Asian Chicken Chili Soup with Micro Greens

Ingredients:

2 chicken breasts, poached and diced
12 cups chicken broth
4 bell peppers cut into 2-inch pieces
1/4 cup soy sauce
3 Tablespoon sweet asian-style chili sauce
2 packages Trader Joe's Organic Micro Greens  (I only mention the brand because I don't know how much I used in ounces!  So, two packages it is.)

Bring the broth, soy sauce and chili sauce to a boil.  Add peppers and chicken and simmer until the peppers are tender-crisp.

Right before you serve add the micro-greens.  Serve immediately, while the greens are wilted, but not yet boiled to death.

Served this with egg rolls on the side, instead of the usually toast or bread.  

Curry Sweet Potato Soup

Fair warning: there may be an awful lot of soup recipes this Autumn and Winter.

Maybe it's the weather or my mood.  I just want a bowl of comfort food every evening for dinner or every afternoon for lunch--much to my husband's chagrin.  He doesn't feel like he's had a meal unless it involves a good bit of chewing.  Therefore soups are not necessarily his favorite.  

So, I'll throw in a few stews and chunky soups to make him happy.  

Today I got a late start on dinner, however--didn't actually think of what I was making until almost 5pm.  I don't recommend putting off your dinner plans so late--especially if you have little children who come into the kitchen looking pathetic saying, "What's for dinner? I'm so hungry."  And then they say, "Can I eat this?" taking a pizza crust off a used plate that a child at co-op today left on the counter.  Mama, you'd better think fast.

This came together so quickly; soul and palate satisfying.  Curry Sweet Potato Soup, served up with apples and buttery toast.  It tasted like Autumn.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
--George Eliot

3 pounds sweet potatoes
1 medium onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 stick of butter
1 quart chicken broth
1 can evaporated milk
salt and black pepper to taste
1-2 teaspoons curry powder or your favorite curry paste
a pinch of cayenne pepper

Bake sweet potatoes until soft.  Let cool briefly (or plow ahead like I did, risking injury. Just depends on how much time you have).  Squeeze the potato flesh out of their skins.  Discard skins.  Set potato mash aside.

In a large pot melt butter.  Saute onion and garlic until golden and soft.

Add the sweet potatoes and broth.

With an immersion blender process in the pot until almost smooth.  (I like the leave a bit of texture.)

Add curry and salt and peppers.

Simmer for 10-15 minutes, letting flavors blend.  Add the evaporated milk and heat through.

Serve up immediately, garnished with apple slices.

Recent Meals In Our Home

Chicken Broccoli Soup topped with a poached egg and Parmesan cheese

Curry Chicken Salad served on a bed of greens from our garden
and with slices of papaya

Garbanzo Beans topped with Gouda,
Served with Cornbread

Homemade Noodles (Tutorial here.)
Sausage, peppers and onions

My Thanksgiving Table, 2010

We celebrated with a total of 27 people (including me).  The primary language spoken was Mongolian (only one of the 27 didn't speak at least a little Mongolian).  Family.  Extended Family.  Friends.  Missionary kids. 

But the food was all the real American deal!  Turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, pumpkin soup and salad, brandied cranberry sauce, asparagus strudel, angel biscuits, carrot souffle, and a relish tray.  Dessert? Apple pie, struessel topped pumpkin pie, cake, and Kahlua coffee.

In all the merry-making, I only remembered to take a picture of the table and the soup.  You'll just have to imagine how breathtaking the rest was.

In The Kitchen With Meg

This morning we put in our winter garden.  This afternoon we spent time under a blanket on the couch reading The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis while the kids made paper crafts.  It just felt like a Fall day, a perfect Fall day.

We needed an appropriate meal!  Meg had this meal in mind for weeks having dreamed it up on her own.  So, today we had a hearty pork stew seasoned with herbs from the garden and a hint of nutmeg.  Served in a pumpkin.  After creating the stew we stuck it in the pumpkin and baked it for about 15-20 minutes so the pumpkin got just tender.  Then when you scooped out your stew you could also get a bit of fresh pumpkin off the sides.

When prepping the pumpkin, Meg very thoughtfully cut a notch for the ladle.  What a girl!

And then Meg said, "Mom, this needs bread.  Some sort of bread that's good with lots of butter."  It wasn't time to start a loaf of french bread, so we made some buttery biscuits.  They came toasty from the oven at the same time as the stew.

Mmmmm, mmmmmm, mmmmm!

An Autumn Dinner....despite the heat

We are having a little heat wave in the Golden State.  But, this is what I had planned, so this is what I made.  Plus, I am feeling a bit under the weather and soup is the ultimate comfort food.

Homemade Wheat Herb Rolls

Roasted Sweet Potato Soup

The bread recipe can be found here.

Here's the soup recipe:

Approximately 2 pounds sweet potatoes, baked

Approximately 4 Tablespoons butter

One large onion, chopped

Two stalks of celery, chopped

One medium potato, chopped

Six cups chicken broth  (you can use vegetable broth if you are vegetarian)
One-third cup pure Maple syrup

Approximately 1/4 cup half-and-half and a little more for garnish

Chives fresh from the herb garden for garnish

After you bake the sweet potatoes, scoop out the insides and set aside.  Discard the skins in your compost bin.

Saute the onions and celery in the butter until tender.

Add the broth and potato and cook about 10-15 minutes until the potato is soft.

Add the sweet potato mash and the syrup and stir.  Here is where I took the immersion blender (hand blender) to it.  (If you don't have a hand blender you can puree it in batches in your food processor or blender.)  Puree until smooth.  Reheat while stirring and then add the half-and-half.  Adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.  Depending on the broth you used, very likely you will not need to add additional salt.  Serve with a dollop of half-and-half and a few sprigs of chives.

Have I ever mentioned how much I adore beautiful food?

Keema and Lady Fingers

Picked these beauties up at Farmer's Market on Saturday.

Many people think they don't like okra, mainly because they haven't had okra done right!  Here's how to cook it without too much......er....slime:

Okra has to be treated very respectfully.  It is not a mere peasant like a potato which you can disrespect and mash up and it responds deliciously.  Okra is a little too aristocratic for that.  If you don't treat okra just right it will not hesitate to slime you.

First give your okra a gentle rinse in cold water being careful not to break or bruise it.

Then lay it out on a fuzz free towel (or paper towel....although I rarely if ever have paper towels).  Pat it gently dry.  Then let is air dry.  If there is any water left on the little beauties when you cut them they will slime. 

When they are completely dry cut off the very top, being careful not to dig into the core.  When the seedy core comes in contact with water it gets gelatinous. 

At this point you can do what you want with them.  Fry them, add them to gumbo, stew 'em with some tomatoes, etc.  They are healthy and delightfully yummy.

Here we have Keema (which is Indian-style minced meat.  I used lamb.) and Lady's Fingers (which is what I learned to call okra when I spent a summer in Pakistan).  We ate this with a jalapeno slaw, cucumbers with yogurt, and Poori (tutorial here).  Served with La Crema Pinot Noir.  I made a lot of everything, really hoping we'd have left overs today.  I guess I made it a little TOO TASTY, because it's all gone!  I guess it's grilled cheese for lunch today. 

Here's another tasty recipe using okra.  It has a lot of ingredients, but is sooooooo worth it.  It's one of my favorite soups.

Seafood Soup

My vegetables and fruits have sprouted.  My herbs are in full-swing.  But, today was chilly and a gentle reminder that it is not yet summer.  It is still soup weather.

I sauteed some celery and onion in butter.  Added one small potato, chopped.  Sprinkled with flour to make a roux.  Added whole milk and a scoop of marscarpone.  To this creamy goodness, I added shrimp, calamari rings and scallops, and a little asparagus for color.  The result was a bowl of amazing. 

Served up with a garden salad with cranberries and pecans and a glass of white wine.