Warm Pumpkin Soup for a Rainy Day

Summer is creeping over the horizon, but this rainy stormy afternoon made me crave something warm and hearty. After searching through my cupboards, I decided to go in a direction I've never gone before and make Black Bean Pumpkin Soup. I found a base recipe online, but decided to alter it quite a bit to make it heartier and much more spicy. The ingredients:

1/2 stick butter
1/2 a white onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic
1 carrot, chopped
2 cups chicken broth
29 oz can pumpkin puree
2 cans 10 oz diced tomatoes with lime juice and chilis
2 cans 15.25 black beans
1/4 tsp coriander
1 tsp cumin
1 bay leaf
salt
pepper
~3 T sherry vinegar
~1 T lemon juice

The onion, garlic and carrot were put in a soup pot with the butter and cooked until the onions and carrot softened.

The remainder of the ingredients were added to the pot, and the heat was reduced to low and simmered about 20 minutes.

Pretty? No Yummy? Yes!

Despite my initial thoughts of what this soup would be, I really really enjoyed it. I doubled the pumpkin that the original recipe called for and added fewer beans so that the pumpkin flavor would come through and have its day. This was a spicy, light and unexpected meal, perfect for a rainy summer day.

Even better, this soup took almost no time, and could be altered to suit any tastes. It could easily be made vegetarian (switch veggie broth for the chicken) or more mild (use less of the coriander and cumin, and use diced tomatoes without the chilis). If you prefer a smoother soup, you could also add more broth or use an immersion blender to up the smooth-and-creamy factor.

Sour cream or plain yogurt would work perfectly with this dish, and I would have added a dollop to my bowl if I had some on hand.

Yum!

PS. I realize that this soup is not pretty (boo I love pretty food pictures!), so to satisfy beautiful-food-picture-cravings I suggest this site: http://foodporndaily.com/ As they say: click, drool, repeat

Feels like friday on a tuesday night......

Ahhhh the sweet taste of success! After days (well, weeks) of lackluster meals and uninspired recipes, I finally stepped up my A game. Half carnivorous and half vegetarian, this meal put me in heaven. These heavenly feelings could have been brought about by the dinner location rather than the food.... but no matter, it was a relaxing and peaceful evening nonetheless. I can't really take all of the credit, because Tom had the simply brilliant idea to pack a picnic of the dishes I had been preparing and grill out at Red Top Mountain State Park. We've been thinking of getting married there, and decided to check it out and then sit by the lake and feast. What was on the menu? Cream Cheese Jalapeno Burgers and Summer Barley Salad.

The burgers were quite simple. I bought two pounds of lean ground chuck, two packages of neufchatel cheese and a can of jalapenos. I mixed the chopped jalapenos (we used mild but could easily have handled more spice) with the cream cheese and set the mixture aside. The meat was formed into thin patties (make two times more patties than the number of burgers that you want - I promise this will become more clear in about three seconds). Form a yummy goodness sandwich with a patty on the bottom, the cream cheese mixture in the middle and another patty on top. With the cream cheese safely inside, pinch the patties together on the outside to keep the cream cheese from oozing out while cooking (we got six burgers out of this, so I Tom made 12 patties).

Recruiting a helper is best:

For the Summer Barley, I combined:

one cucumber, diced
several cherry tomatoes cut in half
a cup of fresh cilantro, chopped
one grated carrot [my recipe called for two, but really, who has the energy to manually grate two carrots]
two green onions, chopped
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 tsp sea salt

one cup barley, cooked (this should be cool before mixing with all of the other ingredients)
After mixing the veggies with the barley, mix in one container of feta cheese (yum!)


After prepping the burgers and the barley salad, we packed up one cooler, one picnic basket and one dog and headed up the highway to our site of potential matrimony.

And since I brought the perfect chef, I was left to sit on the picnic table and ponder important things, such as the nature of our very existence, the intelligence of the person who invented waverunners and our great luck at being passed over by the pop-up thunderstorms that riddled Atlanta at precisely the same time we were sitting to feast. 

 Luckiest girl in the world? That's what I was thinking.

And lest you think we're a might tooooo classy, just set your fears aside.

In all, a perfect night for a perfect meal.

And for those of you getting ready to say your vows and wondering where you can get hitched on the cheap (with lots of nature and a casual atmosphere), Red Top really is quite an economical option. We weren't particularly fond of the site (a bit of erosion in the wedding area that took away from the ambiance), but at $250 for the whole shebang you won't find me complaining about a little dirt displacement.

And since we're pretty certain that a pig roast is a fantastic way to begin many many years of wedded bliss, this caught our eye more than anything else:

Stay tuned for more wedding details. Will we choose Red Top? Will we get married in someone's backyard? Will we elope? (Just kidding Mom.) We plan to answer these and many more questions next week, when we vacation with my super amazing future family.

Until then, bon appetit!

Home

I recently moved into a new house (with a bigger kitchen!), which means that I was also given the menacing task of moving all of my stuff and organizing it to fit in with someone else's space (I moved in with my fiance). This three-day weekend I found myself with very few plans and the house to myself. Inspiration in place, I tackled my boxes-o-stuff and subjected each item to intense scrutinization before deciding whether or not I would keep it. For a packrat such as myself (though not quite of the Hoarders variety), this was difficult. But surprising to me (probably not to y'all), going through those boxes that had been largely unopened from Asheville to San Diego to Atlanta felt really really good. It turns out that I don't really need papers from my undergrad days or all of the trinkets I collected in England and China to retain the memories that I have from those periods of my life.

What I thought was going to be a painful process has actually been quite liberating. I don't have boxes of unknown objects, but do have clean(er) spaces and a happier mind. Whoever said that a cluttered house is a cluttered mind was onto something, and I'll take peace of mind over lots of stuff any day.

What will I do with myself now that I am (mostly) moved in? Besides cooking fabulous meals in my big(ger) kitchen, I plan to tackle various DIY projects. My current obsession source of inspiration is from this blog http://www.younghouselove.com/.

Posts will hopefully be more frequent now that I live in one house instead of two, and now that I have a kitchen complete with all of my cooking utensils and even (gasp!) a real dishwasher! Cooking is so much more exciting when you know you've got someone else to clean up after you.

Sometimes its fun to go all out on your baked goods and spend time measuring flour and separating eggs and whipping cream, but then there are those other times when all of those steps just feel like work. Don't beat yourself up about it, that's what I say! If you went for a nice run around the neighborhood and came back only to find that you have nothing for dinner because you haven't been grocery shopping in ages, I see nothing wrong with reaching for the box of cake mix eyeing you from the back of the shelves. If you want to bake a Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Spice Cake and then eat several small pieces for dinner, you just go ahead.

PS. Those sweet potato fries were amazing, but my number one favorite thing about DBA Barbecue was sitting on the patio with a watermelon mojito.

Worth listening to: Nobody's Woman by Firefly Revival http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhvA6bSYrgs

When happiness is essential......

Today has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, as Judith Viorst would say. I sometimes have these days in my line of work, and though the world's problems inspire me to work harder and to be a better person, they also tend to bog me down from the inside out. I suppose the day wasn't that bad, but I sort of feel like I need a hug (from someone I know and not a stranger please). If you've had a similar sort of day, or feel like you might in the near future, please take note of this very interesting site I've found: http://gimundo.com/. Their tagline is "good news...served daily" and I feel like there really could be nothing better. If we all read this instead of watching our nightly news then I bet our collective happiness stock would be much higher.

In completely unrelated news, tonight I'll be taking a break from cooking to check out D.B.A Barbecue (http://www.dbabarbecue.com/), where I've heard from a very reliable source that their sweet potatoe fries are to. die. for.

I’ve decided that it is my sister – and not me – who should have a food blog, because while I go to great lengths to put items in crockpots and assemble skewers for grilling, she makes HOMEMADE gnocchi. Who does that?

Laura's Gnocchi!!!

Not one to be outdone by my small sister, rest assured that you will soon see a post by me about how I am also fully capable of making homemade gnocchi. For now though, I’ll keep it short and go back to assembling my veggie skewers. Grilling out on a day like today is perfection!

Happiness thought of the day:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

Late St. Pat's Day post, and..... vermicomposting?

Many apologies for the delay in posting. Due to a long list of boring and anger-inducing internet issues that I will not go into right now, a post that I completed (with pictures!) about my Americanized St. Patrick's Day dinner was deleted from existence.

No matter, I will give you the abridged version here in far fewer words: it wasn't very good. Yes, that's right. If you didn't like corned beef and cabbage when you were a child, you may not like it as an adult either. Just sayin'

The meat was actually ok. I used a recipe from my very favorite recipe website: allrecipes.com. I rubbed brown sugar all over a four pound piece of corned beef, covered it with Guinness, and then cooked it on low in a crockpot all day long.

While it was cooking, I went to see my actress friend play the lead in Mulan at the Alliance Theater and then went to the High to look at art. I'm telling you, there's nothing quite as thrilling as calling into work (don't tell!) to cook good food, watch a play and visit an art museum.

When we got home I turned the crockpot on high and added some cabbage, potatoes and carrots. If you ever do this, you should note that the vegetables need more than an hour (more like two) to cook properly.

I also made Irish Soda Bread (which my family would call a scone). I happen to love soda bread, and was excited to use the highest rated recipe on - again - allrecipes.com. What I have since realized is that my family recipe (from my grandmother who is 100% Irish) does not call for caraway seeds. There is a reason for this: caraway seeds do not taste good in soda bread. I realize it is an Irish tradition, but if my rebel grandmother decided to toss them out of her recipe I feel fully justified in cutting them out of mine.

That, in a nutshell, is my St. Patrick's Day this year. If anyone has any Irish recipe favorites, please pass them on. I'm feeling like I need a St. Patrick's Day redo.

On an unrelated note: I've decided to try vermicomposting again. My first attempt occurred when I lived in southern CA and all of my worms died because southern California happens to be overrun with ants (which, sadly, do eat worms). It was very traumatic, but I'm willing to try again. We'll keep the worms out of harms way in the garage, where they can eat our vegetable scraps in peace and turn them into some lovely compost for our garden that is literally smaller than a twin bed.

What I'm listening to now: http://www.myspace.com/dancerversuspolitician This band makes me very happy. I went to see my old roommate play at a show, and Dancer Vs. Politician played right before him.