Category: food for body and soul

What a time.

On December 16, a reckless driver* smashed into a telephone pole at the end of my driveway and flipped her car. She’s going to be okay.

The power surges that wracked my old parsonage the next morning while the electric company restored power completely burned out multiple appliances. Washer and dryer. Dustbusters. Television. DVD player. Treadmill.

Insurance companies. Blergh. Replacing appliances. Then — you know what happened in Newtown, CT. Grief. Holiday preparation insanity at church. Life going on. I am trying not to eat for comfort but I think that’s probably not going to happen. At least I’m eating nourishing things, like this soup.

Ingredients: a bag of mixed soup beans. 1 lb. soft sweet pork sausage. 1 onion. 2-4 ribs of washed celery. 1 small can diced tomatoes with their juice. Some small pasta. 1/2 -1 bag frozen kale or other green. Chicken bouillon. Aleppo pepper, tumeric.

Soak a bag of mixed soup beans overnight.

Rinse them and cover them with water by about 3″. Bring to a boil, add a big tablespoon of chicken bouillon (I find Better Than Bouillon brand by far the best – or use their vegetable base, it’s also delicious) and then simmer on low until the beans are soft.

While your beans are simmering, sautee one onion and a few ribs of chopped celery in some olive oil. While the onion and celery still a bit crispy, slice the sausage skins and add the sausage in the same pan. Continue sauteeing on low-medium heat until the sausage is well-cooked and the onion and celery are very soft.  Season with aleppo pepper and salt + pepper.

When your beans are soft, add about a cup of some small pasta and the frozen kale to the pot. Stir well, and GENTLY bring the soup back to the boil. Keep an eye on the pot, as you are now cooking the pasta and the soup and you want to make sure you have enough liquid. When your pasta is almost done, carefully add the sausage/celery/onion mix from your pan. Plop in a cup or so of frozen cut green beans. Stir in a teaspoon of tumeric, ’cause it’s good for you.

Simmer on low and stir gently until the pasta is fully cooked and all the flavors have blended.

Serve with crusty bread and a salad and enjoy.

This soup is amazing the next day and freezes well.

* The reckless driver? She was furious with me for an earlier draft of this post that called her a “drunk driver.” My mistake. I don’t know how I could have thought such a thing, knowing that she drove directly out of the parking lot of the local tavern, where she had spent at least a couple of hours, and into a telephone pole.  And yet she’s angry with me. She kept her dog locked in a cold car while she spent all that time in a tavern, by the way. The poor old guy was traumatized in the accident. I took him home with me to keep him safe. And she’s …angry… with… me. I want to thank my colleagues and many friends who heard about this outrageous confrontation and encouraged me to “name and shame.” I’m not naming her, but … shame on her. She was charged with driving to endanger, which is a criminal charge. File this under “no good deed goes unpunished.” Poor doggie.

 

 

 

From my Facebook page today:

Have you ever been a forensic cook? Trying to re-create the taste of something you loved from your past? Me, too. After years of messing with various recipes, I can report that I have recreated the taste and texture of the beef ribs from Victoria’s Station, my favorite childhood restaurant. When I took a bite, I almost cried. It all came back. Birthday dinners all dressed up in something with ruffles on it, trips to the SALAD BAR (Wow, the SALAD BAR was a huge innovation back then), feeling like life was so swank and special and magical. Being out and on my best behavior in a dimly-lit grown-up restaurant was living the Glamorous Life, indeed. I could have a Shirley Temple and there were cloth napkins. I probably had patent leather shoes and my parents were both there, and my kid brother and big sister. Food and nostalgia. I’m so Proustian tonight, huh?”

So far I’ve got about thirty comments on this post. A lot of you know where I’m coming from. Someone mentioned the bleu cheese dressing they had at the Victoria’s Station salad bar and I just about died laughing. That bleu cheese was some kind of fancy back in the day. That was like, FOODIE FARE in the 1970’s. It probably had 300-400 calories per teaspoon but we loaded it onto our lettuce because you just weren’t going to get anything that amazing at home. No way, no how.

Gosh, food has changed. We ate meat and a starch and a green salad every night for dinner. Mom cooked every single meal. It was wholesome and delicious but there wasn’t a whole lot of variety because there wasn’t a lot of variety available. Now I can go to the local suburban Stop + Shop and find obscure Asian sauces and the same brand of spices I find in Latin America. If I have a hankering for the British condiment Marmite (and I don’t because Marmite is disgusting), I can pick some up. You got a taste for something? I guarantee you can find the ingredients to make it somewhere within a 30-mile radius. Need Turkish grape molasses to bake your own simit at home because you loved it so much during that trip to Istanbul? Yea, we got that.

What we don’t got is the ability to go back in time and sit at the table with loved ones in an age of innocence. We can’t open a condiment jar and magically conjure our dead father out of it, like a genie in a bottle. I remember the pang of love and guilt I always felt at the end of a dinner out at a restaurant when my dad took out his wallet to pay. Why would I have felt guilty? Daddies paid for everything: that’s how life worked. If Mom had taken out money, it would have seemed like something was askew in the universe and of course children didn’t pay for dinner.

I think my guilty pang came from the fact that my Daddy worked very hard, and I knew that workaholism was taking a terrible toll on him. He had a heart condition and we  lived with the fear of him straining that heart; it was always there are a spectre lurking in the corner. The hospital bed in the house when he came home after having open heart surgery when he was in his early 40’s (a procedure that was new and rare and extremely dangerous in the 1970’s, and for which he had to travel from Connecticut to Ohio).

“Thank you, Dad,” we were taught to say after he took us out. We had good manners. Thanks for the delicious beef ribs and the baked potato with butter and sour cream. Thank you for the SALAD BAR and the nice waitress whose name he always made sure to use, and the fancy little desserts on separate plates with clean forks, which Dad always took “one bite” from — that one bite being a huge gouge taken from the piece of cake or chocolate mousse. We would always protest. “DAAAA-AD!” He would smile slyly. He was just a kid, really. I’m older now than he was then.

In the car on the way home I always had a Victoria’s Station matchbox tucked in the pocket of my winter coat.

PeaceBang’s Just-Like-Victoria’s-Station Short Ribs*

Rub salt, freshly ground black pepper and garlic powder all over short ribs.

Heat up some canola oil in a big sautee pan until good and hot.

Brown the short ribs all over, making sure you get them really, really browned and delicious on every side. They should be just crackling with carmelized crust!

Boil some water, pour about 2 c into a big measuring cup or bowl and mix the following into it:

Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, salt, pepper, tomato paste (2 squirts), 1-2 tsps red wine (or cider, but red wine is best) vinegar.

Smash a few cloves of garlic and put in the Crock Pot.

Put the ribs in a crock pot. Cover with the liquid mixture. If you want to, chop up some carrots and celery and onion and throw them in there too.

Cook 6-8 hours until meat has fallen off the bone and you can cut it with a spoon.

 

*Victoria’s Station went out of business in the 1980’s. The one I am remembering was in Darien, Connecticut. They used big beef ribs and probably grilled them. I don’t know. But I am certain that the magic ingredient here is the combination of the crust from searing and the vinegar. It was the vinegar that did it. The vinegar was the “AH! Voila!”

It’s election season, which means that there’s a special hostility in the autumn air.

I don’t hate Mitt Romney. I just don’t think he would be the best president. He’s a smart man and he’s a rich man. I’m a Democrat with socialist leanings. I think the government is spending too much money, but I also think it’s fine for the government to spend a lot of money keeping the infrastructure of our country as strong as it can be for “the least of these.” I know that “the least of these” can occasionally be con artists and drug addicts and lazybones. I know a lot of really privileged people who are those things as well. It doesn’t do to cut programs and entitlements to millions of people in need (and honestly, that includes the vast, VAST majority of us at some point in our lives) because there’s some corruption and waste in the system.

So that’s all I have to say about that. Tax me: I can take it. I won’t like it, but I won’t starve. But please, Mr. President, keep working on universal health care and job creation and the infrastructure of our cities and towns, and please fund education and public radio and other programs that contribute to the common good. I live in a commonwealth and I believe in its ideals. I do not believe in the accumulation of obscene amounts of wealth, and I do not believe in the expenditure of billions of dollars by ANYONE in order to obtain public office. This campaign spending is a travesty.

Oh, my. I said I wasn’t going to say anymore.

I am reading. I am reading books, journals, and fashion blogs. On occasion, late at night with a cup of decaf Earl Grey in hand, I read about politics. But I carefully limit my intake, as though political punditry is a particularly gut-rotting form of booze and I a good time girl at a speakeasy looking to “tie one on.” “C’mon, Blousy,” I tell that inner flapper. “Be careful with that stuff. It’s pure poison.”

I walk a little more slowly and cautiously through my days, shielding my eyes and scuttling away when conversations threaten to turn ugly. I dodge the subject of politics with dear friends who stand on the other side of the fence, and appreciate our tacit mutual agreement not to fight. I make soup.

PeaceBang’s Election Season White Bean, Meatball, Kale and Lemon Soup

Soak 2 cups of white beans overnight. Navy or cannellini are great.

Rinse the beans the next day and put them on to simmer in about 5 cups of fresh water.

When beans have been simmering for awhile, smash up a few fat garlic cloves, chop them, and throw them in the water.

Add 2 TBS of Better than Bouillon Chicken Stock to the pot and stir until dissolved.

After the beans are almost as soft as you want them (it depends on the freshness of the beans — maybe an hour? an hour and 15?), throw in a half bag of frozen chopped kale.

Add thawed pre-cooked meatballs (mine are made of pork and beef). Cook through until warmed.

When you’re ready to turn off the heat, squeeze 1-2 lemons into the soup and stir well.

Let the soup sit a bit before serving. The flavors just get better with time.

If you want a creamier soup, simply blend most of the beans and kale with an immersion blender or in a food processor before adding the meatballs.