Black Bean Soup

Hot off the presses! Hot of the stove actually. I just made the most amazing black bean soup!! It was so good I wanted immediately to tell the internets about it. Hopefully, some poor protein deprived soul will come across this and fill the bean shaped void inside. I was told about this recipe just last night by my pal Robin, so props to her for spreading the word via her mouth.

Black beans and black bean soup always remind me of National Cafe, a tiny Cuban restaurant that used to be on first avenue, where I spent large parts of my allowance in my youth. Or it would be a reward after going to the dentist or something and I'd eat from the side of my mouth that had feeling while food dribbled out the other. They made incredible beans, rice, stewed chicken and banana milkshakes. The day it closed a little part of myself was shuttered and hung with a 'for sale' sign, ya know?

But still I feel National Cafe's influence. Rice and beans, cooked in a variety of styles, is my comfort food. So Robin told me about this recipe and I was like well I don't have rice and I don't have beans, but I have all the other bits so I ran around the corner to my local friendly deli guy and bought a 99 cent can of Goya black beans and got down to business. Delicious comfort.

Recipe for vegetarian black bean soup:

Can o' beans
veggie stock or bouillon cube (you could make it non-vegetarian and add chicken stock or pork which is I'm sure what was going down at National Cafe, though I was blissfully uncaring)
a few scallions
couple cloves of garlic
lemon
healthy teaspoon of red cider vinegar (any kind would do except maybe balsamic)
tiny pinch of cayenne pepper
dash of black pepper
olive oil
optional, yet highly recommended: slices of avocado

Chop up your scallions and set some aside. Put the rest in a pot with a bit of olive oil and minced garlic. Cook them on low heat till they're soft. Open your can o' beans and rinse them then throw them in the pot when the garlic/scallions are ready. Add enough water (or stock) to cover the beans and set it to boil. When it's boiling add the bouillon unless you used stock. Add the cayenne and black pepper and stir. Turn the heat down to a simmer. At this point if you want to thicken it you can puree some of the beans and liquid then add it back in. I have a hand puree thing which is awesome. Add the vinegar and stir. Pour some in a bowl and squeeze in lemon juice. You don't need that much, use sound lemon judgement. Sprinkle the rest of the scallions on top and avocado slices and you have a bowl of heaven.

I don't have a picture of the soup because I ate it so fast, sorry. Make your own and you'll see how it looks.

UPDATE:

I was thinking about this post the last couple days, because I'm a dork and I realized everything I espouse about eating locally and seasonally is kind of thrown out the window here. I mean-lemons? avocado? In New York? In December? That's fucked up. I guess beans could be worse, they are canned not refrigerated. No icy trucks to get them around but still, trucks. New York being the cultural capital that it is has many different cooking histories from every part of the globe and they all import their sensibilities and ingredients. Cuban cooking (though its pretty presumptuous to align my soup with Cuban cuisine) has infiltrated my personal tastes and I haven't yet gotten to the point where I can cast aside black beans because they don't grow in my back yard. What do you love that's out of season or from far away? What do you love that's only east coast?

Seeds

This summer I neglected my garden. I was away in other people's gardens and had no time for things like weeding or watering. The sun was there doing its thing. Sometimes the clouds would part. That's it.

Of course upon my return the place looked like ass. Nothing had been transplanted on time and all the herbs were sadly strangled in their pots, by their own roots no less. And yet...things grew.
Nature-what a crazy bitch she is.

So here was the total:

Six tomatoes, a handful of beets, and enough beans to replant them next spring. There were also enough basil leaves to flavor a mixed drink. Speaking of which there's a lot of mint growing randomly around, so mojitos for everyone! I have grand plans for next year. There's going to be a pea place (where I grow peas) and troughs of Magic Mollies. There will be strawberries (we have a few in a big yellow tub now but my mouth didn't harvest any) galore and chickens. Chickens.


There is a chance it will all fall to ruin again. That's the chance everyone takes any time they attempt something positive because unlike things that are bad for you doing something good for you is hard work. Diets, exercise, educating yourself, being nice to people... All practically impossible!! At least this is what we're conditioned to believe. Eating organic is too expensive, shopping from local growers is too complicated, eating healthy is too boring, recycling is a waste of time, no one can remember to take canvas bags to the grocery store don't bother, nothing you plant will ever grow.

My garden marched on without me much as the planet will march on without humanity once we've wiped ourselves off it. But if I'd done a little more with it, some weeding for instance, we could have supported each other! No one would have to be wiped off anyone's face. I'm trying to say that you can work with nature or you can ignore it-guess which action turns out better? It's not a perfect analogy since my garden's decline isn't causing climate change but you get it.

Personally I'm not very active on the doing things for the planet front but I've noticed my awareness and interest has increased with every seed I plant. Every seed. We have a compost bin so now I don't throw organic waste into the garbage (for anyone holding their breath to find out what happened with my almost full compost bin, one day Claire just picked it up and dumped the whole thing over a garden bed. It had actually turned to dirt! Didn't need that help line after all) and I reuse bags and recycle and buy organic and am trying to just buy local (if only Europe didn't make such awesome cheese) and these are all pitiful small things, seeds if you will, that hopefully will grow into something more, with time. But only if I put in a cultivating hand. Mmm, mixed metaphors are delicious. Like Mojitos.

I guess what I'm saying (and reminding myself of) is even though a seed looks small and insignificant, plant it because it's amazing what it can produce.

Raymond Sings!

Hey here's that song about pie making Raymond wrote. I hope he appreciates me putting his picture all up on the internet. Kisses, Ray!

"Liveblogging" Thanksgiving

Wednesday November 26th, 7:52 PM

So I wanted to record my cooking experiences this year since it is my first Thanksgiving where I've taken a really active part in any kind of preparation (As I type cranberries are popping merrily on the stove. Wait, are they supposed to do that?) But I can't really keep up with today's modern technologies of whatever the hell live blogging is...partly because I'm not particularly tech savvy and partly because I've imbibed a good deal of the cooking wine and bourbon for the Kentucky Derby Pie. I should be so lucky to escape this ordeal without any third degree burns.

Isn't it interesting that on Thanksgiving everyone is eating more or less the same dishes all across America? I haven't decided if that's creepy or cool but as I compiled my grocery list for this undertaking I noticed that the traditional dishes are composed of ingredients ACTUALLY IN SEASON. Refreshing.

I just plan to write what I'm doing when it gets interesting (...to me) and post it all on Thanksgiving night with pictures. You're welcome!

8:07 PM

Hmm, cranberry sauce smells a lot like mulled wine. Or is that me? Oh well, everything is better mulled...with wine. Moving on to stuffing. Jeez, that's a lot of bread. Stuffing is fascinating-like many soggy bread dishes it was obviously once a solution to the eternal question, "What the fuck to do with all this stale bread?"


8:38 PM

MC Hammer just came on the iTunes. Thank god.

8:46 PM

Okay, the cranberry sauce is a little too sweet but you can't unsweet what has been sweetened. Life lesson, people. Cut up my potatoes for the first bake of the twice-baked potato recipe and have them precariously balanced in the oven with the stuffing. What to do, what to do? So much of cooking is deliberate planning and timing. The pecans have been stewing in bourbon time to make a crust. And dip into the bourbon supply.

9:01 PM

Let's Get It On was playing as I kneaded my pie crust. I'm anticipating some sexy pie...which considering who it's going to feed is fairly disturbing.


9:20 PM

As I formed my pie crust into a pretty border my friend Raymond's song about pie came on iTunes, he wrote it for my little movie about a pie making villain. The recording is excellent and made me smile. I'm gonna find a way to post it here so you can all listen as you make your next pie and imagine you are Holly, the Pie Socialite.

9:37 PM

I used caraway seed sour dough bread for the stuffing, it's tasty but doesn't quite have the right texture. It's supposed to be like glue right? More vegetable stock and back in the oven...is this the beginning of disaster? I KNEW it was going too smoothly!

9:44 PM

I'm waiting for the potatoes to cool and drinking Jack Daniels on the floor. Ahh, the holidays.

9:50 PM

Found a cranberry on the floor. Ate it.

10:34 PM

Okay, cut up sweet potatoes and put them to boil. Now I'm digging the potato insides out of their skins, leaving the shell intact. In the battle of me vs. skins, skins is kicking ass. I probably should have baked them longer! Pie and stuffing have come out of the oven and look good though the stuffing has baked down a bit. No one likes stuffing anyway, right?

10:51 PM

The last skin is empty!!!!!


11:35 PM

Skins refilled! I am horribly sober and should probably have a glass of water.

Thursday November 27th, Thanksgiving, 12:03 AM

Oh God, what's the point?

12:04 AM

Rallying, I made the first part of my sweet potato souffle to be baked tomorrow morning because I don't know how it'll survive being heated up. Next year I need to find recipes that don't rely so heavily on sugar or at least stock up on more honey earlier (One day I'll have my own hive!) so I can do some substitution. I did a bit in my S. P. mix and we'll see how it tastes.


12:23 AM

Okay, twice baked potatoes have been baked twice and I seem to have consumed an entire meal through osmosis. Now some clean up so my roommate doesn't strangle me in my sleep.


12:45 AM

While struggling to make room for all this prepared food in the fridge I came across containers full of materials that can not be identified. After hours of delicious cooking smells I'm being sent to bed with the gagtastic leftovers of meals past...I ran out to the garbage to get rid of the horrorshow as quickly as possible and almost ran into a guy walking a three legged pitbull. Sad...Time for sleep.

Black Friday November 28th, 12:07 AM

I wrote a bunch of stuff between last night and now and it was all deleted. Let us say sweet potatoes were sweetened, showers were taken and I eventually made it out the door. And what happened? Mostly eating. Also a fair amount of waiting since the turkey wasn't cooked as soon as we'd all hoped. And what of the turkey, indeed?


Well, I wasn't responsible for cooking it. I did ask that we buy a free range organic turkey this year and was graciously indulged. Mr. and Mrs. Ed accompanied me to the Co-op and bought that fancy turkey just for me and it was awesome once it was finally roasted through. So dinner was mostly all my side dishes until about six 'o clock.

There are a few stages of learning re: Thanksgiving. First you learn about the desperate Pilgrims aided by friendly Indians who helped them through a terrifying American winter and the delightful feast they had to celebrate their new friendship. Then you learn about the Trail of Tears. After that, the scope of America's gluttonous consumerism obscures all positive aspects of the holiday. But, finally, I've settled on the idea that whatever we dress it up as, Thanksgiving is really a celebration of the harvest, a good old-fashioned animal sacrifice(yay, Buffy!). Winter is ahead. For the Pilgrims and everyone that meant long nights, cold days and the very real possibility that they might not make it through. On my cozy couch, stuffed with pie, that possibility seems so remote it's almost offensive to consider it. But there are dark times always where we think spring will never come and on Thanksgiving we're setting aside one day to appreciate that it WILL come and with it the bounty and life before us will be renewed. It's a cycle humanity has trusted and relied on for a long time and part of the reason I think and write about food so much is because of how important and rare it is to really be connected to that cycle.

Sharing some food with some folks renews that connection in some small way, I think. I am thankful I did it today. And for the half a Derby pie in my fridge right now.

Recipes:

Cranberry Sauce
-a 12-ounce bag of cranberries.
-1/2 cup cabernet wine
-2 tablespoons of orange zest.
-1/2 cup orange juice
-1 cinnamon stick
-some salt, a pinch, and also a pinch of cayenne pepper.

Add 3/4 cup of sugar to a sauce pan. Pour in the juice and the wine; add the zest, the cinnamon stick and those spices. Bring that up to a simmer on medium heat. When it's simmering, add the cranberries. They are going to start to pop, it's going to take about 10 minutes. The sauce will also start to thicken. Throw in a 1/4 cup of cold water and turn off the heat. Take out the cinnamon stick.

Herb Stuffing
-12 cups slightly dry bread
-1/3 cup snipped parsley
-1/3 cup finely chopped onion
-1 1/2 tsp. salt
-1 tsp. ground sage
-1 tsp. dried thyme, crushed
-1 tsp. dried rosemary, crushed
-2 cups of vegetable broth
-6 tablespoons of butter, melted

Combine bread, parsley, onion, salt, sage,thyme, and rosemary. Add broth and butter; toss lightly to mix. Use to stuff a 12-pound turkey or bake covered, in a 2-quart casserole at 325º until heated through, about one hour.

Sweet Potato Souffle
-3 c. mashed sweet potatoes
-1 c. sugar (or one cup honey so your teeth don't fall out)
-2 tsp. salt
-2 eggs
-1 tsp. vanilla
-1/3 stick butter, melted
-1/2 c. milk
Mix all ingredients and pour into greased baking dish. Cover with topping.
TOPPING:
-1 c. brown sugar
-1/3 c. flour -1 c. chopped nuts -1/3 stick butter, melted
Mix thoroughly and sprinkle over top. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

Twice Baked Potatoes
I had a recipe but didn't follow it...cut your potatoes in half, bake them till they're soft enough to scoop out the insides then mash those insides up with everything fattening and delicious-milk, chedder, butter, sour cream, salt, pepper, green onions. Put the filling back in the skins and baked 'em till they're brown on top.

Derby Pie
Again didn't follow a particular recipe...made a crust from butter and flour soaked my pecans in bourbon, mixed them in a butter/sugar/egg/flour/vanilla mix, laid the bottom with chocolate chips, pecans on top, baked till goldeny on the edge. I should write a freaking cook book.

So Many Beautiful Men, So Little Time...

So this has nothing to do with food, farming or even my life actually but every single media outlet I enjoy (and they are not all websites built around fart jokes, I swear) is going nuts over Twilight the existence of which I was not aware of until about a month ago. Whoa out of touch with nerdy fantasy porn, what?? I have to say it's piqued my curiosity. I'm a little jealous that I'm no longer a tweenager with a pretty boy to swoon over, Mr. Pattinson...then I remember I've already experienced the as good as it gets vampire fantasy.

I want to share with everyone, because we all deserve to see it once more before time completely ravishes the memory, the beauty and awesomeness of James Marsters as Punk era Spike:


That is what I am talking about. Again:


Nice. And how bout that Hugh Laurie, huh?


Ah, men on TV. Without them what would emotionally stunted women do?

Forking and Groveling OR Don't Fear the Potato

Oh, Potatoes! Potatoes! Say it loud and there's music playing, say it soft and it's almost like praying...

Dear Reader, I would like to relate a short anecdote about a dish I made. In this dish were the following ingredients: quinoa, kale, tomatoes, onions, some olive oil, and little bitty pieces of potatoes. It sounds simple but it is out of control delicious. I made a bunch, ate some, put the rest in a bowl for the next morning.

Next Morning: Open the fridge. My beautiful bowl of food which I so lovingly prepared has been decimated. Kale: Gone. Onion: Gone. Tomato: Gone. Little Quinoa Sprouts: Gone. All that linger are the potato bits, clustered together at the bottom, shell shocked by the ravaging of their cohorts. Perhaps tormented by the guilt of survival.

Of course I experienced the usual rage that comes with finding your roommate has eaten sustenance you set aside for yourself. Of course! But the insult to the injury was leaving the potatoes behind, like they were something tainted and wrong. So agonizingly wasteful. Since that day I have been determined to spread this life changing message: DON'T FEAR THE POTATO!!!

Potatoes do not make you fat. Bread does not make you fat. Pasta does not make you fat. A constant buffet of these things with no vegetables, lots of sugar, and mostly fried WILL make you fat. But as a part of a balanced diet-a small component of a dish with many healthy ingredients like kale, quinoa, onions, tomatoes for instance-they can be quite good for you. Potatoes thicken soups. Absorb flavor. Chock full of vitamins. Easy to store. What I'm trying to say is stop ruining my cooking.

Since I have friends and apparently roommates who have no interest in potatoes it's hard to find a place to talk about my love. Which is why blogs are great. I can just get it out there! An alternative to blogging is farming and Frosty Morning Farms grows lots and lots of potatoes. When I was first there the potato plants were all leafy and tantalizing. I kept insinuating we should just rip them right out of the ground now and I'd make some soup. But no, there were still flowers on there, still secret rooty things happening underground and the only things I could do in the potato patch was weed or squash potato bugs. WITH MY HAND. THEIR INSIDES ARE ORANGE.

After days of coming back covered in dirt and bug juice with nothing to show for it I had begun to resent those plants a bit. When I revisited the farm in September I was hoping to even the score, pull them up and mash them good. What I saw was shocking. Those proud plants had fallen, limp and brown to the ground. Around them the weeds had taken over (yay, more weeding!) and it was hard to tell where the rows had been.

If, like me, you've never harvested potatoes you probably have visions of pulling up a plant with lots of nodules just hanging off it waiting to be plucked. Or you have no idea where potatoes come from and don't really care but I'm about to tell you anyway, so suck it. Basically the potatoes are taken out through a process Allison called Forking and Groveling. If you're lucky enough to have two people to share the work, one will use a pitchfork to gently loosen the earth while the other (kneeling on the ground) runs their hands through the soil trying to differentiate the potatoes from lumps of earth or rocks. You have to be careful not to make two many cracks in the soil ahead of where you're groveling because the best place to store the taters till you need them is in the earth unless you're prepared to lug bushels to the root cellar. And cracks let in sunlight. Which ruins them! Don't eat a green potato, it has been exposed to the sun and is not good for you. If it has little eyes though, it's fine.

SO that's the boring story. I asked Allison if the word groveling came from the way potatoes are picked, grovel=down in the dirt at someone's feet, but when we did a bit of a search there was no indication of where the expression came from. We all grovel sometimes without knowing why, I guess...

My back broken from alternately forking and groveling we carried loads of fingerlings and yellow potatoes back to the farmhouse to be washed and sorted by size. There were also a few Magic Molly's, an 'experimental' (F.M.F. sometimes runs tests on new plants to see how they do organically and what kind of tastiness they produce) potato that comes in a deep beautiful purple. I snuck some in a bag and plan to plant them this spring and fork and grovel on my own. That night I made an amazing potato, carrot and celery soup with goat yogurt to make it creamy and full of all the dried spices Allison grows around the house. Yay!

Usually I try to tie in my mundanities with some pretentious conclusion I've drawn about life into an annoying package. This, however, is a simple message coming from a heartfelt place. Don't fear the potato. It's more afraid of you than you are of it...that's why it's hiding underground.



P.S. Fun fact. In upstate New York they have a dish called simply Salt Potatoes. The area used to have many salt mines and the workers would throw their potatoes into the vats of boiling salt then fish 'em out and chow down. Nowadays the tiny round taters featured above sell at a higher price to make this 'delicacy'. Funny how time makes all things for the rich. Except being poor.

Is There No Love More Sincere Than the Love of Food?

On Saturday, the Lord's favorite party day, I went over to the Red Hook Harvest Festival with my pal Ray who took a series of crappy phone photos of me posing with hot cider and desperately clutching a copy of Edible Brooklyn. I now regret not bringing a real camera but will try my best to illustrate all my important points through these images.


First of all, wow. I've never been to see the Red Hook farm though I've touted their organizers, Added Value. Added Value works in Red Hook on community programs that clean up parks, teach leadership, good nutrition, provide access to healthy affordable food and build urban farms, like the one in front of Ikea. That's right, there's an Ikea next door if you weren't sold before. I went without even knowing about the Ikea so just imagine my delight. In fact I had so little knowledge about where I was going or why that Ray and I wandered around for almost forty minutes before by the grace of an unseen force (Ikea?) we stumbled across the festival grounds.

Now I don't know what I was expecting but those expectations must have been low because I was pretty blown away by what from most perspectives was a less than breathtaking affair (Ray's perspective). First of all, they had the South Bronx bee man there, Roger Repohl giving a demo on the ways of the bees and violently disputing the lies promoted by Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie to the little children all around. Having seen a few demos of honey harvesting and bee hypnotizing I opted out but came back later for a tasting. Can I just say Wow! And Whoa! Roger harvests a few times a year, through summer to late fall, and every batch has a different color and flavor. Most larger distributors just mix all their honey in one big pot so they can get a consistent product. No generic sweetness here, each bottle contained a separate and unique bouquet of aroma and sensation. It's times like these that I wish I had a more colorful food vocabulary... particularly considering my supposed investment in food. Hmm. Let us just say they were fruity and burst across the palate with an amber fist of nostril flaring-eh, forget it. Let us just say instead that I spent my last six dollars on a bottle, six dollars that may break the bank for rent this month. THAT'S how good it is.


I wasn't going to go on and on about honey again but in that issue of Edible Brooklyn I'm clutching there happens to be an article about urban beekeeping and how New York is one of the few cities that outlaws it. It's pretty interesting and I think once I have enough start up capital (never) I may flaunt the law and my landlord and start up a hive of my own. Their fall issue isn't up yet or I'd link to it, but it is really interesting and can be picked up around town or you can check in later this month here.

Also Roger has a blog that seems to be largely about politics, oddly, and I haven't really reviewed his opinions...but he has a few funny articles about bees too.

There were a lot of vendors around but since I had a budget of eight dollars and spent six on honey my choices were limited. A dollar for cider and a dollar for a raffle ticket-fingers crossed I'll win that vintage bike! Amongst the people selling edible fall goodies were various organizations handing out information and free swag. Big ups to Heifer International for bringing loads of colorful lapel buttons featuring such classic slogans as 'Go Goat' and 'Bee Sweet'. Raymond took so many I was embarrassed to continue the button-glutton, but did manage to snag those two. Because I can get behind Goats and Bees, for realz. We weren't alone in our attraction to shiny colorful objects- a local step dancing troupe outfitted in fringed tie dye (hurray for classics again) had clearly stopped by the table before their performance. Maybe they'll look up what Heifer Int'l is when they get home...


There were also representatives from Compostville, or The New York City Compost Project. I don't want to belittle what they do or say that their table was anything but covered in pamphlets and helpful info on how to compost, but the guy I talked too seemed completely baffled by all my questions regarding my compost bin, which right now is just a garbage can full of rotten food.

"But, that's what compost is...", He said, smiling uncertainly.

"Yes, but it's almost full!! What do I do?"

Pointing at pictures from the pamphlets of what my bin looks like and reiterating that it's almost full had no effect. Luckily there's a compost helpline (Seriously): 718-817-8543. I haven't called it but may this weekend as my roommate and I have vowed to do something about the compost situation. Stay tuned for further reporting...Anyhow he loaded me down with booklets and magnets and sent me away to bother someone else.

The farm itself, which I realize still hasn't been described aside from being blessed by Ikea as a neighbor, sits on a piece of land that looks like it was once a park or playground surrounded by chain linked fence and rowed all across with hay and beds and its own tall compost pile. They have a greenhouse and a few chickens, plus a demo hut which in addition to the Bee Man also featured a canning/jarring how to. There was a even a pumpkin patch in the back filled with parents and shrieking children and some sadly crushed pumpkins. Better than sadly crushed children. Am I right?

The pumpkin patch encapsulated the urban farm for me. It was kind of crazy in there, full of diverse families crushing pumpkins...actually I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Maybe I mean to say that we think of farming and nature as being exclusively for rural parts of the country, and it's true that when you take farming to an urban setting it's not as picturesque as we like. But it is lively and inclusive and brings people together.


This image is beautiful. I may get a carrot-pierced heart tattooed on my chest.

After all that fresh air and love of nature we walked to Fairway and ate all the samples. I call it Urban Foraging. Here's another link to Added Value. They're great. Did I mention they have a farm next to Ikea? (I really couldn't care less about Ikea)