Cooking On Sundays

I didn’t actually make this; I’ve gotten so lazy that all I ever make is salads.  And when I say lazy, last time I just bought a bag of premixed salad and put olive oil and vinegar on it.  However, my industrious eaters came over early to make margaritas to reward the cook (geez thanks guys but if I’m not cooking, do I really deserve quite such a reward?) one of them raided my cucumber stash and made a cucumber soup that looked like this:

• Some butter
• A red onion
• A little garlic
• Two huge cucumbers
• A quart of milk
• Enough salt to call it soup
• A large green bell pepper

The butter went into a soup pan, and at the bottom of the soup pan the garlic and onions were sauteed.  Then the garlic and onions went into a blender with the cucumbers, all blended up.  Then in the soup pan went a quart of milk, which was scalded.  After scalding, the blenderized contents went into the pan, salted to taste, and — almost instant cream of cucumber soup!  Hack up the bell pepper into tiny little chunks, and add more to give it some crunchiness and break up the flavor a little bit.  Served with salt and pepper; well, actually in my crowd we also had hot sauce on the side, but I just put ground black pepper on top, I say nothing about the taste buds of the rest of those freaks.

Tasty!  Extra thanks to my soup maker.  And thanks to my margarita maker too, though now the cap to my blender is broken.  But the margaritas are good!

I love soup.

I get these days of “well, what do I have?” and then it goes from there to the soup pot. One of the most awesomest things about soup is that anything can go in it.

Several weeks ago someone gave me some meat that was never clearly identified. It’s clearly a chunk of beef, but from what part of the cow, I’m not certain. Knowing the people involved, I suspect it came from the shoulder.

I threw it in my freezing promising to use it someday. That was many weeks ago. Finally, I got sick of stumbling over that chunk while reaching for ice cream, and pulled it out.

I’m not that good at cooking with meat so I asked everyone I could think of about it. The suggestion I followed was a “cook it on low all day long”. The only problem with this is that we are approaching spring and really what I want to do is go outside and play all day long, and having a boiling pot making it hotter inside only amplifies this effect.

So I did that. After about an hour (much faster than I predicted!) it was soft enough to cut, so I pulled it out and chopped it into bite sized chunks (because I have this weird american habit of all food must be small enough to eat).

Back in the pot, threw in salt, cayenne, onions, scallions. I also threw in two huge sprigs of rosemary.  In a blender I pureed bell peppers, jalapeños, left over cabbage, and lemons. I didn’t tell anyone about these secret ingredients, and I wanted them out of the fridge before they tried to make friends with me. Tossed this “broth” into the soup, keep cooking.

I wanted this to be more like “stew” than “meat with water” so I looked for things that would thicken the broth. Since I always seem to have a large supply of lentils on hand, I dumped a bunch in. I also have barley! So this became lentil, barely, and beef stew.

I still have veggies left, noticeably, I saved a bell pepper, I have some celery, so I chopped these up, and in they went.

After last week I promised myself I wouldn’t put any cumin in it.

This was tasty! Actually, I would recommend something spicy added to it, and of course, I didn’t add enough salt. On the day I made it, I put out my collection of hot sauces, however most people didn’t use them. They did use the salt though. Since then, when I throw a bowl of it in the microwave, I usually put in sriracha, that garlic helps it a lot, and a lot of salt.

In the end, I suppose calling it “rosemary beef stew” would be a better name, but “mystery meat” is far more fun to have as a title.

Oh–and before I forget–on the side, we served a fabulous salami, cheese, and cracker plate on the side.

Also, despite the lack of pics today, I actually have been making pics. Pics will soon appear!

So continuing last weeks’ saga of the ham bone, I left that boiling on the stove for the week.

Well, not the whole week.  Maybe a couple days.  And generally left it sitting on the stove otherwise.  I boiled it once more this morning, just in case it was breeding cooties.

I soaked the split peas since the morning.  I meant to do it overnight, but I forgot.  I’m really not a soaker, in the bean-soup wars, I prefer to just toss them in and go.  If you soak them, it does reduce cooking time, which is nice.

Split pea soup is tasty stuff–it’s about one of the only recipes I’ve taken from my mom that I like (the other being lasagna).  It’s also dirt cheap–I added up the ingredients, and it was roughly nothing–I already had the ingredients, and was wishing that the peas in the freezer would go away, potatoes that needed to be used up sooner or later, and a half-dead onion.  Realistically speaking, it was roughly $5, or possibly more if you follow roommates suggestion of  using a tad more ham mentioned below.

Ingredient list:

• A huge amount of green and yellow split peas
• An almost-dead onion
• One leek
• Half bag of carrots
• Half a turnip
• A small tupperware container filled with precooked chopped ham
• Oregano, thyme, pepper, salt, and probably something else I’m forgetting

No garlic?  No garlic, I would typically use a huge amount of garlic, but I’ve done that in the past, and it makes everyone reek of garlic for days.  I chopped the onion and leek, threw it in the boiling pot.  Tossed the peas in until they turned to mush, stirring constantly.  This takes some time–about two hours–and you need to stir with regular frequency to prevent the soup from sticking to the bottom.  Towards the end, I chopped up the carrots, potatoes, and turnips, and tossed them in.  I actually had got this all done well in advanced enough that I turned it off and worked on the other foods.

I particularly skimped on the ham.  See, that’s what happens when you let the vegetarian cook!  The ham lovers in the audience added more, and said it was tastier with much more ham.  One person had a bowl filled with ham, and just poured some soup on top.

For the cumin potato salad, I used a recipe I’ve had for some time now.  It’s basically roast some cumin on a pan.  Then grind the cumin, add enough oil/vinegar to potatoes to make sure cumin gets everywhere, and stir.  You could probably do this with other foods, like eggs (and I commonly use eggs) or maybe even make a “oil and cumin” type dressing, the way oil and mustard dressings are popular.

• Potatoes (about enough to feed four)
• Carrots
• Two hard boiled eggs
• A (measured) teaspoon of whole cumin
• A (measured) teaspoon of whole coriander seeds
• Two peppercorns, because last week someone said one wasn’t enough
• Enough olive oil to mix everything together

To make this, roast the spices on a stove, with no oil.  I miss my cast iron pan, because doing this with other pans isn’t quite the same.  After the cumin smells cooked and is slightly brown, toss it into the grinder.  Boil the potatoes and eggs (separately) and chop them up small, and chop the unboiled carrots very small.  Mix everything together with olive oil, until everything is well coated.  Normally I would use tomatoes instead of carrots, but I didn’t have any today.

The hard part in this making sure the proportions are correct.  Here I think I used too much cumin/coriander compared to potatoes.  My original recipe said “makes enough to feed four”, which I think is about how much I actually made.  Fortunately my vast eaters did not in fact show (I expected ten, and only four showed up) so there was plenty.  I still think this one is tasty, however, others were not as appreciative as I was.

Perhaps I should have shown the bowl before people devoured, instead of after.

And, for the curry.  This was a slightly bold recipe, and I followed it from a book exactly.  Wait, let me quantify that “exactly”, I followed the directions exactly, however, I used varying ingredients.  In fact, at some point I looked at my counter, said “this is what I have”, and looked at the recipe, and said “well, how different can it be?”  It came from a book entitled “Spicy Vegetarian Feasts” and was labeled as “Braised Vegetables in a Cardamom Nut Sauce”.  Things I was missing included onions and ginger and green peas and I’m not sure what else.

The ingredients were something like:

• One habanero chili (the recipe was written for an english audience, we use chilis, not peppers)
• One serrano chili  (the recipe called for “one very spicy green chili”)
• One cup of yogurt
• 12 24 green cardamom pods
• 24 12 cloves (I got the amounts backwards from the original recipe)
• A cinnamon stick
• Two cloves of garlic
• Two pounds of potatoes, chopped small
• Half a turnip, chopped small
• Some remaining carrots
• A  zucchini
• Half a thing of spinach
• A few string beans

The book says put the potatoes and turnips in a bowl of water and let soak while doing everything else.  Okay….

I threw some olive oil into the pan, with the garlic, chillies, cinnamon stick, cardamom, and cloves.  “Add two spoonfuls of yogurt, and let the yogurt boil down to nothing, and repeat, until that cup of yogurt is gone”.  As I’m doing this, I’m thinking to myself, “am I  making cheese?”

“Then, throw in the potatoes and turnips, along with a cup of water”.  I throw in the potatoes and turnips, and put enough water to submerge them all.  I let the water cook until it’s not there any more and the potatoes and turnips are cooked.  I throw in the spinach and carrots and zucchini and just a hair more water and let it cook long enough for the veggies to cook.

I carefully warned everyone “this is a cardamom pod, don’t eat it, this is a clove, don’t eat it, you all know what a cinnamon stick looks like, don’t eat it”.  So who was the one chewing on a cardamom pod wondering why it was way way over cardamomed?  Yours truly, of course.

It was tasty enough if you were careful enough not to bite any of the pods or cloves.  Of course, they were mixed in well enough, so we all did, and everyone said it was way too spiced.  The habanero and serrano didn’t really show through at all, or at least I didn’t taste them at all.  If I were to do this, I would remove pods, cloves, and cinnamon stick before adding anything else.  Otherwise, they get far too in the way of enjoying this.

Next time I try this, I’ll follow the recipe a little closer–with ginger and onions and no spinach but with green peas peas and I’m not sure how many other variations  I made.  It was tasty, but I would say it was over cardamomed, another eater said it was over cloved, and another said it was her favourite.

The fortunate side of getting four when you expect ten is now I don’t have to cook for the rest of the week.  Woo!  They better get used to cardomom breath at work!  Someone better help me eat some of this soup, as it takes up a huge amount of space in the fridge!

I’m getting better with the photos–but it’s still not on top of my mind.  There are no photos of completely made soup or curry.

I was at a latino butcher shop with my friends, somewhere between planning on abandoning dinner plans due to the multitude of parties to go to, and determined to still make dinner, despite the lack of eaters (I did end up with two eaters besides myself).  While carefully examining everything on the shelves, I found fufu flour.

I asked Ickabod, who is a master chef, what is fufu flour?  He didn’t know.  So I bought it, and looked it up on Wikipedia.

The box said it was made from cocoyam, which took me through several Wikipedia redirects and disambiguations pages, which led me to decide that it was the root of xanthosoma.  The directions were easy–just add hot water and turn into paste.  It was then I really realized what fufu is–pasteballs.

After some searching the internet, I found an interesting recipe.  My original plan was to follow this recipe, fufu with okra soup.  However, I couldn’t find the broth, and due to vociferous objections against okra from my eaters, the soup turned out radically different.

With this dubious start I worked on the soup.  I was planning on using Golden Curry as a broth base–it’s like this weird beef base thing for making curries, but it’s really thick, so it’s easily adaptable to soup, and I didn’t have any beef broth.  But the store didn’t have any, so I found a coconut/lime/red curry soup instead.  And becuase of the objections of okra, I made it with cauliflower instead.

• One cauliflower
• One can of “Red curry soup” (see picture above)
• Half bag of spinach
• One small onion
• One habanero
• Some string beans
• Some onion sprouts
• All the spices I found in the closet (curry powder, onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, salt and pepper)

Hm, was that it?  I started the soup with sauteeing the habanero and onion in the the soup pan with oil, and adding some finely chopped cauliflower in the idea that it might become some kind of little crispy crunchy stuffs, which it didn’t.  I added the can of soup with lots of water, which turned out to have lots of interesting things in it, like bamboo and basil and I’m not sure what else.  I added the rest of the ingredients, nervous the whole time that it wouldn’t taste good.

For the fufu, I carefully followed the directions.  While the principle was easy, add hot water and turn into paste, all sorts of details were given, either by the box or the wisdom of the internet, such as wet all the surfaces the fufu will be in contact with prior to mixing, add the water in small amounts, etc.  Really I think you could just pour water on fufu flour and mix with your hands.

I made smaller balls of fufu rather than the large mounds I find images of on the internet.

I also made a simple salad, adding some chopped string beans and onion sprouts to the salad.  Onion sprouts are tasty!  I give up rewriting the salad recipe every time and just put a page here, which will be linked probably weekly.

Do I dare tell you the results?  The soup was fabulous!  It was the tastiest thing ever!  Raven attempted to make it again as soon as my back was turned!

But what of the fufu?  The fufu was universally despised.  Many suggestions were given to make more palatable, such as throw the box of fufu flour out the window, throw fufu balls at people you don’t like, or use it to paste things to walls.  The general consensus was that if you weren’t a starving african, there was no reason to eat fufu.

I think that review is a little harsh, and that if you added flavor to it (any flavor!), it would be better.  Make pancakes out of it!  Deep fry it, call it donuts!  One person said it was meant to be made with soup broth, not just water, that’s another idea!  But in the form of water and flour, it’s just pasteballs, although pasteballs in soup is not that bad (after all, people like matzo ball soup, right?).

One of the nice things about being out of town is I don’t have to worry about the local allergens.  One of not so nice things is figuring what everyone else is allergic to!

Anyway, today’s recipe involves milk, and a lot of it.  We only made soup and a simple salad (tomatoes, cucumbers, and bell peppers, with some dressing found in the fridge, very easy), and I’m only going to write about the soup.

The original recipe was found in “The Joy of Cooking”, I can’t remember what page, and an edition from about 1990ish.  Again with the lack of pictures, we were too busy drinking wine and talking about things that happened a long long long time ago rather than looking for cameras.  The original recipe was spicy corn chowder, with Raven’s suggestion (and actually she did much of the cooking) we turned it into corn chowder with curried shrimps.

The ingredient list looked something like this:

• About 3/4 a liter of milk
• Three bags of frozen corn
• Lots of paprika, red cayenne powder, yellow curry powder, turmeric, salt, and pepper
• One green and one red bell pepper
• One poblano
• Two unidentified anaheim-ish peppers
• A few potatoes
• Some butter
• Garlic and onions
• Small precooked shrimps
• Enough oil to saute shrimps

We precooked the potatoes by boiling them.  The garlic, onions, and peppers were sauteed in the soup pot with butter, and when done, put in the milk and potatoes.  As we argued about whether it was soup or hot milk, we put in the the other ingredients except the shrimp, and kept adding various spices, in the hope that some of them would turn it into soup, while keeping it on the heat all the time, boiling it down somewhat.  As it approached a more “soup” quality than “hot milk” quality, Raven sauteed the shrimps, without using oil or butter, in yellow curry powder, and then tossed them in.  Comparatively easy!

This fed seven people, one of which showed up three hours after the rest of us ate.  The soup was well received–people who were looking at it suspiciously as we started later went for seconds, and the poor guy who showed up late was lucky to get the last bowl, as we were all threatening to eat it.

The only thing I would do different is add something to the milk for a more substantial base–while cooking potatoes, spices, and other stuff into the milk does give it some substance, next time I would blend potatoes, or possibly some bread, into the broth.  I found a stale baguette and hacked into pieces and let it soak in my bowl–I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I love bread, and it was delicious.

I’m visiting a friend who really likes mushrooms, and so I tell her, I figured out how to make a tasty mushroom soup that you’d really like.  I didn’t mean this to be a Sunday, but it just happened to be on a Sunday, so it works out.  She lives with a friend who is a fancy cook, and Saturday, he made us poisson cru (tahitian raw fish salad), hawaiian rice, and skewers with spam (sorry, “cured ham”) and pineapple.  So anyway, I was expecting that while I am in town, that I would be shooed from the kitchen and not allowed any where near his pots.  Well, I’m not allowed near some of them.

Anyway, on to the mushroom soup.

We stopped, on a whim, at a chinese store/mall/etc place called Kam-Man, in Quincy, MA.  I was noting the mushrooms were really cheap (portabellas for $2.99/lb, shiitakes at $3.99/lb).  The response I got to this was “hey weren’t you going to make soup?”

So we got mushrooms, mushrooms, a few potatoes, two leeks, ginger candy, durian candy, sesame seed candy, banana pocky, some chocolate cookie things that reminded me of jaffa cakes, and a duck.  A duck?  Well, the aforementioned cook, who is known as Ickabod, who will play a more prominent role in this story, had always wanted to get a hanging duck from a chinatown window, and though this was not chinatown, he got a duck.

The ingredient list here was much smaller due to me not cleaning out the fridge.  I wonder if it made it less tasty.

• Four yukon gold potatoes
• Two leeks
• A pound of portabello mushrooms
• A pound of shiitake mushrooms
• Salt

So, I asked him which soup pot I could use (”any one but the red one”), and I took his largest pot and put some water in it and put the heat on.  I started chopping potatoes and threw them in the water.

“Hey stanza you’re already making your first mistake in the kitchen!  You always boil potatoes from cold water!”  Turns out that putting potatoes in boiling water does something to the molecule chains in them, whereas cooking from cold water doesn’t mess up that molecular structure.

I hadn’t heard this before.  Anyway, I chopped and cut the leeks.  Ickabod introduced me to a method of washing leeks much easier than what I had done before (leeks are a pain to clean due to dirt everywhere).  Since I learned something, I might as well share–I always cut the leeks into “rounds”, little discs.  He said cut lengthwise, so you have two halves, then cut the slices the way I did–then throw the half-discs into a bowl of water.  Swish them around a bit, and that should rinse anything off you may have missed–and since dirt hides everywhere on a leek, this is much easier than peel off a leaf, rinse, peel off another leaf, etc.

I objected when he tried to throw out the green bits.  On the heat, boil boil boil.

I chopped up half the mushrooms, sauteed them in butter and salt (only unsalted butter in this house, which is a detail I should have noted in my previous sauteeings (I always used salted butter)), and threw them in the pot.

Then began a heated argument over whether to put the soup through a blender.  Ickabod says it must go through a blender to become soup.  Me and Raven much prefer chunky soup.  We compromised, and blended the half of the mushrooms that were already in the pot, and did not blend the second half of the mushrooms that I sauteed in butter and salt as well.

Then came the great argument of the thickness of soup.  I like a thick soup.  They argued that soup should not be thick enough to eat with a fork.  I went along with them, and watered down the soup to the point you could no longer make sculptures with it.

And there was a duck!  I didn’t pay much attention to the duck, I was pretty oblivious to the duck, until I announced “I’m done!” Ickabod’s reply was “get out of my way” and a cooked duck appeared!  So, I asked how duck was made (only one ingredient, a duck).

It was already roasted at the store.  (Oh.)  It was wrapped in tinfoil and stuck in the oven.  Shortly before dinner time, it was unwrapped, and cooked some more, to make the outside crispy.  Crispy duck!

The duck was well received.  The soup did not go over quite so well as the last time, but I will note that blending the mushrooms into it spread tasty mushroom flavor throughout.  I did forget garlic, and I didn’t use any boullion or soup stock.  We also skipped on the orzo.  But it was tasty nonetheless, and I think the addition of perhaps onion, garlic, and/or boullion would have gone a long way.  The next time I attempt this, I would try for the first version of the soup, but blend half the mushrooms.

The sign said “30lb cabbage, $1.85″. I saw that, I carefully dug through my wallet for $1.85. Yes! Exact change!

So, what to do with 30lbs of cabbage?

Well, of course, first question is, is it really 30lbs of cabbage? All our methods of determining this say that this is a no. It’s much closer to about 5-6 lbs. It is bigger than your head (well, maybe not your head if you have a particularly large head, but I did describe it as a cabbage “bigger than your head”). Our three methods of weighing it (how is it no one has a scale?) were simply lifting it, and guessing “4-5lbs?”, going to the store and weighing similarly sized cabbages (5-6lbs?), and, thank you raven I entirely blame you, making a balance beam (hey let’s not use my diabolo next time, and our planks are substandard), putting books on the opposite end, and looking it the weight of such books on amazon.com. It weighed about as much as “Road to Reality”, by Roger Penrose, 3.4lbs, and “AI Game Programming Wisdom 2″, edited by Steve Rabin, 3.3lbs, combined. Actually the books were heavier, but my army of choppers were impatient, so my attempts at stacking a bunch of small paperbacks with Penrose were aborted.

On to the next question. How do you cook thirty pounds, I mean about six pounds, or at this point more frequently said, a cabbage larger than your head, in such a way that is tasty?

Well, let’s start with the soup. Not cabbage soup, let’s start with the huge bag of mushrooms I got at the farmers market.

Three varieties of mushrooms: shiitake (in front), maitake (on right), and oyster mushrooms (on left).

The mushrooms came with several recipes. I decided a mushroom soup recipe, and then decided it was too much a cream-and-flour recipe, so I added potatoes and leeks to that recipe. And forgot to put in paprika. And pretty much everything else it suggested. And it’s soup, so I added everything not nailed down.

• 3 large baking potatoes
• 6 leeks
• Half a thing of orzo
• Some chicken bouillon
• Some salt
• Little bit of garlic (only because it was getting so late before it went in, it would have been more)
• Half an onion (again it went late, but it was tasty, there were still identifiable bits of onion in it)
• One apple (what else am I going to do with that apple?)
• Plate full of mushrooms sauteed in butter
• Lots of water

I chopped up the leeks and potatoes, and put them in boiling water. Really, everything should have gone in except the orzo and mushrooms, but it took me so long to get everything going that this went over a long period of time. I saved some of the green ends of the leeks towards the end so there were visible green bits in the soup, but let everything else dissolve into white mush soup. Then the orzo and the leeks went in. The mushrooms were sauteed in butter, but that’s about it.

For the next dish, I tried to follow this carrot kinpira recipe and failed miserably. It was an interesting experiment, though. I forgot to get sesame seeds.  I almost forgot to add soy sauce. I added cabbage core and bok choy stems.

• Carrots, cut thin
• Cabbage core, cut thin
• Bok choy stems, cut thin
• Sesame seed oil
• Ginger
• A pinch of Three arbol peppers, ground
• Way too much parsley (reconsider buying when you see bunches that big)
• Soy sauce

Well, it was tasty, but not quite kinpira. I heated the ground peppers in sesame seed oil, and stir fried the veggies and ginger almost as fast as my assistants could chop them, and grumbled about my lack of sesame seeds, while chopping and adding parsley.  At the very end, only because someone mentioned it, I added the soy sauce.  Not bad, but not what I was expecting, and due to the quantity I was making, not very well cooked, but not bad for a salad.

The bulk of the cabbage was basically a stir-friedish-thing.  One assistant was mostly charged with it.

• As much cabbage as could fit in the pan
• A bunch of bok choy
• Some ground beef
• The other half of the onion
• Garlic
• One habanero
• Mustard

I’m not entirely certain what else, because on occasion my back was turned, and odder things were put in there.

I started by sauteeing garlic, onion, and habanero.  Then all the cabbage and bok choy was thrown in (about 3/4ths of the cabbage).  It was continually stirred, with odd things mixed in, the only one I’m certain of is the mustard, which I could taste (it gave a very sweet taste) and pretty much else no one noticed.  Some commented the flavour of the habanero stood out, some commented the spiciness of the habanero stood out. I’m going to revisit this, because I need to ask what else went in while back was turned.

Ah yes and I also made rice with some cumin thrown in the pot on the side.  I use a little rice cooker, and this I did not know–I really should have made two pots of rice.

The clear winner here was the soup.  Everyone loved the soup.  The rice was devoured in seconds–I made another pot, but the time the second pot was done, no one was hungry anymore.

The cabbage went over well–I think most people’s reactions were “um…  interesting” but it was well devoured.

The “almost kinpira” was also devoured–those who don’t do spicy said it was way too spicy, but that really was only one person, whereas everyone else said it needed more “something”, with the something suggested ginger, or sesame seeds, or…  well, something.  Funny, as my new technique with ginger is to make sure it is fresh, chop it fine, and use a ton, otherwise the flavor doesn’t come across as well.  I thought I did use tons, but it didn’t quite come through.

This fed eight, with barely-almost-some left over. I felt like I succeeded–the leftovers weren’t there because people were still hungry, but there was something left over. There wasn’t any soup left over, but that’s because people kept eating it, even if they weren’t hungry anymore, because it was tasty. There was barely one bowl full of cabbage left. There was half a bowl of kinpira left over, and it would have been eaten had there been room left. There was a pot of rice left over, but when it was done, no one was hungry anymore.

Seriously, for the soup, while doing dishes, I saw there were about five spoonfuls left, went to find a spoon, and when I got back to it they were gone. The other dishwashers beat me to the last five spoonfuls. I will repeat that recipe sometime soon.

Edit: typos fixed throughout.  And lists given bullets.

I got two butternut squashes from the farmers market yesterday.  They were $2.50.  I only actually used half of one of them for two recipes.

Both recipes came from http://bread-and-honey.blogspot.com.  I had never tried to make a butternut squash curry before, it seemed like an odd idea.  The soup seemed almost natural, and came out tastier than I expected.

I also made a salad involving tomatoes of every color.  Wish I had a picture now.  I had green zebra tomatoes, lemon finger tomatoes, chocolate tomatoes, and some italian red tomatoes that I actually forget the variety of now.  Some cucumbers, some bell peppers, and some balsamic, very basic yet still tasty.  Bell peppers and cucumbers are strangely cheap at the farmers market ($2 for five bell peppers, $2 for two cucumbers or $1/pound).

Salad:

• Two large cucumbers.
• Tomatoes of every color I could find at the farmers market
• A large bell pepper
• Balsamic vinegar

Chop up and stir together.  That’s about it!  Actually no I think a hair of salt was added.

The other two were much more involved.  I baked the squash, potatoes, garlic, carrots, onions, and a couple peppers all at once before starting.

Soup:

• 1/4 squash
• Several potatoes
• A small bulb of garlic
• Half an anaheim pepper
• Half an onion (sorry to these folks)
• Carrots
• Some powdered chicken boullion
• Lots of water
• Salt and pepper

I followed their recommendation of “when baking, drizzle everything in olive oil and salt”.  They are right in that it makes everything tasty.  After baking everything, I boiled a small amount of water and threw in the boullion.  Actually, I threw in all the ingredients, wandering around the house looking for anything else that needed eating before it became icky.  Then I scooped the ingredients out of the boiling water, into the blender, added more water (not from the pot), blended, and back into the pot.  Since not all the ingredients could fit in the blender, I did this process about five times

The curry was a bit more involved, but not much, not really.

• 1/4 Butternut squash
• One small summer squash
• Block of tofu
• One clove of garlic (normally I’d do much more, but being as there is a bulb in the soup, I decided against it)
• The rest of the onion
• A small can of coconut milk
• A bell pepper
• A spoonful of Patak’s curry paste
• Two arbol peppers

This was easy, just saute onions, garlic, peppers in olive oil.  When the oil has those flavors, cube the tofu, and sizzle as much as possible.  When you’re convinced the tofu won’t cook anymore, put in the coconut milk.Turn the heat down, and add water if the coconut milk gets too thick.  Stir in the curry paste, and add all the other vegetables.  Let the glodge cook until you are satisfied (I generally just let the veggies get as hot as the rest of the food, you may want to add them before adding coconut milk).  Serve with rice.

Edit:  I can’t believe I forgot to mention this!  After curry paste, but before veggies, get the mushiest chunks of the butternut squash.  Mash them up into the coconut milk/curry paste mixture.  It makes for a creamy yummy tasty curry sauce.  You can leave some of the squash as chunks, or not, as you like, I mushed all of my chunks up into the coconut milk.

The original recipe calls for Thai curry paste, but I used Indian curry paste, mainly because I found myself lacking Thai curry paste at the last moment.  It didn’t matter-it still came out very tasty.  The only thing I’d suggest is a more serious vegetable-the summer squash was as white as the tofu, I’d recommend a broccoli or red cabbage or something.