Thursday, February 2, 2012

Whatever Soup

Just made a whatever soup, and I must say, it is Freaking Delicious.  The goal of this soup is to use up any appropriate leftovers or veggies that were in danger of not getting eaten.  I made a big pot of it, had some for lunch, and will be freezing the rest into single serving portions, for later consumption.  Served with a few slices of the amazing cheddar-chive bread we got in our farm box, it made for a surprisingly hearty meal!

Bacon, leek, mushroom, broccoli, turnip, carrot, wild rice, potato, a sprig of rosemary, with beef boullion base.  Next time, I hope to have some home made chicken stock to use instead.


What do you do with your overabundance of left overs or veggies?


ETA: No hands were stabbed in the making of this soup.

Goddamn Smoothie

In our farm box this week, we got a mango, some bananas, and some delicious vanilla yogurt.  I thought to myself, "Hey! This sounds like an excellent smoothie opportunity!"  Now, I'm not as competent at smoothie making as I'd like to be.  Turns out that living with 2-4 20-something year olds who are grumpy in the morning makes it difficult to run a blender at 7:30.
Fortunately, I now live with only one grumpy 20-something, and I'm married to that one, so I can run the blender whenever I damn well please!  Yippeee!

Well, not so much with the yipee.  Mangoes are a difficult fruit, and one's dedication, desire, and knife skills must be at a high level in order to access the tasty mango-meat.  First you have to peel it.  Then you have to score it without cutting into the toxic pit, then you have to pick the bits of mango off the pit, without dropping them all on the ground.  This took me about 15 minutes.  Here's a free tip: an important thing to avoid while scoring the fucking mango is stabbing yourself in the hand, in the webbing between your first finger and middle finger, thus unleashing a torrent of blood that is not easily staunched by bandaid.

So, with the half a mango cut up and in the blender, the mild medical emergency taken care of, I added a banana, a few glorbs of vanilla yogurt, a couple spoons of brown sugar, the juice of half an orange, and a little bit of soy milk, then blended it until it looked good.  Poured it out, realized it was more of a chunky than a smoothie, put it all back in with a bit of apple juice, the pureed it for a couple minutes.

Triumph never tasted so good!  Or so much like pennies.