Ina Fridays -- Salads, Soups, and Sides -- Winter Minestrone with Garlic Bruschetta

WE'VE MOVED! More Time at the Table is now published on wordpress.com!  This blog has been hosted on blogger for the past four-plus years and will be published at both urls for a month or so…or until all the kinks are worked out of the transition process.  Do change your bookmarks or links, please, and follow me here on Word Press:  http://www.moretimeatthetable.com/   Great thanks to my gorgeous daughter Emily who managed the migration.  So cool to have smart kids!

A fast, hearty, healthy, rich, and inexpensive main course is what this soup is all about. A little pancetta to set the stage for the quickly sautéed vegetables bolstered by a heart-happy hit of garlic.  A big blustery can of Italian tomatoes added to chicken stock to create instant broth.  Pasta and beans to fill your tummy.  A few fresh leaves of spinach and a splash each of white wine and pesto to top it all off and make it so.

Creamy Zucchini Soup with Parmesan and Cherry Tomatoes or Back Porch Gifts are Best

Fresh sliced cherry tomatoes are hidden at the bottom of the bowl for a surprise.

There may be more recipes for zucchini than anything else at this time of the year.  Long gone are the tiny, tender and sweet pencil-slim squashes of early summer.  Here now are baseball-bat sized --could I say clubs?--appearing on back porches, in countless loaves of bread, stuffed and broiled, or any of the above.

My basil died while I was gone.  Market had plants 3 for $10 this week. I'm starting over.

Since zucchini is my favorite vegetable, perhaps after asparagus... or maybe green beans...I just don't care.  I'll buy or take all I can get and never be tired of it.  Shredded, mixed with egg, onion, and a bit of flour, it's a supper pancake served with grated cheese.  Slit open, scooped out -- the moist innards sauteed with onions, garlic, and pepper--and refilled, I'm thrilled to stick it under the broiler under nearly burned and definitely crispy.  But what I really love to do is make soup.  Any kind. Especially with lots of fresh herbs  Which you knew.   (And the new soup book, Soups & Sides for Every Season truly is about done! Coming up in hard copy on amazon.com)

Turkey Wild Rice-Vegetable Soup with Sherry and Walnut Garnish OR One More Snow Day in Saint Paul

It's spring in name only in Saint Paul.  Whereas many food writers and bloggers are already complaining about too many fresh pea or asparagus recipes, people here are still sniffling and shuffling around town in their by now worn-out snow boots. (Uh, there are not even pea tendrils in St. Paul because snow covers the vegetable gardens; see below.)  In fact, if you move here, you'll save a lot of money on shoes;  you only need them May - September.  Not only that,  you can write about fresh peas, rhubarb, and asparagus when folks further south are eating their first tiny tomatoes and are getting tired of grilling already.

This picture is out my front door this morning.

38 Power Foods, Week 27--Soy Beans-- Three Bean Chicken Chili (With Edamame)

In the winter,  I make a big pot of chili just about every month. (If you follow my blog or are a regular reader - THANK YOU!!!! -  you know this.)  Leftovers fill the freezer for lunches or suppers before choir on Wednesday nights.  I'm happy to make chili  for supper for friends with no apologies. I make vegetarian chili, turkey-lentil chili, Texas chili (no beans), Silver Palate chili, and Ina Garten chili.  Last year I once or twice made Tuxedo Chili, a Food52 winner--simple, healthful, and quick (ground chicken/two colors of canned beans), but filling and yummy.  Mostly it's just Alyce chili--a bit or a lot different each time.

Minnesotastrone-Big Pot Full (Minestrone Made in Minnesota)

I do love soup.  Ask anyone who knows me.  I'm never happier than when a big cauldron is bubbling away merrily on a front (or back) burner.  I like fast or slow soups.  Vegan, vegetarian, or meaty stews.  From scratch, on purpose, or fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants clean out the frig pots.

I love soup for Dave and me, for dinners with friends, or for parties.  Last week, my friend Sue was coming for supper on Friday night.  I didn't want a complicated (IS THIS or this DONE YET?) meal.  Soup was perfect; I'd have the entire evening to spend with her and Dave.  I knew I had some ham from Grandma and Grandpa, as well as two huge chicken breasts leftover from a casserole I'd made Wednesday.  At the store, a couple of beef shank bone slices with quite of bit of meat on them sealed the deal.  I'd  make minestrone.  While there's really no need to use three different kinds of meat/poultry, I did it because I had it on hand; I bought the beef to make the stock.  If you, for instance, have some pork roast or Italian sausage leftover, cut it up and throw it in.  If you only have a ham hock, forge ahead--using the hock where  I've used the beef shank slices. 

Turkey Noodle Soup--Carcass and All

Make this soup on Friday and curl up on the couch to watch the first Christmas Movies!

If you kept or froze your turkey carcass from Thanksgiving and aren't quite sure what to do with it, this is your method for soup. While it looks like a recipe, it's merely a method and you must yourself judge which ingredients you have or want to add; it's all about flexible. Note the options of using your leftover vegetables, gravy, stock, or just adding all purchased low-sodium chicken stock and so on. In about an hour an a half, you'll have just about the best turkey noodle soup you ever ate. If you are skipping noodles this week, leave them out and, instead, add extra fresh or frozen vegetables. (Brown rice, wild rice, or barley are other possibilities.)

Turkey Noodle Soup from Thanksgiving Leftovers...Including that gravy if you like.

This soup is made in two stages: one to create a quick stock and the other to make the soup.
Please read all the way through before beginning.  

Cook's Note:  The Turkey Soup police are not out today.  You can make this with lots of changes and substitutions, but you have my idea to start.  Blessings on your soup pot!  Be brave!

38 Power Foods, Week 8 -- Carrots -- On the Loose

I have no idea what you'd do without carrots.  I think I just couldn't cook without them.
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about, "Oh, I love carrots," but there isn't a week that goes by that I don't buy them. I can't imagine my crisper without carrots.  But I don't think I ever thought much about them before.

Two carrot stories come to mind...after this gorgeous salad:

Moroccan Carrot Salad

 We were camping in Texas once where we spent long days tubing on the Guadalupe River.  (Folks floated by with six-packs tied to their inner tubes.)  It was so hot the ice was a constant puddle in the coolers and we worried about our food.  (Why didn't I sell ice in south Texas?  Once again I had chosen the wrong profession.)   Insert bad language; there were six of us to feed three times a day for a week.  One poor woman stopped to say only one thing to me, "Even my carrots rotted today."   I knew how she felt; I was down to cabbage, potatoes, and onions, though I always have cans in the back of the van.  If your carrots betray you, you're in trouble.  She was heartbroken and I understood why.

And the other story....

Once, when I'd been on Weight Watchers forever, Dave said,

I liked you a lot better when carrots were no points.

38 Power Foods, Week 2 -- Asparagus -- Asparagus Soup

Alyce's Asparagus Soup a la Silver Palate

Every Friday for the foreseeable future, I'll be blogging one of the 38 healthiest ingredients from POWER FOODS : 150 DELICIOUS RECIPES WITH THE 38 HEALTHIEST INGREDIENTS by the editors of Whole Living Magazine. 

50 Women Game-Changers in Food - #46 - Gael Greene - Corn Soup with Sautéed Scallops and Bacon

“Do you sing, too?” I asked, tickling his tweed elbow.

I have a good friend who is fond of this phrase:  "She was born with the words, 'Please peel me a grape,' on her lips."   That could very well have been said about spicy bon vivant Gael Greene (1933-  ), this week's  number 46 on Gourmet Live's List of 50 Women Game-Changers in Food.  Greene, the 40-year New York Magazine restaurant critic and columnist, novelist, and philanthropist from Detroit, is best known for her erotic encounters with food, as well as with the likes of Clint Eastwood and Elvis Presley.   Want details?  It's all (probably not) chronicled in Greene's memoir, the infamous Insatiable : Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess (Grand Central, 2007.)  And while I promise I'm not telling tales out of school, you can listen to her own description of Presley as appetizer here.

Alyce's Lamb Shanks on Mashed Ginger Rutabaga and Next Day Lamb Stew

I like a pasta bowl for lamb shanks and sides...sit them up in the rutabagas to show them off.

 If you're a bit unsure about lamb shanks... what they are or how to cook them, here's the deal:  they're pretty much like cooking a tiny pot roast on a big old bone.  Whatever treatment you've given beef chuck roast is probably going to work with lamb shanks--which are from way up on the lamb's leg.  Since the meat is tough, it needs to be braised (cooked in liquid) and the braising liquid of choice is often wine, though it needn't be.  A stiff stout would work, as would broth, tomatoes, cider and water...whatever floats your shanks.  Add root vegetables and/or onions, celery, garlic, and you've an entire meal.   Even just onions and wine with a bit of dried rosemary will give you something well worth eating.  Most recipes call for two lamb shanks per person; there isn't a lot of meat on one.  I find that given the vegetables and sauce inevitably cooked with them that one is plenty.

Chinese "BBQ" Pork, Five Heap Noodles, and Wine-Explosion Soup for Chinese New Year

Set your table before you begin cooking.

While I missed blogging Barbara Tropp a couple of weeks ago for "50 Women Game-Changers in Food" from Gourmet Live, it didn't stop me from making some of her incredible food in honor of a good friend's birthday and Chinese New Year.

I started out by spending a bit of cozy time with one of Barbara's books, The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, just to see what I thought I'd like to make.  The choices were myriad and luscious... but I couldn't make all of them.  I did, however, want to keep reading forever; she wrote beautifully.  I decided on three separate dishes:  one a soup for a starter and the other two as a main course that could be eaten together, but that would also provide some great leftovers.  HA!  There were hardly any leftovers.  Do make extra pork; it's a perfect cold snack.

Homemade Tomato Soup and Fried Cheese on a Snowy Night or How's the Second Week of Advent Goin' for Ya?

The story goes that tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches....  Actually, I don't know that story.  If you do, tell me.  I just can't remember when I didn't eat that comforting, homey classic Saturday noon meal.   My kids grew up eating it, but mama's got a brand new bag.

This time around, I made the tomato soup myself.  No sugar, sweetheart.  Just a drop of honey to counteract the acid in the tomatoes.  And...no grilled cheese sandwich.  Not for me.  Dave had one.  Instead, I fried my cheese and gently topped my soup with it.

It was creamy, crunchy and fulfilled all those grilled cheesey longings while I skipped the bread on a cold, cold night with the snow flying across the piano window:

 

Fresh Pea Clam Chowder

I love oyster crackers.  Maybe it's the salt.

Despite days of unpacking (still) and rearranging (forever) and gardening, we've still had a few cool evenings and one such night last week, I made, for the first time, one of Dave's favorite soups.  Now we've been married thirty-seven years and why I haven't made this soup before, I don't know.  If you're from the midwest, fish or seafood soups weren't terribly much part of the cooking pattern when I grew up.  Fish?  Yes.  Fresh out of the thousands of lakes and in the summer. (Though my parents froze quite a bit for great winter fish fries.)  But not fish soup.  Seafood?  A rarity.  You ate it when you went south.  Or east.  Or west.

Now that we have great fish and seafood available all of the time (especially in St. Paul, I'd add), we have such great options for seafood dishes and I'm finally able to set aside my considerable food prejudices and make clam chowder.  I did look at a few recipes and then did it my way.  Naturally you can use fresh clams; I happened to have a couple of cans of clams in the pantry and used those.  In fact, with the exception of the fresh peas (and you can use frozen), this dinner is pretty much out of everyday pantry ingredients.  Note:  This is a regular old unthickened chowder.

This photo of my fresh peas from Trader Joe's just wants to be like this.  I give up.  

You get the idea!

Fresh Pea Clam Chowder serves 4

4 pieces of bacon
1 large onion, diced
2 stalks of celery, diced
1 carrot, diced
1/2 t sea salt; 1/2 t white pepper
1 cup chopped fingerling or new potatoes
1 bottle of clam juice
Water
1/4 c fresh peas (or frozen)
1-2 drops of hot sauce (put bottle on table)
2 cans drained clams
2 cups milk
3/4 c half and half
1T butter
1/4 c chopped parsley
Oyster (or other) crackers

In a 4 qt stock pot, cook bacon until well-browned and remove to toweling.  Chop the bacon and reserve.  Saute onion, celery and carrot in the bacon fat until softened.  Season well with salt and pepper.  Add chopped potatoes and clam juice.  Add enough water to cover all of the vegetables and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat and simmer until potatoes are tender, about 10-15 minutes.  Add peas the last couple of minutes.  Season with hot sauce.  Add milk and half and half.  Stir in drained clams and butter and heat through.  Add fresh parsley and stir in bacon.  Taste and adjust seasonings.  Serve hot with oyster crackers or saltines and let folks add hot sauce as desired.