Soup - - Page 7

by gansie

Feeding a Grease Monster

I have friends (plus baby) coming to town this weekend. It was just the push I needed to finally get to the store this year. Yea, that’s right. I haven’t been food shopping since 2009. 80P and I have been out of town, sick and lazy. I think 80 has grabbed some eggs, cereal and milk, but really – that’s it.

I grabbed some weekend snacks: tortilla chips, ruffled potato chips, avocado, feta and mozzarella. I’ve heard their one year old, Jack, loves polly-o string cheese. All I could find was a chunk of mozz, so I’m hoping if I cut it into cylinders, Jack will dig it.

Also in my cart, with no real reason: plantains, Kabocha squash, cilantro, mangoes, lemons and limes and other canned staples (beans, coconut milk, pickles, olives).

I got home and still had no clue what to make. I turned to The Flavor Bible, checked out mango’s flavor friends, but didn’t have the right ingredients. Making room for that on the shelf I saw a new cookbook – Alicia Silverstone‘s The Kind Diet.

The first few chapters detail the horrendous factory farming practices of our country. I skipped those pages because I’m still struggling to finish Eating Animals, which actually makes me never want to eat anything ever again.

Then a recipe calling for Kabocha squash, and barely any other ingredients, found me. Alicia directed her loving fans to simply boil the peeled and cubed squash (4 cups squash to 3 1/2 cups water), add salt, bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 10, add more salt, simmer some more, mash til smooth, finish with chopped parsley. Now simple sounds good to me, especially when I have to spend the rest of the night scrubbing the floors for a one year old’s visit.

But a soup only flavored with salt. I have a food blog. I must do better than that. I started off healthful – adding lime juice then crushed red pepper flakes and I subbed cilantro for the parsley. But 80. Oh 80. My grease loving boyfriend. How could he be enticed to sup on soup for dinner?

by gansie

Curry Cauliflower and Coconut Milk Soup

It’s countdown time. But not just for the bird. In my household there are other things a-brewin’.

80P has a monster paper due by the end of today. In preparation, he has been consuming plenty of caffeine (coke and tea), grease (pizza) and salt (tortilla chips.) He can handle the mounting calories.

I, on the other hand, am facing another type of demon. This Saturday is my 10 year high school reunion. Eek! So while 80 is lovingly gorging on the tastiest calories, I’ve been trying to banish those foods for the past few days AND the coming few days.

Tonight 80’s pizza looked so amazingly shiny and beautiful. But I passed. I did however, end up making a mighty delicious meal for myself though, minus the bubbling cheese. If you’re also trying to keep it light before the big day of eating, I highly suggest a soup thickened with pureed vegetables.

by BS

T Minus Ten Days: Our Best Thanksgiving Sides Recipes

Uh-oh! Ten days and counting to National Gluttony Day, and the crew here at ES is far from finishing our Thanksgiving menus.

How about you all? In need of some inspiration? To get the ball rolling, here are some of our favorite side dishes from Endless Simmer Thanksgivings past:

– Cranberry-Butternut Squash Spring Rolls

– Curried Parsley Sauce with Brussel Sprouts and Potato

– Squash with Portobellas, Walnuts and Feta

– Hot and Spicy Sweet Potato Fries

– Julienne Root Vegetable Salad

– Turkey-Bacon-Potato Onesie AND Sweet Potato-Feta-Spinach Onesie

– Roasted Pumpkin Stew

– Ginger-Gorgonzola Acorn Squash

– Mindless Baked Sweet Potato

– Curry Pumpkin Soup

– Squash and Spinach with Curry-Ginger Yogurt Sauce

Have a great Thanksgiving side recipe? Drop the details (or a link) in the comments.

in Holiday / Veggie 1 comments

by gansie

Friday Fuck Up: Soup and Salad Combination From Hell

It’s been a long time. In fact, so long that I thought we’ve moved past the horrors of inedible food. But just as we neared Halloween, I got the shit scared out of me. I made something so foul, so ugly, so smelly, all I could do was photograph it and make something else for dinner.

Because I refuse to let go of summer, I bought about 6 tomatoes at the farmers market. I could have embraced the new cold weather and its bounty of orange hued goodness, but if there’s tomatoes out—I’m buying. MISTAKE.

After a week on my dining room table I finally got around to putting them to use. Cutting away the rotten parts, I chopped the tomatoes and dropped them in a pan with a shallot and 5 minced cloves of garlic. I had already made a quick, and quite delicious, Ten Minute Tomato Soup, so with the last tomatoes until June 2010, I wanted to create something different.

Conveniently decomposing in my fridge was a 3/4 eaten salad from Chop’t. Usually salads can not be saved, with the dressing making its components soggy. But I thought, maybe if I buzz this spinach salad around in a food processor I can stir it into some baked egg dish. Yea. That’s it.

Except that would be way too normal. Well, normal for me. While the tomatoes were simmering, I blended my salad. It wasn’t until after I added it into the soup that I realized this was a remarably terrible idea. Let me tell you what was in that salad.

in Veggie 7 comments

by BS

Happy Leftover Pumpkin Season!

Editor’s Note: If you’re anything like us, you’re finding this manic Monday particularly difficult, as you sit among a pile of empty candy wrappers and turning-bad pumpkin, wondering how the hell it got to be November already. Fortunately, Alex is on hand with some tips about how to use up all that leftover pumpkin before Thanksgiving rolls around:

As per my seasonal tradition, I got really psyched to make pumpkin cookies a few weeks ago. (Note: butter does NOT work as well as shortening in pumpkin cookies. Disaster.) Under normal circumstances, I would normally have only bought a small can of pumpkin for this endeavor, but presumably because those New Hampshire fall colors just make you want to eat something orange, they were all out of the little cans. So I had to buy the 16-oz. can, but since I was not going to make a hundred cookies, I needed to figure out what else to do with all this leftover canned pumpkin.

Pumpkin bread was the first and most obvious choice, but I wanted to get a little more creative, so to the Internets I went, and ended up with two new pumpkin dishes: curry pumpkin soup (inspired by a recipe at pumpkinnook.com) and pumpkin pizza. Yes, pumpkin pizza.

in Desserts / Recipe / Veggie 13 comments

by Lyndsey

Farewell Summer, I Shall Not Miss Thee

As I sit at home on this gloomy, cold day in the Mid-Atlantic, it seems like so long ago that the summer heat of August was blazing down on us, rendering me miserable and cranky in my home and kitchen. While I know that many of you lament summer’s passing, and the associated end of grill season, I have been looking forward to the change in weather for some time.

With no air conditioning in my kitchen, the summer weather meant that we did little cooking in the kitchen. Grilling became our main source of sustenance. I longed for the days when I could whip up a one-pot meal that would produce leftovers throughout the week. And now, finally, the seasons have changed (perhaps too fast for those of you getting snow), and we are deep in the middle of fall-cooking weather.

So here, readers, are my five top foodie reasons why I am happy to see summer gone:

5. Crock pot

The crock pot never ceases to amaze me. Throw in a bunch of veggies, meat and some liquid, and eight hours later – voila! – a tasty meal. I never use it in the summer, since I don’t really crave a meat and potatoes sort of meal during the summer.

ES on crock pots: BBQ Pulled Pork

4. Hot tea, hot cocoa, hot cider…

Who doesn’t love to curl up with a hot cup of your favorite beverage on a cold fall or winter day?

ES on hot drinks: Homemade Hot Chocolate

3. Red wine

Call me crazy, but in the summer, I have no interest in drinking red wine. And I love red wine, so sometimes I’ll make sangria, but generally, I have to wait until the cool weather hits to really enjoy it.

ES on wine: How to Use Leftover Wine

in Desserts / Drinks 3 comments

by gansie

Guy Beat Me To It

I was in Pasadena, MD last week with my friends Katie and Lory. Lory, a native Pasadenian, found us a classic Chesapeake Bay restaurant. And when I say classic Chesapeake, I only mean one thing: crabs. Maryland loves their crabs.

Unfortunately, after I snapped a few pictures, I realized I was beat. Guy Fieri already brought much deserved attention to Stoney Creek Inn. Noticing our paparazzi ways, the waitress asked us if we had heard of the place through Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. Ugh, no, I hadn’t. Not that I thought I was discovering the place, but man, I was embarrassed to know that Guy (or his assistants) and I shared the same taste. He’s such a douche!

But I won’t let that ruin it. Here’s some pics of the crab-infested food from this adorable restaurant right off the water.

Above you will notice the most heavenly appetizer. I’m a sucker for a soft pretzel, and not just a soft pretzel to share as an appetizer, but a soft pretzel as my entire meal. I perfected the practice in college with Rock Bottom’s TWO large soft pretzels with spicy cheese sauce.

Anyway, there was no doubt I could not order this. A soft pretzel, topped with crab meat and cheddar cheese, served warm and with a huge steak knife. I’m not usually a fan of fish with dairy, but this worked really well. Shit, anything and a soft pretzel will work well together.

Here’s Lory with our awesome waitress, Donna (I think that was her name.) She rocked the cutest boat shoes. It was nice to see someone that actually has been on a boat wear these now trendy shoes. Lory ordered the thickest crab soup I’d ever seen. If I were a better writer I would bring on a kick ass metaphor to describe the thickness of the soup. I wanted to compare it to health care or something, but it just didn’t work. If I do think of one deserving of the soup, I’ll throw it in the comments. I’m also game for suggestions.

in Celebs / Photos 6 comments

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