magistrate

Finally got around to making carrot soup tonight, which was a process which started quite some time ago when I came home with ~2 pounds of carrots and a white onion, which progressed through soaking some chickpeas and then simmering them with a sprig of rosemary, and which culminated in me staring at this recipe for a while, then going "Fuck it" and making something up as I went along.

My version involved peeling and dicing carrots, dicing onion and putting garlic through a garlic press, sauteeing the onions and garlic in some olive oil, dumping the diced carrots and chickpeas in, adding a few bowlfuls of water until it looked vaguely write, throwing in some bouillon cubes until I felt reasonably assured of the number I'd put in, leaving it on the stovetop for a while until the carrots were soft, then cooling it a bit in the fridge and putting the whole shebang through a blender. I may add more chickpeas in when it's actually time to eat it.

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The thing I've noticed with cooking is that it's not baking, and thus generally needs more of a gut feeling for what goes together and what will ruin food. (Baking is all about ratios and timing that you have to get down before you can start blank-canvassing it. I can throw things in a pot and watch food happen. I cannot throw things in a mixing bowl and watch it turn into an edible baked good.) The soup is a little bland, but it's thick and holds heat well, which is probably the most important thing.

(The guy at the store today said that this cold snap is really unusual for El Cerrito. Randomly. Good time for comfort foods, I guess.)

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I also made this banana nut bread, with chocolate chips instead of walnuts. (I'd have preferred walnuts, but walnuts are expensive. And the past month has been me learning the "crushing, chronic financial uncertainty" side of working for a startup, which means everything, including my grocery shopping, has been minimal around here.)

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But the star of the evening's cooking frenzy was probably the three-bean salad, because I've discovered several important things about it, at least the way I make it:

1) It's reasonably nutritious,
2) It keeps forever in the fridge,
3) It's delicious, and
4) I can pull it out aperiodically for the next two weeks and eat it for dinner without expending much effort at all.

I don't think my three-bean salad recipe is the traditional one, but that doesn't bother me, too much. Nor does the fact that I never really use a recipe; here again, I just kinda throw things in a pot to see what happens. The rough guidelines, for those who'd like a neverending supply of high-protien vegetable-based lazy dinner food in their lives, goes something like this:

* Stick 1/4 cup brown sugar (or honey, or white sugar, or whatever, man) into a big tupperware with 1/3 cup vinegar (I use apple cider with a glug or two of balsamic) and 1/2 cup olive oil (but seriously, specifically use olive oil).
* Chop up the leaves from a sprig of fresh rosemary. Very important. Must be fresh. Thyme would also probably work. Or dill. But fresh herbs are superior to dried in every way for this specific application. Stick your fresh chopped herbs of choice into the oily mix.
* Also shake some black pepper in there. Fresh cracked is best; coarse ground is good; I use table ground because that's what I have.
* Rinse out a can of chickpeas. Add.
* Rinse out a can of kidney beans. Add.
* Chop up some fresh green beans. If you use canned green beans, I will excommunicate you for blasphemy. Add. (I usually cut these somewhere between a centimeter and and inch in length. I know, not only am I mixing my standards of measurement, but I give you an almost completely unhelpful range? RUDE.)
* Dice some other veggies. Whatever was on sale, y'know. I've used carrots, cucumber, fresh sweet corn, celery, bell pepper, and red onion, and various combinations of the above. Add.
* Fight off the nagging feeling that you're forgetting something with the assurance that it doesn't matter that much.
* Stir everything up.
* Seal tupperware and put in fridge.
* Let sit a couple of days or until you remember that you made it and/or realize you don't want to expend effort on food production.
* Dish out and put in face.

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auto_destruct has been making many pancakes, which has been good. My contributions to the pancake project were incidental, but threefold:

1) The creation of peanut-butter-chocolate-chip pancakes via clever additions (bet you can't guess what they were!) (hint: yes, you can) to the plain pancake batter,
2) The conjecture that lemon curd and butter would be fantastic on chocolate chip pancakes, and
3) Whipping up a batch of plum compote.

I remember that I looked at a bunch of recipes for guidance, and then spurned them after all of them called for a vanilla bean. Then I chopped up the plums, threw them in a saucepan, pits included (as it apparently intensifies the flavor) with some sugar (I don't even remember how much I used, now), put in some vanilla extract and cinnamon (1/2 teaspoon of vanilla? Maybe? And... several shakes of cinnamon?), and then let it bubble on low heat until you could no longer tell that the flesh had been yellow because everything had taken on the deep pinkpurple of the skins and the mixture had a particular gloopiness which suggested that it would be a spreadable consistency when cool.

It was pretty tasty.

And I even remembered to remove the pits before anyone bit into one.

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See this? This right here? This is why I don't write cookbooks.