The time has come, my friends. I’m off to France for four months.
I don’t know how often I’ll be able to update while I’m gone, but I’ll take lots of pictures and come back with lots of stories on the Southern cuisine.
Until then… au revoir!
I don’t know many families who eat four different kinds of homemade soup on a normal night, not to mention the night before Christmas Eve. We do.
My mother, who is my food guru (see my “About Me” for more info) cannot tolerate having guests and not serving them something amazing, so when my grandparents arrived at our house the night before Christmas Eve, she was ready with three pots of soup, and one saucepan available for Sarabeth’s famous Cream of Tomato soup.
The soups in question were as follows:
The carrot-ginger soup was sweet and smooth. Pureed within an inch of its life, you’d swear that the taste and texture came from cups of heavy cream, but you’d be mistaken.
The potato leek was not the traditional creamy soup, nor did it have the chunks of potatoes and onions that are typical of a more country-style soup. This one was made specifically for my little sister, who is quite picky, and likes her soup like she likes her instant mashed potatoes: smooth smooth smooth. While this one was not my favorite (I like my soups full of texture), the flavor made up for it. Sweet from the cream with the slight bite of leek and the full-flavored starchiness from the potatoes, this is a warming winter soup.
Mushroom, however, was the undisputed favorite. With mushrooms chopped so fine, you’d only recognize them from their woodsy aroma, and just enough black pepper to send those little pricks of heat to the tip of your tongue, this soup was, without a doubt, the first to go. I, myself, went back for the carrot-ginger until we left for Italy, right after Christmas, but hey, that’s just me.
That other pot up above? Oh… that’s about fifteen pounds of potatoes for Christmas Eve, the next day. You think making three pots of soup would slow down my mother? Nonsense.
Mommy aka Mrs. Claus with Marnie aka my grandma.
At the peak of the dotcom hype, I distinctly remember hearing people ooh and ahh over what was, at the time, a huge innovation: peapod.com. You would simply log on, enter what groceries you wanted delivered, and a truck would arrive with all the food your little heart desired.
I, however, was not impressed. Why? Because New Yorkers have been doing this for ages. My mother is on a first-name basis with a guy at our local D’Agostinos, and has been known to call him from a taxicab to ask to personally hand-select “two pounds of your prettiest strawberries.”
Personally, I love the grocery store. I like wandering the produce aisle, finding new vegetables I’ve never tried. I like browsing the cheese counter, wondering how long it would take to eat an entire wheel of Brie by myself (not very long, I can assure you). But if I were to order groceries, I would do it over the phone, like my mother, and so many other New Yorkers. With peapod, I doubt that there’s an option to select “the 1% milk farthest back in the case, and whatever berries look good to you.”
I like to pretend I’m some kind of food guru, but the truth is, a year and a half ago, I was trying to no avail to get my mother to give me a recipe for lasagna so I wouldn’t starve while living on my own. Now, I finally have quite a few “recipes” of my own that cannot be taught (”Add paprika ’til it turns pink.” “Add salt until it tastes right.”) However, this still doesn’t make me a pro, which leads me to Christmas dinner in Toronto, and Charlie. This December, before we all headed off to our various corners of the world, we decided to throw a Christmas party. Let me rephrase that; my friend Mel decided to throw a Christmas party. One glitch. She didn’t really know how to cook. She’d seen her mother cook a bunch of times, but in the end, I agreed to help with the cooking so long as I didn’t have to do any dishes.
We hit the supermarket and, after a lot of math trying to figure out how many pounds to a kilogram, we bought the turkey, named him Charlie, and took him home with us.
Looks good now. What you didn’t see was Mel squealing as I had to pull the gizzards out, the turkey fat that spilled all over the counter as we tried to carve it, and the disaster that was the Pillsbury crescents.
As anyone who’s made crescents before can probably tell, I rolled them the wrong way. We also burned the first pan while we were trying to carve Charlie into the neat little plate of turkey he became. So much for having one part of the meal that was easy.
At least the mashed potatoes went off without a hitch, as did the stuffed mushrooms, which were my personal favorite and disappeared before I could get a picture.
However, by the end of it all, we were too tired to make dessert, so we threw a frozen pumpkin pie in the oven and ate it without whipped cream, which we had been planning to whip by hand. My fondue party a few days ago fared much better, but this is not the worst first party horror story I’ve ever heard. Except, of course, that while my friends were doing dishes, they saw the neck in a pot that had once held gravy, and refused to ever eat my food again.
As something a little different this week, my shout out isn’t to another blog, but to another foodie, my friend Joanna, and the cheese which she thoughtfully gave me for Christmas.
As she put it, only I could understand this gift. She brought over a selection of four cheeses: a gorgonzola, a grada padano, a parmigiano reggiano, and a monte veronese.
How great is it to have friends who get you?
Whoa… I guess I need to ease myself back into this. I’ve had an amazing month, both back at home in New York and in Italy (Milan and Rome). We ate some amazing meals… sadly no pictures, but that’s OK. If any of you are planning to go to Milan any time soon, I recommend the Sadler. Amazing. That’s all I can say about it… just plain amazing.
Now, completely changing gears, on to the chili. People seem to be very serious about chili. Opinions are strong, although it seems as though it can go either way: meaty or meatless, beans or no beans, the way that one was raised and where that raising occurs can affect drastically the way one views what is basically like a stew: a recipe invented to use up veggies and meat left in the icebox.
I wasn’t raised with chili, so I don’t have any strong opinions on either of these issues. I’ve tried all kinds of chili, meatless, beef, pork, chicken, turkey, with or without beans and other vegetables, and I’ve come to a conclusion: I simply don’t care that much! I want flavours that go well togethe, and I want heat all the way through, both on the tip of the tongue with the addition of cayenne and black pepper, and in the back of the throat from hot chiles. Other than that, I’m willing to try anything.
When butternut squash went on sale, I grabbed one and then browsed epicurious, finally coming across this recipe. I didn’t have swiss chard, but I had spinach, and since I didn’t want to run out to the store again, I used that instead. I also hiked up the hotness factor quite a bit, but use your judgment if you try it. I like chili that blows my head off.
What was born was a relatively quick chili, considering that chili is meant to be slow-cooked all day, and an interesting mix of flavours.
Plus it keeps in the freezer. A definite plus for me.