Bread, Wine, Salt

We were out of town for a weekend, off the grid on a church retreat which usually takes place in crisp Fall weather. But this year the retreat was a week earlier than usual, and thanks to Global Warming or just bad luck, it was shorts and t-shirt weather the whole time.  I wanted cool days and chilly nights. I wanted to need an extra blanket and to find the heat of the Saturday night campfire a relief, to draw closer. Instead it was warm and the bugs were still out and the fire was so hot I had to roll my log-seat further away. It was still a good retreat. There are no bad weekends at the Shrine, but it was not Fall. Fall arrived on Monday. The morning was grey and we all knew it would storm even before we checked the weather.  By late morning the wind was blowing hard and the clouds had cracked open. The rain lasted most of the day and the air it left behind belonged firmly to October. It was time to make soup. I wanted this batch of soup to be vegetarian. The challeng...

Sleep is surprisingly necessary for the proper functioning of my body.  Most of the time I get enough sleep and I wash my hands often enough I can avoid most of The Yuck, the nasal/sinus/chest phelgm monster that travels the preschool circuit.  But my job sometimes gets in the way.  I was up all night on Sunday, so what had been an annoying thing at the back of my throat, easily vanquished with gargling and tea, became a full blown head cold, complete with that most undignified of symptoms, the runny nose.  This morning, after dropping W at preschool and humoring A through a toddler art class I walked to the grocery store to pick up the extra soft tissues, and the ingredients for this soup. This is potent stuff.  You have to be dedicated to garlic and ginger to eat it made with the full amounts.  But it's just the thing when you can't smell and you need something to give you a boost.  It won't cure the common cold, but it will make a lovely companion...

Lunch in the Park , a novel about love and family, is available for sale in multiple electronic formats at Smashwords , for the Kindle at Amazon.com and for the Nook at BN.com Wherever you buy it, it is DRM-free . The delicious recipes that Kate and Jeff cook up are right here on my blog. I hope you'll read Lunch in the Park , you'll love it, and you'll feel the overwhelming urge to write a review on one or more of the sites above. And of course I'd love to hear from you here on the blog, too.   Sometimes I'm here talking about food.  Sometimes I'm chasing my kids around.  Sometimes I'm serving women in labor . If I'm not doing any of those things I might be checking in on the lives of the fictional people who live in my head. Before you run away, no, I'm not hearing voices.  I've just always have a story or two that I'm writing in my  head.  If I have a few minutes I try to get the story out of my head and onto paper.  Sometimes ...

Probably not the Martha you're thinking of, unless you also have a young child who loves the show " Martha Speaks " on PBS. Bird had been begging for alphabet soup. So I picked up some alphabet pasta and whipped up some soup.  The soup was popular enough that I had to make it again almost as soon as the first batch was gone.  Even the grown-ups liked it.  It might not make your dog talk, but it does make a nice lunch. 2 Tablespoons vegetable oil 1 medium onion 2 cloves garlic 1 28-oz can tomato puree 4 cups water 1 cup alphabet pasta (or other small pasta shape) salt and pepper to taste juice of 1 lemon Add oil to a medium saucepan over medium heat. Finely dice onion and add it to the pot, stirring to coat onion with oil. While the onion cooks, peel and mince the garlic.  Add garlic to pot and stir again.  Allow onion and garlic to cook together for about 5 minutes until onion is translucent. Add tomato puree and heat to a bare simmer. ...

Madhur Jaffery's World Vegetarian is a great resource when you have something vegetarian in your fridge or pantry and don't know what to do with it. I had a bunch of red beans left over from the vegetarian chili that I wanted to use for Sunday dinner. If you google “red beans” you end up with a lot of recipes for Louisiana style red beans and rice, which wasn't what I had in mind. This African stew was just the thing: easy and tasty. The peanut-butter flavor isn't strong here, the peanut butter adds more creaminess than flavor. My peanut-butter-refusing four-year-old ate his portion without complaint. If you're dealing with allergies I think any mild nut or seed butter would work here. You can use up beans you've already cooked, a mix of varieties would be fine, especially if you have pinto beans around. The original recipe calls for kidney beans, but I used small red beans. You can cook them just for the occasion, or you can use canned, so ...

Michael over at Herbivoracious is working on a cookbook. I'm very excited about it, and you should be, too if you're at all interested in vegetarian cooking that uses real food and plays with flavors. As part of writing the book Michael put out a call for recipe testers and I volunteered. He sent me a recipe for Pozole Rojo de Frijol, a vegetarian version of a traditional pork stew. I loved it. The kids liked it. The husband liked it. It must be said that not everyone at the table liked it, but I think that was my fault for misjudging the audience, not the fault of the recipe. I will make a couple of changes next time: I'll use slightly less lime juice, slightly less water, and I'll up the chiles. I used the minimum this time, and there was very little heat. Obviously someone trying to write a cookbook doesn't want his recipes reproduced all over the internet, but I am allowed to link to it. So go read the recipe , try it for yourself, and then ch...

When the weather starts to turn in Autumn, I like things that are warm, and warming. I love making soup. Normally, when I say I'm making soup I mean a specific vegetable soup that requires a full afternoon of puttering around the house and occasionally tending the soup. There isn't always time for that. So I make other soups. This one has the virtue of being simple and fairly quick, assuming you have average knife skills and you know vaguely where things are in your kitchen. (I just barely meet those qualifications.) And what says Fall better than pumpkin? It's also smooth and creamy and comforting. The smooth does require blending. I use an immersion blender, which you really should put on your wish list if you don't have one, but you can use whatever soup blending technology you have available. A note on spice mixes: People Who Are Very Into Food will tell you that pre-made spice mixes are evil and you should toast and grind your own spices. And they...