Wood Stove Cookery & Being Thrifty.

As promised, a little more detail on the soup.

Soup On The Wood Stove, January, 2012.

Some facts: our finances continue to be terrible, we like cooking, winter is cold, soup is good, & we have a wood stove & a lot of cast iron enamel pots.

For most of January, our propane tank was really low & we couldn't afford to buy more, but we are allowed to cut wood off our property, so wood is free. This led to using the propane stove as little as possible, & coming up with creative ways to cook on a wood stove. Solution? Frequently SOUP. 

(We boiled water for pasta & made red sauce & slow cooked bacon a lot too.)

It turned out to be a very good thing that we enjoy roasting a chicken as a cheap but really satisfying Sunday dinner & always make & can stock from any large meat thing we cook. Duck stock? Lamb stock? Yup. We moved a lot of frozen stock over to the new house, & we ate it in January.

Cheap Ass Back Woods Soup:  

Place cast iron enamel pot on wood stove. Simmer an onion & garlic in a bit of chopped bacon from your freezer supply for just these occasions. Add chopped beef from some large cut of meat you have been using sparingly from Stop & Shop. Add homemade chicken stock, a potato if you have one, rice or barley or both, a can of whatever beans you have on hand, season, cumin, oregano, sage, touch of cayenne, or whatever you like. Simmer at wood stove heat, stirring occasionally. Eat, hopefully with free day old bread & expired cheese from your work (one of my perks.)

Delicious. Keep reheating for lunches until gone. Repeat.

A tiny rant: I hate eating cheap meat. That really bothers me. I am a committed meat eater after many years in my teens & twenties of vegetarianism & veganism & my decision to eat meat is well thought out & firm but I hate supporting the meat industry that brings the cheap grocery meat to our tables. But what we can afford is the cheapest thing the grocery store has. 

I can't wait until we get to the producing our own meat level.  It'll happen pretty soon since we got straight run chicks with the intent of eating the males. It will be hard after knowing them from tiny fuzzy babies, but part of my eating meat agreement with myself is I be willing to kill it myself if I am going to eat it. If I can't do this, I guess it is vegetarianism for me once more.

For right now? We eat small amounts of meat & lots of kale (also one of the cheapest things at the grocery store, & way less troubling than the cheap beef).

That was a lot of opinion for one post. Dear me. 

I shall leave you with this: having a wood stove in your kitchen is very nice, & looking out the window while cooking on the wood stove to chickens is even nicer.

There Is Really No Better View Than Chickens.

An out take from Eating & Drawing @ Flying Object, & also a glimpse at our new life in Greenfield.

January 2012: Lunch At My Painting Desk With DR Watching the Chickens.

So having our chicken owning fantasy come true? It is pretty great. After all that time trying to figure out how to have chickens in our community garden plot, or in our tiny slopped front yard on busy South Street, & suffering through terrible chicken jealousy when someone did have them...wow, finding this place with its own resident hen in need of people, Lucy, a very opinionated & bossy & fabulous Plymouth Rock, was one of those moments of luck I still can't quite believe.

In another moment of craiglist brilliance, I found three Rhode Island Red pullets, Amanda Jo, Lulu, & Miranda. This was the afternoon of their second day here at Barton Heights. 

Today's words of wisdom: there is no greater gift to an indoor cat then a nice window seat with a plant & a view of an active chicken coop. 

What was lunch, you ask? As this is a food blog & all? Why homemade beef, barley, & chickpea stew, reheated on our woodstove in a cast iron enamel pot, a huge white vintage one from Denmark I inherited from my mom which is one of my favorite things. Oh yeah, did I mention the cottage came with a woodstove too? I'm really in heaven here. 

More on the soup coming up, to be continued... 

Butternut Squash #4/5: With Red Lentils In Soup (In The Dark).

10.29.2011: Butternut Squash Week #4/5:

 Butternut squash & red lentil soup, with homemade chicken stock, cumin, ginger paste, crushed chilis & curry powder, & onions, garlic, & yukon gold potatoes, served with Boursin, eaten in the dark two nights in a row during the Great October New England Snowstorm/Power outage.

It was a few days before Halloween in Massachusetts, on a Saturday. A potential couple of feet of snow is bizarrely predicted. We get the dog walked & head back to the house, snow starts falling around 2pm, & I decide to make soup, just in case the power goes out later & we lose a lot of food & our ability to cook (electric stove). Good call. Power went out around six that night & didn't return for two days. We ate the soup Saturday night by candle light, & Sunday night by candle light once more after reheating it in the snowy driveway over the propane burner for our turkey fryer.
Thank god my husband is a redneck, with a blow torch (to make coffee) & a propane burner to reheat soup & cook eggs in the driveway. & for a huge pot of delicious soup. & for Cheezits which accompanied Sunday nights dinner & are one of my biggest guilty pleasures. When in difficult times, go to Cheezits. These are the things you are thankful for when you have no light, heat, or stove & your work doesn't tell you work is cancelled so you have to drive there to find out. Blah. Did I mention I love Cheezits?

The soup is itself, pretty basic: onions & garlic simmered in butter/small amount of bacon, add ginger paste, cumin, & curry powder, crushed chili peppers, salt & pepper, then add chicken stock, red lentils, & potatoes, bring to a boil, add cubed butternut squash, simmer for the rest of the afternoon while it snows, conveniently in a cast iron enamel pot that can also work on a outside propane flame.

My classic red lentil ginger soup, really, but with butternut squash! Because it was still The Great Butternut Squash Food Challenge Of 2011.  (Theme: classic recipes of mine, with butternut squash). Also, we eat lentil soup during natural disasters in this family!  

It's just that during some of them, the power actually goes out.

It was dark, but we managed to eat well, & the hound dog & tiger kitten kept us warm. Whiskey helped too.

Hurricane Soup. Or Tropical Depression Soup?

See, I promised I'd be back with some actual food! & what better occasion than Hurricane Irene Sunday, here on the East Coast. After days of Hurricane Drama, by yesterday around here it seemed like just about time to give in, purchase provisions (i.e. wine & beer, food & novels), & get ready to stay home. Last night we got prepared by making a giant lentil soup, the purpose of which was to cook as many things in the fridge as possible in case we lost power today (which we didn't, by the way).

8.28.2011: Hurricane (Lentil & Sausage) Soup.

Into the trusty giant white cast iron enamel pot went chicken apple sausage, lentils, onions, garlic, potatoes, ginger, leftover chicken, chicken stock from the same chicken, the last of our garden atomic red & purple haze carrots, & lots of cumin. Since this took a while to cook, while waiting we also consumed the last of the amazing Stop & Shop frozen appetizers we purchased on a recent late night trip, the silly kind where one might by tempted by such items as mac n' cheese triangles & jalapeno poppers. Then we went dancing in the rain.
All in all it's been a pretty good hurricane. My work was delightfully cancelled, & nothing bad happened other than it was kind of anticlimatic I guess.
But it's very cozy here at home, & Owen is brewing beer in the kitchen while I get reacquainted with my blog & listen to Amanda Palmer in our room. We walked the dog over to check out the rather dramatically high Mill River, we addressed the last of our wedding invitations, & we thought it a perfect occasion to drink wine in the afternoon. Even thought the part of my soul that loves storms was secretly looking for a little action, I learned in New Orleans to not play around with hurricanes, so I'm really very happy with how today turned out. Always marry the guy you can spend a perfect hurricane with, that's what I say.

Asparagus City. Population: Lentil Soup.

What? Ok, I am taking liberties with my titles. The asparagus has nothing to do with lentil soup. Nothing at all.  Except for being part of my early morning random train of thought when I was first writing this post.
Maybe I have mentioned-I am ready to eat fresh food. I can really get into the whole winter thing-big heavy meat dishes roasted in the oven, ducks & lamb, pot roasts & whole chickens, curries, the "coming in from the cold Sunday dinner" food that one doesn’t even think about in August. Last year we were a lot better at preserving our garden food than ever before, so all winter there were also little bursts of summer goodness-canned salsa & tomato sauce, green tomato pickles, pickled jalapenos, homemade chili paste & habanero hot sauce.

But now it’s May & I want to taste different things. We are having a rainy spring week, so last night it was back to soup (curried red lentil) & coziness but even my taste in soup is changed as spring progresses- a little less meat (although by no means none! hells no!), more flavor, more brightness. I topped the lentil soup with fried ginger root, herbed goat chevre & arugula pesto, & daydreamed about my future thai basil patch in the garden & when that will be my garnish.

 5.16.2011: Red Lentil Soup.

 A few notes regarding this soup (as this is a food blog after all): Adding the arugula pesto was kind of a crazy idea, but we had some leftover from this meal. We keep ample homemade chicken stock on hand in the freezer (when I roast a chicken I always make stock-chicken fat is a terrible thing to waste), & I personally find that in lentil soup, a good chicken stock is essential. & the fried ginger root-well, I learned a few things from my more than ten years of subscribing to Martha Stewart Living & that lentil soup garnish was one of them. That & the fact that an immersion blender is nice to have on hand when making soup. Thank you, Martha.

So the "food grown in the ground outside relatively near where I live" season is only just beginning. What do we have? Well, here in the Pioneer Valley we do have local Hadley asparagus for a very brief, delightful season, & I realize that forgetting to give it a nod would be a terrible error.

Fresh asparagus is best super simple, so this is more of a celebration than a recipe. Olive oil, garlic, salt & pepper. That is all you need, well a good cast iron skillet helps too.
We had it over pappardelle noodles with cheese. We had it with a fried egg on top. We had it with pumpkin seeds thrown into the mix. We had it with grilled eggplant in a burrito made up from the burrito topping leftovers.

May 2011: Hadley Asparagus Season. 

 What else? The leftover lentil soup made a very good lunch. It is well after 9pm & I have yet to eat my own dinner tonight, so I should think about that. Walt prefers that we NOT eat vegetables, but we do anyway. I like spring rain & am not sick of it yet; I am however sick of people complaining about the rain. IT ALWAYS RAINS A LOT IN MAY HERE. Let it ago. At least the temperature is remaining steadily above 50. This date on various years marks the day of both my parents' birth & of my grandparents wedding anniversary. So May 17th is a pretty cool day.
Some miscellaneous thoughts from EnD. Hey, why have a blog if I can't share this stuff sometimes? Eat your asparagus.

Saint Patrick's Day, Corned Beef, Cabbage, Beer, & All That Stuff That One Does.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day from EnD. Whatever that means. On one hand, I hate fake bullshit forced holiday crap (mostly as experience at work, i.e.last Mardi Gras) but on the other hand, I love love love bullshit holiday crap too, traditions, decorations, colours & most of all foods. What can I say? I love being festive. Whatever the random holiday, I can get down with it.

& Most importantly, Stop & Shop had a really good sale on corned beef, & I scored some free cabbage & potatoes from work. CORNED BEEF & CABBAGE=SOLD. I had none of the traditional seasonings on hand, so when boiling the corned beef added to the water some dijon mustard, some wasabi paste, peppercorns, garlic, red wine & an onion. Later came the cabbage & potatoes. Worked out pretty excellent.

3.14.2010: Corned Beef & Cabbage (not St. Patrick's Day but it was a rainy Sunday & what the hell do we care). The potatoes (yellow) sat in a nest of cabbage leaves with tons of butter (Irish butter!). It was lovely.

3.15.2010. The next day happened to be my day off. Hence thinly sliced corned beef & cabbage sandwiches, with Hellman's (the only mayonnaise as far as I'm concerned) & good whole grain dijon mustard. Condiments! I love them! It rained again (hello March in Massachusetts), so a hearty sandwich in the kitchen was cozy & awesome.
still 3.15.2010. The broth created from random refrigerator contents turned out to be so good we wanted to save it. As another chilly rainy March day progressed (I love these raw New England spring days really, but they do make me want warm food) it seemed clearly soup was next. The C & B stock plus dry white beans were combined & then we searched the pantry & fridge & came up with sweet potatoes, a package of frozen mixed veggies, garlic, an onion, & white rice. To which was added more corned beef & cabbage. EXCELLENT white bean stew, some of which is now still living in the freezer. YAY LETFOVERS.
3.16.2010. One more night of leftover corned beef, in a tandoori curry sauce with a free scavenged from work red bell pepper & an eggplant, over white rice. I thought this meal was a good knod to the current U.K., myself.
What is the moral of this tale? LEFTOVERS. I am nearly one half Irish, & I can tell you being Irish is about getting drunk & making really good use of leftovers. So for St. Patrick's day, I ate a $4 cut of corned beef for four days, & ate well. oh & I think I mentioned beer in the title of this post? We did recently purchase a 30 rack of PBR, so that was indeed drunk during the creation of these meals. I'm actually too white trash Mass Irish to afford actual Guiness, you know. I work in a godamn grocery store, people (like a good Irish giorl from downtown New Bedford).

What have we learned?

Less than week until spring. I bought more seeds today...green zebra tomatoes, basil, purple beans. What do I love more than cooking & drawing food? Cooking & drawing food that I grew...look forward to Eating & Drawing & Planting in the future.

Scrabble & Winter Vegetables & Art.

2.3.2010. We have a Scrabble/Art/Soup/Roasted Stuffed Squashes & Other Root Vegetables Party here at 133.

It was sort of an organic collision of my inviting Rin & guest over for a double date dinner party with Owen & I, & Abigail throwing a Soup & Super Scrabble party, at exactly the same time. The food was delicious, the Scrabble game was fierce, Pandora pretended we were at the Basement for some reason, & Rin, Owen, & I (not being the Scrabble types) made some art on the living floor together (while the world's most hilarious books were being read aloud, yet again). Damn, the lessons we learned from the Book Swap are endless. Oh, David Deida, you've given us all so much.

Rin's drawing of Owen & I collaging together.

"Stuffed Squashes/An Inferiority Complex", by me.

"Self Portrait via Show Magazine", by me.

Rin's.

"Soup & Ass", by me.

& Owen's.

(He never glued anything down, but he cut out a lot, so I dumped all the cuttings on the scanner & here's what we have. Pretty freaking awesome. Thanks again, Show Magazine! )

That's the art. Oh, wait, what's this blog called? Oh right, EATING & Drawing. So what did we eat? Well, I was still playing the "work with what you have" game, so mostly this meal was shaped by free stuff from work, but it turned out rather well, in my humble opinion. (Note: this vegan dinner party). I made acorn squashes stuffed with a wild rice blend I made of some pre-mixed blend, wild rice, & short grain brown basmati, crimini mushrooms, spinach, thyme, tofu, onions, & garlic, with a side of rosemary/olive oil roasted sweet potatoes, yukon gold potatoes, & summer squash. Abigail made a soup of (from what I remember from watching) sweet potatoes, chickpeas, watermelon radishes, coconut milk, IDK, it was very good, yay food, we like it. A good combination of things, food creations, games, mixed media, watercolours, drawing, eating, drinking, over the top ridiculous sex/relationship books, trashy music, & friends. & of course, the world's best cat & dog, DustyRose & MelodyRose.

This post is dedicated to the works of David Deida & the ladies of Show Magazine for providing oh so much laughter & inspiration...heart heart heart.

Rabbits Cure Swine Flu? A December Story.

Or Homemade Hot & Sour Soup does?

As I mentioned in my Christmas post, Owen & I spent most of mid-December through New Year's sick sick sick SICK. With Swine Flu! So topical of us! We like to definitely live in tune with all major news stories.

This was a December day right at the beginning of our bout with the plague (before we were reduced to surviving on instant miso soup packets mixed with sriracha, chili oil & sesame oil eaten in bed due to utter lack of strength), a gray chilly day involving walks with dogs & a trip (my first!) to Yankee Candle (don't ask). Possibly we can blame Yankee Candle for the severity of our illness, or at least their Drift Away scented candle. Yes really, wtf? Where in god's name are we drifting to? Where, Yankee Candle? & Why is your fake snow so fucking lame?

So, I had a day off from work, attempted to not get really sick, went to Yankee Candle, came home in desperate need of soup, SUPER SPICY SOUP which is how I knew the flu potential was bad, & made some hot & sour soup with the stock from this chicken.

& ate it with Annie's Bunnies crackers. & lots of Yamamotoyama green tea, & still got REALLY SICK. I still blame Yankee Candle. Maybe it was the Evening Air candle that did it. Cause the soup was actually pretty fucking good. & soup, good hot sauce, & green tea usually save me from getting sick.

We really were not doing well already at this point, so this recipe was kind of random, stay tuned for the non-delirious version. This one was just homemade chicken stock, leftover chicken, sriracha, chili oil, sesame oil, white wine vinegar, cornstarch, whatever random veggies we could find, garlic, jalapenos.

The moral: Unicorns come from Yankee Candle (want to know what that means? feel free to comment & I'll tell you, promise promise).

Meals That Aren't Dinner.

Because there are other meals besides my regular solitary elaborate 3am dinners.
& there are the good friends you share them with. & all the places to eat late lunches & early breakfasts & post-dancing snacks in the Pioneer Valley. Such as:
Crepes with strawberries & honey & whipped creme & the MOST perfect mochas with Melissa at Mosaic.

Wednesday morning after a Tuesday night of dancing at the Basement.

There are always the meals eaten in the parking lot at the grocery store.
Some shit I ate on recent breaks.

My classic hot sauce & cheese sandwiches & instant miso soup.

yup, that's what I eat at work.

(plus a note from Cait)

Lunch with Ali at The Black Sheep.

A good sandwich really takes you far in this life.

& then, there's the TALKING over sandwiches.

With your AWESOME SISTER.

In which Local Burger saves all our lives, by way of snacks after dancing.

All fried. & dipped in something else delicious.

Where do all these drawing come from?

My typical room at right around 3am.

post-dancing, post-facebook, post texting, just me, alone, eating & drawing.

& Rin's tofu sandwich, while we were drawing/painting.

At Woodstar last week.

I can't say it enough. Food shapes all our lives.

Vietnamese/Jewish Gramma Inspired Chicken Soup.

When I lived in San Francisco, in the Richmond, I became addicted to Pho.

When I was first seriously learning to cook on my own, well for the second time, (I learned to cook as a teenager as a vegetarian/anorexic, then I relearned in college after I started eating meat again, then I become a better educated vegetarian, & cooked the hell out of that, then I came an even better educated truly dedicated meat eater. Long story. Oh & I was a vegan for a while along the way, too.)

ANYWAY, at some point at RISD in the mid-90's I taught myself to make chicken soup. Roast chicken is one of my mum's classic recipes, & I do it too, & just today over lunch I was coaching my lovely sister in the Diamond family fine art of roasting a chicken. I was raised to of course always turn a roasted chicken into many more meals by making chicken soup from the leftovers (after the AWESOME sandwich phases of course).

Originally this was of a more traditional variety (my paternal gramma was a matzo ball soup queen) but I like spicy food, & I like asian food, especially southeast asian food & while I can also make pretty authentic Pho & sometimes I do, one of my favorite comfort foods is kind of a cross between my gramma's classic Jewish Matzo Ball Soup & this incredible spicy soup I used to get at the Citrus Club in the upper Haight in SF.

It's always different, my chicken soup, since I never ever cook with a recipe, but this particular one:

boil the hell out of the leftover chicken bones, strain, add leeks, carrots, chili peppers, yukon gold baby potatoes, lemongrass, & garlic (a shit ton of all the spicy elements), boil more, add brown basmati rice, simmer, splash of sriracha, eat.

oh & of course, as toast is really just a vehicle for butter, soup is sometimes just a vehicle for toast, & therefore butter.

God I heart butter, good butter, so much. Seriously, nothing like a hot, spicy, complicated broth with good veggies & chicken on a chilly October night. I like to freeze some for when I'm actually sick & don't have the energy for this, although I love roasting chickens in the winter so I usually end up with plenty of soup.

In conclusion, if you're sick & in need of soup, you know who to call.