chickpea pancake mushroom toast

Wow, I'm exhausted. In conclusion, have some pictures.

Chickpea pancakes: equal parts water and chickpea flour, plus grape tomatoes, kale, and red onion. You can use any vegetables you want; frankly, spinach would have tasted better here than the kale, but that's ok. Salt, pepper, maybe some paprika. Fry just like regular pancakes until awesome. Chickpea pancakes are great with something tangy like yogurt cheese or smoky like baba ghanouj slathered all over the top.

I didn't have either of those, though, so I had them with mushroom toast. Toss roughly broken mushrooms and smashed garlic cloves with olive oil and roast at maybe 350F. Stir thoroughly halfway through to distribute the awesome mushroom-garlic liquid. When done, put on toast, making sure to soak it with all the extra juices. I had sourdough and it was awesome.

I finally did it: soup with popcorn garnish

SOUP WITH POPCORN GARNISH. YES.

Ok, so here's what happened. I've been thinking about popcorn with smooth puréed vegetable soups for years. Literally, it occurred to me two or three years ago, but I didn't try it until now. That was a mistake. I could have been eating considerable bowls of spinach soup with popcorn and onion soup with popcorn and sweet potato soup with popcorn for the past three years! And yet I never actually bothered enough to get more than one pan dirty before.

In this case I made carrot soup with white bean broth, which was substantial and yet extremely vegetable-dense and smooth and clean. Bean broth: don't ever throw it out after you cook a pan of beans! Instead, throw it in the freezer and wait until you want to make something like this, then bask in the awesome qualities of the finished product.

Carrot soup with white bean broth

olive oil
onion
garlic
carrots
white bean broth/other appropriate broth
(actual white beans if you feel like it)
sage, thyme, salt, pepper

Easy easy.

Peel and dice an onion and toss it in a soup pot with some olive oil. Stir it up and let soften while you peel and coarsely chop a few cloves of garlic, then add them to the pot. If you want, you can chop up some hot pepper or celery to add the the business, but if not, that's fine too.

Peel at least three or four good big carrots, more if you're feeding more than two people. Chop them into half-moons and throw them into the pot. Add some sage and thyme, plus a pinch of salt, then stir everything up and let it sweat for a few minutes.

Broth. I had mine in the freezer, as mentioned, so I just popped it out of the container and threw it straight into the pan to melt.

If you have vegetable broth or actual white beans in broth, those should work fine too. The bean broth gives the soup body; vegetable broth will still taste good, but be thinner and have less protein. Just do what you think sounds best.

Let the soup simmer, covered, until the carrots are cooked through, then take it off the heat and purée it. Correct any seasonings and you're done. Keep it warm on very low heat while you make the popcorn on another burner.

Ok, it goes without saying that microwave butter flavored gack will Not be very good with delicately spiced vegetable soup. Pop your corn from scratch in a pan over the flame and you'll get exponentially better results. Here's how I do it. In this circumstance we didn't have any flavorless oil, so I used olive oil and slightly lower heat to pop the corn. Even though olive oil has a lower scorch point, everything turned out fine.

Don't butter or salt the corn; leave it plain for optimal tastiness. All you have to do is put things in bowls and eat them.

Popcorn in soup is crunchy and soft and melting and tastes intensely like corn all at once. If you bury it in the soup the texture changes and gets spongy, but it's still pleasing as long as you eat it relatively quickly. John and I sat around putting new handfuls of popcorn in our bowls over and over as we ate the previous bits, which worked admirably. I would totally recommend serving individual bowls of both popcorn and soup, equally full. Imagine what a little kid would think of a dinner like that! It would be the most ideal dinner ever.

MASSIVE SANDWICH

Behold!

two slices wheat bread
one slice sourdough
dijon mustard
salami with fennel seeds
grape tomatoes
mushrooms
havarti with dill
red chard leaves

Toast the bread, slice up everything that needs slicing, stack it all together, and you have a sandwich so tall and impressive it barely fit in my mouth.

I heart cheesy goo: real mac and cheese

I've been feeling low-level crappy for a couple weeks. My taste buds got kind of screwed up, and not a lot of food seemed even a little appetizing. So one day I went out to the store to get a pint of half and half, a bag of flour, and a chunk of sharp cheddar to make the only dinner that sounded even remotely good.

Real actual macaroni and cheese! Here is my method.

Oh man, how awesome is real mac and cheese? I don't know about you guys, but in our house growing up, boxed mac and cheese mixes were considered pretty much an abomination. Real sauce mornay mac and cheese is my heritage, so fortunately it's what I want when I feel terrible and whiny. Of course, then I have to stand up and cook it, but I can deal with that.

And ok, I still don't feel all that great, but at least in the meantime I got to eat this.

Secret super power soup

Every so often I forget that my super power is making delicious soup out of, like, water and a potato.

Potato, turnip, and corn soup

veg broth/veg scraps and water
olive oil
a yellow onion
a couple cloves of garlic
a big potato or two
half a big turnip or a whole small one
frozen corn
sage, thyme, red pepper flakes
salt, pepper

The first thing to attack is vegetable broth. If you have broth in the freezer, get it out and let it start to thaw. If you want to make your own broth, throw some big handfuls of the vegetable trimmings in the bag in your freezer into a pot of water, put it on the stove, and simmer it for ten minutes. Use at least three or four cups of water for plenty of broth. Vegetable broth: food made from trash. Awesome, easy, and worth it.

Ok! While the broth is cooking, warm some olive oil in a big soupy pot. Chop up your onion (putting the trimmings into the broth) and throw it into your olive oil. Mince a few cloves of garlic and add them too. As those soften, scrub and dice your potato and turnip. If you want to peel your potatoes (and throw said peels into the broth), you can, but I don't bother. Dump all the vegetables into the softened onions, season with sage, thyme, and red pepper flakes, and stir it all up. Sweat the vegetables over medium or medium-low heat for a few minutes, or until your broth is all done.

How to tell your broth is done: you've simmered it for at least ten minutes. At that point, strain the liquid into the potato-onion-turnip mix and throw out the leftover broth veg. For frozen broth, you can just dump it into the pan and let it defrost there. Add a couple handfuls of frozen corn and some salt and pepper, stir everything up, and simmer, covered, until the root vegetables are cooked through. The time will vary depending on the size of your turnip and potato dice; my soup took about twenty minutes. At that point, just correct any necessary seasonings and you're done.

Voila: secret super power soup!

You probably want to eat this soup with a big pile of toast. Biscuits would also be acceptable. So would muffins. I had some nice wheat bread, a little stack of sliced havarti cheese, and red wine. It worked admirably.