Cookery

We've been on a soup kick the past few weeks, now that the weather has gotten colder. It started with a recipe for lentil soup with dandelion greens, finished with fresh lemon juice, that came from the Greek cookbook Kathy Schwab recommended, The Olive and the Caper (the recipes are fabulous, but the layout is just too much; lots of insets, wacky fonts, etc. Also, I don't really need a primer on the Greek gods, or Homer, in order to make tzatziki).  Then I made a split pea soup with ham hocks from a recipe on Skinnytaste, which got a thumbs-up from Sean's dad.  It was so good I ended up making it twice more; some went to our neighbors, Kari and Brady, when they got home from being in Utah for a couple of weeks (they'd previously given us some of the best beef stew I've ever tasted, so I returned their tupperware with my own offering inside) and the third go-round was chiefly to freeze.  After I'd already sauteed the vegetables, though, I realized I was out of chicken stock.  I was literally turning off the stove and trying to decide whether the Krauszer's down the street would be likely to carry stock or if I'd have to go to the store when Kari knocked to ask something.  The awesome thing about having a friendly neighbor?  She responded to my dilemma with one container of stock and a bag of chicken bouillon cubes!  The third batch was also an experiment to see if you could re-use the ham hocks, since it seemed kind of wasteful to chuck them out; doable, I learned, but it doesn't give you the same level of flavor as fresh ones. It's nice of the powers that be to call them "hocks," by the way, instead of saying "now flavor your broth with these severed pig's feet."  That might put people off.

Tonight's effort, however, was much more involved, creamy white bean and chorizo soup from Bon Appetit. It came from the stack of 2007-era magazines Linda had left behind in the closet in the basement, which I've been flipping through before recycling.  It took two hours to make, most of it active time, and more pots, pans, and utensils than I think I've ever used on a food item. I even used the blender with hot liquids inside.  Surreal.  I told Sean afterward that I had forgotten that Bon Appetit is not really designed for the J.V. cook, but I realized that that's not even really true; there weren't any special techniques required, just a lot of time management and following precise instructions.  The result, I'm happy to say, was fucking awesome, and since there was fresh rosemary and thyme in the pot, the house smelled delicious to boot. I'll be making a freezer batch on Friday, since I have enough left of everything.

The only real snafu tonight was discovering that I'd bought Spanish smoked chorizo,--the only kind I knew existed--while the recipe called for fresh, aka Mexican chorizo, that's in sausage link casings and which can be ground up easily. Slicing up slippery medallions of smoked chorizo into little bits? Actually really difficult, even with our knives newly resharpened courtesy of Gary (I learned on Top Chef that a knife's true test is whether it can easily slice through a sheet of printer paper...now ours finally can).

In a nice bit of serendipity, I started reading Provence, 1970 tonight, about a couple of months when Julia Child, James Beard, and a whole raft of American food luminaries whose names I'd never heard were gathered together wining and dining in the south of France.  It's written by one of the participants' great-nephews, who found his great aunt's meticulous diary in addition to studying the archived correspondence of the other figures, and it's really captivating.  It's making me want to try French cooking (except for snails, urchins, oysters, and things in aspic, all of which seem to be playing a big role), or go to Provence, or both.

Side note: While reading I was confused by the phrase pommes mousseline, which, I read below, means mashed potatoes.  But doesn't pomme itself mean apple, ala the Pomme d'Or?  But then how do you get pommes frites? Confusion...Googling...answer: French people call potatoes pommes de terre, "apples of the earth" (which is delightfully poetic), and then typically just shorten it to pommes.  I guess they figure no idiot is going to think you mean mashed apples...