J’s family owns a cabin in Canada, where all our boy friends go every year to shoot airsoft guns and eat meats and be manly. This year, they invited the girls. This also meant a lot of very serious questioning, ‘can you eat meat? can you shoot guns? you realize we’ll be shooting guns. and we’ll smell.’
We went anyway. We ate meat. We shot guns. We smelled (pretty).
And we made delicious foods, including my new favorite recipe: Corn Chowder!
Corn chowder is easy peasy, it just takes a long time because you have to chop so much stuff. You can chop the veggies as small or large as you prefer. I chopped my veggies large, mostly because I’m lazy, but also because (as in ice cream) I like my foods chunky.
So chop up: 2 medium sweet onions, 2 medium carrots, 2 stalks celery, 1 red bell pepper, 2 medium potatoes (I chopped these a little bigger, and they sort of melted down as they cooked which added a nice thickness to the soup), 6 ears of corn off the cob (I grilled the corn the day before), and about 3 or 4 strips of cooked bacon chopped into small pieces.
In a large soup pot, melt a little olive oil or butter and add the onion and stir about until the onion is soft, about 8-10 minutes. Then pour in 5 cups of reduced sodium chicken broth (I made my own, but it’s generally easier to buy it), the carrots, celery, pepper, and potatoes, and the leafy bits from 3 de-sprigged twigs of thyme. Allow to simmer until potatoes are soft, about 15-20 minutes. Stir in the corn and 1 cup heavy cream. Simmer uncovered for 10 more minutes, adding pepper and salt to taste.
Here’s also the point where K had a super suggestion. We had a small leftover hot pepper from the night before, which we hoped would add some much needed kick to the chowder. But I didn’t want those super potent hot pepper seeds floating around in my soup, giving shocks to unsuspecting sippers. So I took a fine mesh strainer and put the halved pepper in it, then lowered the strainer in so that the pepper was in the soup, but easy to strain out. That way, we could monitor the spiciness, and remove the pepper when the soup had achieved ideal heat. It took about five minutes, and then we lifted the strainer out with its heated pepper and all the offending seeds.
Finally, you sprinkle in the magic… bippity boppity bacon!
Ta-da!
I made the soup in the early afternoon while the boys were outside making up zombie scenarios for gun games. We let it cool on the stove then heated it up again about six hours later for dinner. I think the added hours allowed the soup to really mingle its flavors, and I’m convinced that the soup is the better for it. But it was also quite tasty at 2 pm, which would have also been a fine hour for soup, had it not also been such a perfect hour for waterskiing, fish spearing, and painting.
But I am hoping to redeem myself with a new recipe, one culled from S’s and my trip to Costa Rica! We spent a week warming up in Puerto Viejo, a small town on the Southern Caribbean coast, eating as much coconut and fruit as we could stuff into our sunburned bodies.
So here’s my recipe for super delicious coconut enhanced Gallo Pinto, or ’spotted rooster’, of which there were many in Puerto Viejo, running around on the gravel streets, macking on the lady chickens:
One day ahead of time, pour one and a half cups of white rice into a pot. On the side, stir together a can of light coconut milk and however much water it takes to make three cups of combined coconut milk and water. Add that to the pot.
Heat the rice and coconut milk on the stove until it boils, and then simmer it down until the rice is soft and tasty. Then store the rice until the next day.
On the next day, chop up one small red bell pepper, one medium sized onion, and saute in a pan with a few tablespoons of oil until slightly soft. I added some salt and pepper at this point, too. Then pour in one can of drained black beans, and saute that with the onions and pepper for about two minutes. (Sidenote: all the recipes I read said to also add Salsa Lizano or, if you don’t have that, Worcester Sauce. I did neither and it still turned out tasty.)
Finally, add the three cups of day-old coconut rice and stir until the rice is heated, about five minutes. Stir in some roughly chopped fresh cilantro, and you’ve got Gallo Pinto, Puerto Viejo style!
In Puerto Viejo, our Gallo Pinto was often served with scrambled eggs and white cheese. Once it came with delicious jonny cakes, a recipe I’m still trying to pin down. But Gallo Pinto is also great on its own, especially when washed down with some fresh fruit juice.
I have a few more recipes I want to try from our trip, since the food was so superb. Check back soon (really! I mean it!) for some more tasty things to try.
In the meantime, I’m pondering titles for my recipe book. I was considering the comic book inspired ‘Eat… or DIE!!!’ which is true, if a bit fatalistic. However, the current top title, which lacks the same pizazz but is more cheerful, is: ‘Eat Like Me!’ In any case, all suggestions are most welcome.
It’s high time that I posted something other than funny videos. Unfortunately, I have little time for cooking or baking or even going out for chocolatey things.
Last night, though, S and I did go to Tria, where he got wine and I looked at the extensive snack menu (the reason I’m drawn to Tria). It seemed like everyone in the bar was on a date, including the very awkwardly chatting couple beside us. The conversation mostly revolved around her failed tennis career. It didn’t seem like the date was going much better.
It took much deliberation, but finally I chose their Rogue Chocolate Stout Bread Pudding with Allagash Cherry Sauce. I was a little befuddled by all the stuff mentioned in its name (rogue? stout? allagash? what was it going to do, waddle off the table with my wallet?) However, it ended up being a melty, squidgy bread pudding with chocolate sauce and dried cherries throughout. S had olives. Olives and bread pudding do not a match make. The bread pudding alone was quite warm and delicious, just the sort of thing for a cold winter’s night.
I can’t resist. This made me laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe and was reduced to barking and squeaking noises. How do the Japanese come up with such amazing shows? Somehow they’ve tapped into the truth of bad comedy, that splatting never gets old, especially if you add costumes.
On principle, I dislike human interest stories when they’re stuffed into the nightly news. In reality, my sister and I are sitting in the family room pleading, ‘Don’t change it! Don’t change it! I want to see the elephant and the dog!’
Planet Earth! The place where beautiful vistas alternate with baby killings. My sister gave a copy of the series to my father for Christmas, despite my protestations that in spite of the gorgeous high definition panoramas, mostly, life is about hard times for the cutest among us. And that is hard to see.
But, as all comedians can tell you after this fall’s rousing election, the most depressing news can often be made palatable when you insert a laugh:
Happy new year, chocolateers! It’s time for resolutions, for example, only eating chocolates containing 70% cocoa or more. But since milk chocolate will sometimes sneak up on you via truffle filling or candy dish, I had to find something a little more do-able.
Resolution #1: Improve my bottle opening technique. When finagling the cork out of a wine bottle in order to make mulled wine, I accidentally cracked the lip of the bottle. A milk tooth of glass chipped off. I suppose that this could be fixed by buying a Corkscrew-for-Dummies, except that I also got very confused at around ten seconds to midnight about how exactly to open the bottle of champagne, even though the directions were printed clearly on the side. S took over popping duties because I looked so nervous. He did an excellent job (nothing broke, a little plume of smoke whispered out, and then champagne was poured for all), then later went up on the roof with a bunch of people to really pop a cork over Philadelphia.
Next year, I hope to pull out this fancy trick to redeem my flustered midnight self:
When my sister and I watched ‘Wall-E’, we nearly died of laughter before the movie even began. I think we created a scene. Arms and legs flailed. Here’s why:
As a tenderhearted eleven year old, it took me years to recover from watching half of The Princess Bride, thanks to the ROUS (Rodents of Unusual Size). However, I’ve come to realize that the problem was not that the rodents were unusually sized, it was that the rodents were toothy, vicious, shoulder-gnawing rats. If the rodents were, say, hamsters, or bunnies, the situation would be much different.
Matched in awesomeness only by Germany’s tiny cows:
And, since the tenderhearted and squeamish eleven year old turned into an only marginally less tenderhearted and squeamish twenty-six year old, here is not a clip of ROUS from The Princess Bride:
Perfect picnic food. Great in any season. Hearty (chickpeas), refreshing (tomato and mint), spicy (onion, garlic, and pepper), with great texture (smooth and crunchy). I loooove balela.
Trader Joe’s sells balela in little eight ounce containers. Unfortunately, my appetite for balela is exponentially greater than the servings they offer! Also, it’s a little expensive. I looked for a recipe online, but couldn’t find one. Desperate, out of options, with a hungry belly only 1/4 full of the balela I wished to eat, I looked at the ingredients list on the side of the container, and made it myself.
Ingredients:
Two 15 ounce cans chickpeas
3/4 cup tomatoes chopped into 1/2 inch pieces (I use cherry tomatoes for a firmer bite)
1/2 cup Vidalia onion chopped into 1/4 inch pieces
1/4 cup minced fresh mint, parsley, or mint and parsley
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup white balsamic vinegar (regular white vinegar is fine, but I like balsamic better)
1 clove garlic, pressed
1/4 teaspoon powdered hot pepper
sea salt and black pepper to taste
Directions:
Drain the liquid from the chickpeas and pour into a bowl. After that, pour everything in the bowl and gently mix together. Eat. Eat a lot. Share with your boyfriend so he also has onion and garlic breath. Later, after dessert, while watching TV, eat some more. Sustain boyfriend’s garlic breath by sneaking a few extra chickpeas into his mouth. Spear the last wayward bits and consume. Sigh happily.
