A Little More Food (or Swamp Thing Soup)

Once upon a time...I had a food blog. Sadly it only lasted for a whole of two posts. It wasn't particularly bad. I just didn't find the time for it. I started, got a new job, moved to canada, came back, went BACK to canada, came back. Add to this, I rarely use recipes. I just throw things together and wing it, hoping for the better. I make a ridiculous amount of leftovers and love breakfast. Really now, how many recipes for poached eggs before it starts to seem a bit ridiculous. To start it again would seem slightly wasteful of internet space so instead I'll give you all just a little more food on here. My dramatic and whiney personal blog. Where I address the internet like it's some sort of personal audience with only a twinge of sarcasm.

I give you.

Swamp Thing Soup.

An accident in the making this soup is losely based on a soup I found on 101 Cookbooks. I happened upon her recipe for Edamame Soup (from A to Z Vegetables) which sounded so easy and simple, that I set out instantly to make it's velvety goodness. Yet upon further investigation in my freezer I found my one bag of edamame (which had been in my freezer since I first went to Canada in 2005) had been divided into a smaller bag. How can I make a beautiful velvet green soup without a full bag of edamame! It would be thin and listless, like one of those box soups trader joe's makes yet never sells.

I dug further. Settling upon another mysterious half bag of peas (probably vintage 2006) and decided that their green nature was close enough of a family relation to work. I also never have owned creme fraiche so...sour cream it is!



Thus, Swamp thing soup was born, titled so for it's similar color to the murky bogs not all that far from my house. Thanks to my freezer for holding onto mysterious frozen vegetables. It needed a little crunch so I made some floaters from mysterious pine nuts I found on row 3, in the back, behind carrot cake ice cream. As well as some nice cheesy toast boats to suck up all that extra goodness.

Swamp Thing Soup,

Serves Four.

The Bogs

1/2 bag Frozen Edamame
1/2 bag Frozen Peas
3 small red Potatoes
1/2 sweet farm onion
1 liter containor of vegetable stock
1 teeny clove garlic
1/3 cup sour cream (or plain rich yogurt)

The Floaters

1/4 cup Pinenuts, Chopped Coarsely
1/2 slivered (like really fine) Red onion
1 tsp jarred harissa (I used the Sonoma williams one, which is very lemony and oily because of a large dose of lemon confit in it)

The Rafts

Good Bread, sliced 1/2 inch thick cut into 1 1/2 inch strips (however long you want)
Butter
Parmasan or Asiago (Store bought shredded works good)

Start by heating a tbsp olive oil in a four quart sauce pan over medium heat. Dice your potato and onion in a hearty chop. Add the potato to the pan, stirring frequently until it starts to grap to the pan then add the onion, mince the garlic and stir into the little pan concotion you got going so far. Lower to medium low heat and saute until the onion starts to soften (translucent).

At this point add the peas, edamame, and stock. Bring to a boil, then simmer over medium heat until the Edamame is tender. It's okay if the peas keep cooking they're really not the main texture here and help add a little smoothness later. This will take around 12-16 minutes (sometimes longer I've found upward of twenty so keep an eye on it).

In the meantime (get to work again!) start by slivering off little slivers of red onion. In a seperate little pan ( I used my baby cast iron skillet) Heat a teaspoon olive oil over medium high heat until it starts to shimmer, then add the harissa and onions and stir until the onions are nicely coated and start to take on a red color. Continue to lightly fry these babies until they start to show signs of browning, yet still aren't sticking to a pan (well-seasoned pans work great for this) Add the pinenuts and drop the heat to medium low, until they just start to toast (you'll smell it) Remove from heat and set on a cold burner.

Butter the bread with a good light coat and top with a bit of cheese, toast in a toaster oven (or broiler) until the cheese melts and starts to brown.

After the edamame is tender remove the soup from the heat and blend appropriately either with a food processor (cool a little first), blender (with a removable top insert covered by a towel instead), or hand blender (my choice!) until starting to look smooth. Add the Sour Cream (or Yogurt) and continue to blend until it reaches your desired texture.

Serve topped with Floaters and Boats on the side.

Enjoy and Tell me how it was.

Found in the Footnotes

Have you ever really looked at the footnotes, voluntarily? In high school we dreaded footnotes our senior year because our evil term paper required it. The eleven years prior to that point, we were only asked to type up a simple (yet in reality entirely inaccurate) bibliography. So why now? Why must we bludge through the painstaking process of numbers and real sourcing!? Screw accuracy, score quotes, all sources are mine! Riot I tell you, RIOT!

Oh, how the times have changed.

Now...I kind of like reading the footnotes. They are like a long running commentary to help me really understand what I am reading, plus they usually lead me to something equally interesting to read. So I encourage you to read your footnotes! Mark it on your daily list, along with brushing your teeth, plotting world denomination, and fighting for a better pay! It will fit right in I tell you. So I present to you a first for this blog, a series---"Found in the Footnotes"

Taken From Sex God By Rob Bell "God Wears Lipstick" note 13.

"Recently I saw my friend Josh, who teaches fifth and sixth graders. He was preparing the lesson for that day and had his supplies with him: a large glass bowl, a can of beef, fatty tissue, sauerkraut, a jar of olives, some anchovies, and a hundred-dollar bill. I know---I was curious too. So I did exactly what you would have done. I asked him what his lesson was about. He replied, "I put all the ingredients in a bowl, including the money, and then I mix it together. then when it doesn't taste good, I pretend I'm going to throw it all away. At this point the kids go crazy, telling me not to. I ask them why I shouldn't, and they say, 'Because it's valuable.' And then I counter with, 'But it smells and it's disgusting.' At which point they rush to the front volunteering to reach into the bowl and pull out the hundred-dollar bill. Actually, I may have to start using a twenty for this lesson, because the last time I used a hundred, they trampled each other to get to the front. I then read to them from Genesis chapter one about how every single human being bears the image of God and how no matter what else is mixed in there, a person still has limitless worth in God's eyes."

Some days, I need little stories like this as a real reminder of what I should be doing in my daily interactions. Customer after Customer comes in daily, and all I seem to be able to do is judge them more and more each day. I had to actually walk into the back room the other day because I wanted to slap myself for what my mind was doing. I kept judging this frighteningly shrill and creaky woman who comes in every day and is just impossible. She is an older woman of an indiscernible age with small wisps of peroxide blond hair poking out in random places. Normally she is disheveled in an almost non functional way causing me to wonder what she actually does with the rest of her day, and her voice cracks and creaks like an old door scraping a rough floor. Regularly in at an early hour, every day she orders a coffee in a cup the size up, today I got it ready for her as she was walking to the counter. Smaller mistakes have been made, but the reaction wasn't a good signal to that. She accuses me of trying to sell her old coffee, so she changes her order: "I want two medium coffees in large cups". We pour her two fresh cups and she throws her hands up: "I won't drink stale coffee!" and she runs out the door. This isn't even the first time this happens, but she still comes in day after day. I've heard the people at work say they hate her, and that she's a ridiculous old bat. Truth is, I've thought the exact same things over and over. I want to hate her, but that's just too easy. There's got to be something behind it.

I want to understand. I really want to know what causes someone to get so frighteningly disconnected from reality, and to be able to care for her the best a barista/christian can and just maybe help her have a better day than the day before. I actually want to make a customer happy! Maybe I'm just trying to understand this concept: god loves equally, the diseased, the downtrodden, the depressed, the happy...or maybe I have just been there myself.

Disheveled, disconnected, and discontent with my surroundings. Those people we distance ourself from really aren't that far off when you think about it.

That Was the Worst Christmas Ever! - Part II

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

-Robert McCloskey

I distinctly remember baking and rushing my last batch of christmas cookies, god knows they tasted awful.

Somewhere someone told me that with anything you create, your emotions can determine the outcome; this was the case. Somehow I managed to make them wrong (normally taking ten minutes they took 30 just to set up). Internally I was thinking of just going out on a good note, but in reality I was just trying to stretch my time and stay there---just squeezing in that last ounce of the atmosphere I was about to leave behind. I just wanted to stay.

The ride to the airport was quiet, on my front at least, but everyone else seemed to have something to say. They had their questions, stifled with an unabashedly akward silence. All the while I was just trying to hold back from crying, something I had done quite the fair share of in the few days I had between the announcement I wasn't ready to attend out reach and the flight date home. We said our goodbyes, and like most good Christian people we hugged. Out of All of the hugs in my life, those hugs lasted just a little bit longer than usual; as if to say: ‘I’m sorry’, ‘Don’t give up’, and a thousand other forms of what is the one-two punch of guilt and regret.

I remember when they first told me that I was not going to go. I looked like a patient about to be forced into a psych ward---minus the straight-jacket. Flailing aimlessly, angrily screeching; something in me was dying...and then I crashed. I couldn’t handle them telling me that, and I was digressing into my most basic animal instincts. I was fighting it both inside and out, feeling as if an unbearable poison was forcing its way through my veins, paralyzing all rational thought. Over the next few days I mellowed, or more so I was tranquilized by irrational fear.

I was going home a failure, a then incomplete mess. Standing in front of me was the daunting fact that everything, and I mean everything I had planned for in the next months was going by the wayside. I was returning to Ohio---but I wasn’t supposed to be back yet. I was seeing my family---who weren’t expecting me until March. I was turning twenty and thrust into “Happy Holidays” mode, but I honestly wasn’t happy. I was pushed back into my life, my reality, questioning everything that had happened in the previous months. I was home. The sad part though is really just how hard people tried to make me happy. It was like trying to warm over a slab of marble. Something in me had felt like it died, and I was regressing into the stages of grief; or maybe it was a good grief I just don’t know.

"This is what I'm thinking, this is my point."

When I got home, when I decided I wanted to be a little better than I was last year, I took off like a rocket. This past year had a definite direction to it. Despite being severely depressed for a majority of it I was a force of movement. A week into it I had a job, that same week I had two, and then I just took off. I wanted something and I wanted control over it. There were times this past year where I was ridiculously angry. I tried not once but twice to retry a discipleship training school. People would say they were proud of me, but I knew that it wasn’t my time yet. The first time was in October, I had hoped and prayed for a school, finally finding one that just screamed me. It was in Montreal, and I was enchanted by the idea of attending a working internship of a school. It was my first big rejection in a while, but they where honest---they felt they couldn't help me. So I talked to Mark, which took forever. Only to hear from Hilary in a Newsletter the school I wanted to attend was canceled. I almost applied to another school, they actually called me three times, but I didn't go. Looking at my situation left me a little troubled differencing reality and determination, holding on to an archaic tendency to move in that fixed direction. Something about the fixation to leave a town combined with the impatience of being stuck in a town really throws you.

It’s weird looking back at mistakes made, because initially I would have just dwelled on not being able to correct them---but now? Now I have this innate want to hold onto my mistakes, to actually…learn from them. I know now that I want to learn, I desire to learn. That’s probably the healthiest habit I’ve ever picked up in my life. So as the one year mark came around I was feeling just a little bit of a failure. I was finishing up a semester, and slightly worried of failing. I was at one job for the longest period I’ve ever been in my life, and slightly worried of being fired. Was anything really wrong? No! Nothing big, I just didn’t want to be at this point at this time. I wanted things to work out slightly differently. I was quite literrally worried because I really had nothing to worry about, go figure.

So I procrastinated a little...then a little more...then a lot until today really.

So what has happened since---November?

I went on vacation, a real honest to god vacation with beaches, gelato and everything! It wasn't quite wonderful, but it was something. Especially our last meal---easily the most gourmet meal I ever had (and I picked it). I learned a bit about Gullah. I've watched fifty Korean movies (eight Japaneses, two chinese and one soap opera too). I survived the three month mark at my job, and now the six month mark. This is a landmark of commitment. I stayed home...so far. I catered the deserts for my work Christmas party. I went to North Carolina, and realized Durham has a street that looks like Commercial Drive. I saw my family again, they're all a little older---yet exactly the same. Christmas came, Christmas went, and then I turned twenty-one. Heck I went out and bought a SINGLE beer. It was bitey, with hints of coffee and the color of Guinness. I passed with a B, and signed up for two more classes. I realized I liked photos, and even started a page for them. I watched an entire movie in a theater without talking, and with smuggled cheesecake. I made Sugar cookies from scratch; gingersnaps too. I also chased seagulls.

So here I am. A little over one year later, a little bit older, and not so much the wiser but all the more eager to try a little more. What have I learned...well. God is slow. Painfully slow. In perfect conjuction, I'm obnoxiously impatient.

So he continues to push my patience just a little bit more. Maybe I'll see some of you in September?