny pale green flageolet beans. Both work fine, but the flageolets are a little more delicate.

With everything added, the soup ended up maybe an inch below the lip of a 3-quart pot. Be careful and don't let it overflow.

Cover and simmer for maybe ten minutes. Then add a small handful of long pasta of some sort, broken into maybe 2-inch sticks. It's important to use long, thin pasta so it can cook quickly. Cover again and simmer another five minutes, or until the pasta is done.

During the simmer, it's time to make pesto. This one is by far the simplest pesto ever. I didn't even use a mortar, as ours is too small for much besides salt, or a food processor. This was knife pesto. I just washed and de-leaved a couple huge stems of basil, smashed and peeled 5 cloves of garlic, and alternately finely chopped and squashed them all together with the flat of my knife. The whole point is to release the basil oil, so make sure you can smell it easily. Then I transferred the stuff to a bowl, added a couple glugs of olive oil, and mixed/continued to smash it all together with a fork.

When the soup is done, assemble. Take the pot off the heat and add about 2/3 of the pesto. Stir it all together to properly distribute the basil oil goodness. Serve into bowls; garnish with left pesto; continue to garnish with parmesan or romano, if necessary and available.

It is perfect and delicious and does not even need bread.

Since this does make a cubic ton of food, as mentioned, let's talk storage for a minute. Freeze it. Freeze it without any pesto added yet. Just separate things out early and distribute them among containers. That way when you want to eat it you can just smash some more basil into pesto and add it to the reheated soup. If you freeze the basil, you are going to lose all the fresh basil oil that gives this soup its actual taste. So don't do that if you can help it.

Smörgåsbord; artichokes

This week and weekend was full but FULL of family. Mostly this meant John's parents. We always have fun with them since we can take them to every single restaurant we haven't been able to come up with a good excuse to go to in the past month or month and a half. So we went to Osteria, to Fiesta del Mar, to Joanie's. We ate field mushrooms in olive oil, shrimp over spinach fettuccine, hearts of palm salads, veal ravioli. We ate gigantic fish burritos and sour cream and bean burritos and vast plates of rice studded with cubed potato. We ate gigantic 3-egg omelets stuffed with avocado, then went to the store for more avocado, then made and ate two avocados' worth of guacamole at home.

I did not take any pictures of the restaurant things, however, since this project is all about cooking things at home. "You better have cooked some things at home, then, Eileen." We did.

John's dad is hereby contributing to the late theme of "stuff in California", particularly produce. This is a guy whose backyard is being slowly subsumed, season by season, in a shiny collection of raised beds filled with three layers of dirt, straw, and compost, then blackberries and raspberries, 3 kinds of tomatoes, 3 kinds of melon, 3 kinds of squash, 3 kinds of basil, various peppers, carrots, potatoes, green beans, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers: you name it and it's probably grown in their yard. I am totally jealous, even though they have to battle deer, not squirrels. So you can imagine what such a person thinks of CA produce and the farmstands you see on the way to Half Moon Bay and/or Sacramento. Our entire counter was suddenly full of bags of local fruit and artichokes.

You don't want to COOK with local strawberries and bags of grapes, especially when it is getting up to the actual summer period, so they ended up cut into fruit salad. You do want to cook the artichoke, however. Then you want to mix up a vinaigrette and set out all the sandwich equipment in the house so as to go for full perfect smörgåsbord activity.

You guys know that smörgåsbord is essentially a huge Swedish-originated buffet from which you make sandwiches and other deliciousnesses. Ours was fairly limited, due to having only three people eating. However, it did include pretty much everything people had bought at the farmstands in the past few days.

We had:
-summer sausage
-swiss cheese
-red romaine
-the first decent tomatoes
-brown porter mustard
-loaf of good wheat bread
-bowls of strawberries, grapes, and black cherries
-and the artichokes with vinaigrette.

Most of these things you just slice. The artichokes are a slightly different matter.

Artichokes are such a California thing in my head, it isn't even funny. When I was really little in San Jose we had an artichoke bush in the backyard, so I spent the first six years of my life being indoctrinated into the way of the artichoke. It is not very hard. John's dad had never had artichokes, though! So I set out to show exactly what to do with them.

Cooking artichokes is easy.

however many artichokes you want to eat
water
lemon juice
salt

First, trim the artichokes. Cut off the stem at the base of the flower. You know artichokes are just big thistle blossoms, right? Eating flowers ten points! So, cut off the stem. Then cut off the top third or so of the blosson, where all the leaves come together hard and spiky. You can also trim the leaves down lower on the body of the artichoke, but it's not really necessary, since you don't eat the tops of them anyway. Throw the leaf bits away. If you want, you can peel and steam the stem with the artichoke; it's as edible as the heart and makes eating artichokes at all a bit more productive.

Bring a pot of water to a gentle simmer. Salt and lemon juice it up, then add the artichokes. You need the lemon juice so nothing turns brown and gross. If there's no lemon juice, a decent vinegar is ok. Then you can either steam the artichokes over the pot or just boil them. The time depends on the size of the artichokes. I let my tiny fresh farmstand ones go for about 25 minutes; the huge globe ones may need something like 45.

When they're done, you'll be able to smell them. Pick off a leaf and scrape the fleshy bottom through your teeth. Does it taste done? Then they are done. Get your artichokes out of the water with a slotted spoon, turning each upside down to drain into the pot on the way. You may want to squeeze them a little so as to avoid puddling later.

That is it. Now you eat your artichokes.

Eating artichokes: pull off a leaf and dip the fleshy end in whatever you like. You can use lemon juice, mayonnaise, melted butter, vinaigrette: whatever tastes good to you. I like vinaigrette best even though I grew up on mayo (GUH!). You can use bottled salad dressing or do what I did and make your own.

Vinaigrette

Put a 6:1 ratio of olive oil and white wine vinegar in a bowl/something whiskable with some salt, a lot of cracked black pepper, and some torn parsley. Add a little decent mustard if you like it. Whisk with a fork until it coagulates into tasty dressing.

Choke; no choke.

So. Dip the fleshy end of the petal into the vinaigrette. Scrape it between your teeth to get all the flesh off. Eat that part; discard the spiny petal. Repeat until all petals are gone and you are left with a little round piece with a bunch of feathery bits pointing inward. That's the choke: the undeveloped thistle blossom. Spoon out all of the choke; thistle blossoms hurt. You will be left with a little round shallow cup of artichoke. That's the heart. Eat it all, with more vinaigrette. Or you can collect them from everyone and mash them and make them into artichoke dip/something for later.

Then go on a four hour traffic-happy holiday weekend drive to Sacramento.

Fagioli redux

Let's just say that this stuff is too good to let alone, especially if you are a vegetarian (or mostly-vegetarian) who is not particularly into soy-based meat substitutes. In this case, the obvious choice for substance is beans.

Beans are awesome. Beans are cheap. Beans are easy. You could easily live off beans, rice, and fresh vegetables. It would cost almost nothing and still taste fresh and new and delicious.

Things you can make with beans:
-refrieds, with either pinto or black beans
-bean soup, especially thick black bean with corn and maybe squash or sweet potato
-or soupe au pistou: brothy vegetable soup with white beans and pesto
-bean salads with lots of vinaigrette and red onion and mustard and parsley
-beans cooked in red wine, with toast and any fresh herbs you can get your hands on
-beans in burritos, enchiladas, tostadas, nachos, salsas
-baked beans with molasses
-freaking hummus!

For this batch, I really wanted to recreate the same texture of the version we had in Venice. Clearly, you always want to recreate whatever you ate in Venice, right? Maybe not the beer. Everything else, though, is pretty much up for grabs. So. In Venice, the beans were totally pureed and smooth and a little thin, like the refried beans you get, blitzed and covered with melted cheese, in some Mexican restaurants. Ok; we can approximate this texture even without a decent blender, as beans are particularly vulnerable to being mashed with the back of a spoon.

The pasta was a variety I'd never eaten before: ditalini. These are tube pasta about the diameter of regular standard macaroni, but only a quarter inch or so long. This part of the variation is even easier to achieve: just use ditalini! Of course, I couldn't find actual ditalini. I could find tubetti, though--exactly the same cut, but smaller in diameter, like the pasta in boxed gross mac and cheese--so I used those. No problem. The result was a little denser, but really, dense and filling was what I was after.

Fagioli redux

pot of white (canellini) beans w/bay leaf
half bag of tubetti or ditalini
olive oil
half onion
lots of garlic
a poblano
broth or water
splash dry vermouth
dried oregano, salt, pepper
fresh parsley
parmesan

Soak and cook your beans in advance, like you do.

Cook your pasta at an appropriate moment during the bean process.

Chop your onion, garlic, and poblano. The poblano may seem a little odd here, but it definitely makes the end result more vegetable-savory as well as spicy. Be sure to chop everything really finely, for as smooth a bean mix as possible.

Warm your pan; throw in some olive oil; add the onion, garlic, and pepper. Stir to get everything good and oily. You want to use a bit more olive oil here than you might use for pasta sauces and etc: olive oil is actually a flavor in the finished product. Or you can use olive oil to finish servings; whatever. Add a little oregano or maybe marjoram or sage to give the beans some herbaciousness. Cook, stirring occasionally, until everything is soft and clearly ready for action.

Add your drained beans. You can either mash them before you add them, or mash them in the pan. I myself am lazy and so generally do things right in the pan. Add a little broth, tap water, or bean soaking water, plus a good shot of vermouth, and stir everything together to cook. It's shockingly like making refried beans, isn't it? I just use refried beans with totally different starches.

Let things cook together for a good five or ten minutes, or until they reach a happy medium. I mean, consistency. Salt and pepper. Lots of pepper is great with things as unctuous as beans.

Is everything done? Mix the beans with your drained pasta. Proportions here should be about half and half for maximum comfortfoodia. I had a little too much pasta, but whatever; it will be delicious anyway. You can also add some grated parmesan and stir it in, if you so desire. It's also good with no cheese; the flavors are already pretty complex, considering the pepper, herbs, and vermouth.

Finish with chopped fresh parsley and (more) parmesan. Gracious me, it is delicious! It cost about sixty cents, or maybe seventy, with the cheese! It is extremely filling! You can drink lots of valpolicella with it, and maybe eat a radicchio salad! It's almost like being in Venice, except for the lack of canals and cheerful waiters who spontaneously refill your glass after you knock it off the table. In this case, you have to go get your own glass. Such hardship!

CA plants

Family is here and more family is yelling at me on email and I am exhausted.

The best thing in such a circumstance is to eat delicious things.

Here is one good reason to live in California: fruit. Fruit fruit fruit. There is so much fruit it falls off the trees in people's yards and gets smashed as people walk over it. I used to walk under this one tree to get to the bus. Every day I would get brown gack on my shoes. This went on for two years before I realized they were FIGS. Figs! On a tree in the front yard! The people weren't picking them!! They were just letting their bounteous purple figs fall onto the sidewalk and rot.

This is the case for lots of fruit. No one eats their entire tree full of lemons, or even makes the effort to get out a ladder and pick above head level. Instead, they let the lemons fall into the yard and mold. Same with oranges. Same with plums and weird baby mangoes and kumquats. Our apartment complex has a row of cherry trees that get picked totally dry by the squirrels and birds. Then there are the giant hedges of rosemary that line the streets practically everywhere you look. They are landscaping! This makes it really easy to make good marinades, since you just have to walk up the street and pick a branch, but still. It is infuriating! The citrus harvest in southern CA was apparently killed by frost, but I guess there are still just too many lemons to use up here!

The worst part is how lots of these trees grow in people's yards, and you get a glimpse of their abundantly full branches over the tops of the back fences, clearly never picked, never used, and never obtainable.

Gross tea.

You would think that the new blooming flower ridiculous gourmet teas would have something to offer besides the fascination of unfolding gradually in water.

This one, however, tasted like rotting vegetables. Very pretty rotting vegetables, but rotting vegetables nonetheless. I guess you could use it for a centerpiece if you like that kind of thing. I, however, chucked it and made a fresh cup of green tea from the 3-language $2.99 100-pack.

It reminds me of a joke John and I have about a tiny coffee gremlin who waddles around carrying a huge styrofoam cup of coffee, so big it comes past its knees, and hissing "EGG MCMUFFIN...GREASY HASHBROWNS...GROSS COFFEE." Then it sticks its tongue just barely over the lip of the cup and slurps tiny gross rivulets of the gross coffee down.