Monthly Archives: March 2008

Green Soup for After a Party

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I hosted Easter yesterday — sent out invitations and invited everyone I know to stop by — it was great fun, there were probably 30 or 40 people over the afternoon, luckily not all at once since my house isn’t that big. I did a big ham, cured and smoked by our local butcher, Matt. He does wonderful hams (we keep trying to convince him to eschew CAFO meat, and while he does do some local sourcing, he’s unconvinced people around here will pay for it. Considering half the kids in the county get free lunch, he might be right, but we keep trying nonetheless). Even though he uses commercial pork, he does a great ham, and unbelievable bacon — I consider it half-local — and I glazed that 16 pound big boy with a mixture of equal parts orange marmalade, mustard, rooster sauce and brown sugar (next time I might add some orange zest as well). It came out spicy and sweet and fabulous, and as always, people ate most of that ham.

I also made some delicious asparagus mushroom egg stratas using this recipe I found online — and made a big salad. Now because I have a horror of running out of food at a party — I had an entire uncooked egg strata left over, as well as 3 big bags of washed greens (a mix of red and green leaf lettuce, frissee, and watercress). I cooked off the last egg strata this morning, then portioned it up and froze it — that’s a lot of easy dinners for nights when work has been hectic. And I’m making soup from the leftover greens.

I love greens soup in the spring — and today’s mixture of spitting rain and sunshine screams spring like nothing else. I cut up a white onion and sauteed it in enough butter and olive oil to cover the bottom of my dutch oven. When the onion was translucent I added a dried chile pepper and 4 cloves of garlic minced. Then I started feeding in the greens, stuffing more and more in as they wilted. A good slug of leftover champagne (I know! sounds decadant — but it was leftover cava from the mimosas) and cook it until all the greens wilted down. Then I added a box of chicken stock (I have some homemade in the freezer, but I wasn’t thinking ahead), and a half pint of whipping cream leftover from this weekends fiesta. Cook it until it seems done but not dead, then get out the hand-held blender and puree. And there you have it, a big pot of liquid greenness — which feels like just the thing after a long winter of bean soups. As if we all need the tonic of greens after a long winter, even though we’re not exactly Greek peasants surviving on dried fish and salt pork all winter.

So, Spring is officially here. We’ve had a big fiesta complete with kids and dogs and everyone standing around my kitchen talking and drinking mimosas. There’s been a ham. The leftovers are dealt with, and I’m looking forward to a long summer of entertaining in the garden — that is, if summer ever comes!

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Martha Stewart Cracks Me Up …

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I admit it, I love Martha Stewart. I love her drive. I love her insane love of crafts. She had Nathan Lane on the other day making plaster of paris bunnies — it was insane. She had these plastic molds she’d clamped together with binder clips and as she was making Nathan Lane file off the rough edges he looked at her and said “Martha! People aren’t going to do this! They have lives …” and her response was “Oh yes they will.” As though she was going to come over to each and every one of our houses and personally supervise the proper manufacture of decorative plaster of paris bunnies that we were all to paint to look like chocolate ones.

And then this morning she was dyeing eggs. First, of course, she was wrapping them in scraps of lace, “you know, from your sewing basket,” or, as she also suggested “you could cut up that old wedding dress. You know, if you’ve gotten divorced or something.” And then, after taking the lace-wrapped eggs out of the dye and cutting the lace off them (they really were pretty) she put them on this egg-drying board she’d made by sticking a million pins through a piece of foam core. Like one of those beds of nails the freak-show guys lie on. “You could just have your kids make one of these for you,” she said. I loved the whole thing. The freaky attention to detail. Her genuine joy at how pretty the eggs were. The kind of mind that thinks of sticking a million pins through a piece of foamcore so your eggs will dry without spots.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I know that I have a little inner Martha, the one who took enormous joy in making 6 dozen pecan biscuits last weekend and freezing them for my Easter Brunch I’m throwing this weekend. My inner Martha likes projects — likes the way you get all focussed and keep trying to figure out how to make an actual object that matches that cool idea in your head. It was my inner Martha that got obsessive at Christmas about repurposing two tiny lunchboxes that I got for free at the grocery store into flower fairy lunchboxes for the twins. It was so much fun — finding the right paper then decoupaging it, then cutting the flower fairies out of the calendars and glueing them on, and of course, the glitter. What’s not to love about a project with glitter?

Here’s how they turned out: Martha Stewart Cracks Me Up ...
Maybe it’s the bossy older sister in me, but I get an enormous kick out of watching the way Martha relentlessly orders her world. It’s probably not always a lot of fun to be around her as she’s forcing the universe to conform to her inner vision of how it’s supposed to be, but there’s something I find enormously touching about it. She seems to take such genuine joy in her ridiculous crafts — it’s a joy I get. There’s something wonderful in knowing you’ve got a supply of perfectly lovely plaster bunnies that look like chocolate, but aren’t chocolate so you don’t have to worry about them melting or the pets eating them. And you made them yourself. Martha’s flaws, temper tantrums, and generally difficult nature have all been exhaustively documented, but I just have to admit to a big soft spot for her. She’s so relentlessly herself, and ever since she got out of prison, she seems to have grown a healthy sense of humor about herself as well. What can I say? Martha Stewart cracks me up …

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Spring?

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Spring? Here’s what I woke up to this morning — welcome to spring! It’s prettier than you can see in this photo (must invest in new camera) — that pretty spring snow that clings to each little twig. It’s still snowing as I write — nice wet spring snow that will nourish all those bulbs that are just starting to poke their little heads up.

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Garbage Soup — It’s What’s for Lunch

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Take one pint mason jar of leftover lentil/lamb/mushroom soup (made from leftover lamb braised with mushrooms), one pyrex half-pint dish of leftover braised cabbage/onion/carrot/tomato, and one of Matt’s Meat’s good homemade German sausages. Dump them all in a pot, stir, add enough water to bring to a soupy consistency and simmer until the frozen sausage is cooked. Chop up the sausage into smaller pieces, make some toast, and you have a delicious lunch that will last for several days.

When we were kids, Monday was Garbage Dinner night, a name we found hilarious in that way that kids love a verbal mashup. Garbage soup was one of my mother’s staples, especially during those years when we were really broke. And I have to admit, it’s a habit I’ve carried into adulthood. When in doubt, make a soup out of what’s lurking around in your fridge. And considering this morning’s piece in the NY Times about foodies and fat bellies, a nice lunch of soup and a piece of toast — well, it’s not only a good way to keep yourself from thowing leftovers out, but it’s a good way to keep your waistline in trim.

So, Garbage Soup it is … yum.

(Another handy hint: if you put the leftover hot soup in a mason jar, then put a lid on it while it’s still hot, the seal will help keep the soup from spoiling in your fridge. It’s not the kind of seal you’d want to trust at room temperature, but it prolongs the length of time you can keep it in the fridge.)

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Spring Cleanup

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During my blogging hiatus, I did a lot of little projects — and one of them was cleaning out the vegetable beds in prep for planting. I still need to order compost but I’m waiting for my new fence to go in because I want to build a new raised bed. But I spent a glorious warm Saturday cleaning out the dead stuff. I’ve learned the last couple of years that although it looks messy all winter, it makes more sense to clean up in the spring instead.

First I pulled all the dead stuff out of the herb garden — there was green parsley at the bottom, and the chives are starting to come back in. As for the annual herbs, the cilantro and savory and chervil, we’ll just have to see what self-seeded and then I’ll throw a new batch of seed in when it warms up some. Savory was the big surprise last summer — I fell in love with savory. Sarriette as the French call it (or at least that’s the French name on the cover of that big seed packet from Seeds of Italy).

The next chore was dealing with the bean trellises — I built trellises out of copper plumbing pipe a few years ago (I’m still waiting for them to turn green — we have so little moisture here that it’s taking a while) and then I used zip ties to fasten nylon trellis material to them. Those actually lasted several years, partially due to the fact that I had such trouble getting beans to grow until I cut down all the hollyhocks near the veggie patch to control the flea beetles. But last year I had a bumper crop of beans and so this spring I bit the bullet and just cut the nylon trellis material and pulled it all out, dead bean vines and all. I’ll have to replace it this spring but they’re not expensive.

Finally I tackled the dead greens. The chard plants all came out entire, no overwintering for them, but the chicories and radiccios seem to have made it through the winter with some little nubby heads left. So I cleaned all the dead stuff off of them, and we’ll see if I get some spring greens out of it.

The beds are all nice and tidy now — waiting for a new load of compost and some early spring planting. I’m going to do some spinach and broccoli rabe in the next couple of weeks, and onion sets are starting to show up at the local grocery store. But we’re having a real winter this year, we’re still having snow flurries on a regular basis, and my bulbs have barely broken the surface. So I’m going to take my clues from what’s out there, and not get ahead of myself. I hope. Really. I’m going to try.

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