Winter soups: Chipotle black bean

A while back, I found Moosewood Restaurant Cooks for a Crowd in the discount bin at Chapters. Even though I rarely cook for 20+ people at a time, I do do a lot of big batch cooking, so I thought some of the recipes might be interesting or useful, and bought it. I have two or three other Moosewood cookbooks, having once lived in Ithaca, New York state, home of the Moosewood restaurant (I was a starving grad student at the time, so only actually ate there once or twice). The cookbook turned out to be a very good buy, with lots of interesting recipes that I can adapt or use as inspiration.

The following recipe is inspired by the MRCfaC’s “Black Bean Soup” recipe.

Chipotle black bean soup

• 1 cup dried black beans, soaked and cooked, or 2 cans black beans, rinsed
• 2-3 cloves garlic
• 1 large onion
• 1 tablespoon olive or other cooking oil
• 2 cups vegetable stock
• 2-3 medium sweet potatoes
• 1 large red pepper, roasted
• 2-3 whole chipotle canned peppers, minced, or 4 tablespoons chipotle sauce
• 2 tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped, or 1 teaspoon ground coriander seed
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• ¼ teaspoon cayenne or more to taste

I make most of my soups, including this one, in a slow cooker / crock-pot, but I’ve included instructions for making it on the stove top as well:

1. Mince the garlic and ginger, and dice the onion. Saute them in the olive oil over medium heat until the onions soften. Use a frying pan or small pot if you’re going to transfer to a slow cooker, use a large, heavy-bottomed soup pot if you’re going to cook the soup on the stove top.
2. Stir in the cilantro, cumin,  cayenne, and a dash of black pepper and  “cook” the spices with the onions for 2-3 minutes, stirring often.
3. If using a slow cooker, dump the sautéed onions & spices into the slow cooker and deglaze the pot with some of the stock. If cooking on the stove top, add the stock to the pot and stir.
4. Peel and dice the sweet potato, and add it, and the cooked black beans to the pot or crock-pot. Top up the pot with additional stock or water if necessary to just cover the vegetables & beans.
5. Peel and roughly chop the roasted red pepper, and add it to the pot or crock pot.
6. Add the minced chipotle peppers or chipotle sauce, and give everything a good stir.
7. In a slow cooker, cook on high for at least 2 hours or on low for at least 4, or until the sweet potatoes are soft. On the stove top, bring to a boil and then simmer for 30-45 minutes, or until the sweet potatoes are soft. With either method, add extra water if the soup gets to thick and starts to stick to the bottom of the pot.
8. Adjust the seasoning if necessary by adding more chipotle peppers (or sauce) if the soup isn’t spicy enough. If it’s too spicy, serve with a dollop of sour cream or plain yoghurt in the middle of each bowl.

This serves roughly 6 people for a main meal with a side salad or bread.

Socks!

Back in October, I posted that I’d started knitting my very first pair of socks. This past weekend, at our monthly crafting get-together, I finished them:

They even mostly fit me! They’re a tiny bit tight, but I altered the pattern a tad to take into account the fact that I have tiny feet, and it turns out I needn’t have. I will make the next pair slightly larger, and at least an inch higher on the calves, but I’m very, very pleased with my first effort. Now I want a whole sock-drawer full of colourful hand knit socks, which should only take me about 5 years or so…

t! gets it. In the car on the way home from the crafting meet-up, I said,

“I finished my socks! Do you know what this means?”

“It means you get to start another pair of socks?”

“Exactly!”

Winter soups: Dahl

Now that both of us are home most of the time (I’m working from home as a freelance writer & editor, and t! is taking some well-earned time off), we’ve had to re-jig our meal planning. When t! was still working in the city, I would make a big batch of casserole or stew each Sunday afternoon, and pack it into tupperware containers for him to take to work each day as his main meal of the day.

For the last little while I have been falling into the trap of worrying about what I was going to make for supper every evening around 4pm, and feeling like a failure every time I didn’t come up with something creative, healthy, and tasty. So we sat down and discussed it and made a meal plan that works for both of us, which includes making at least one casserole, one nice dinner, and one big pot of hearty soup each week.

So far it’s working pretty well, so I thought I’d share some of the recipes I’m using, starting with the hearty pulse-based soups (part of our meal-planning discussion included the observation that traditionally a farm kitchen would have a pot of split-pea soup simmering on the back of the wood stove all winter).

First up, Indian curried red lentil soup, or Dahl.

• 2 cups red lentils
• 500 ml chicken or vegetable stock
• 300-500 ml tomato sauce, or crushed tomatoes, or stewed tomatoes
• 1 half can (approximately 200 ml) coconut milk
• a chunk of fresh ginger (or 1 teaspoon of powdered ginger, but it’s much better with fresh)
• 2 or 3 cloves garlic (or more to taste)
• 1 to 2 tablespoons olive (or other cooking) oil
• 1 onion, diced
• black pepper to taste
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1  teaspoon cumin
• 1  teaspoon turmeric
• 2 teaspoons curry powder
• ½ teaspoon cayenne
• ½ teaspoon salt

I make most of my soups, including this one, in a slow cooker / crock-pot, but I’ve included instructions for making it on the stove top as well:

1. Mince the garlic and ginger, and dice the onion. Saute them in the olive oil over medium heat until the onions soften. Use a frying pan or small pot if you’re going to transfer to a slow cooker, use a large, heavy-bottomed soup pot if you’re going to cook the soup on the stove top.
2. Stir in the cumin, turmeric, curry powder, cayenne and black pepper. “Cook” the spices with the onions for 2-3 minutes, stirring often.
3. If using a slow cooker, dump the sautéed onions & spices into the slow cooker and deglaze the pot with some of the stock. If cooking on the stove top, add the stock to the pot and stir.
4. Add the rest of the ingredients, except the salt, stir well. In a slow cooker, cook on high for at least 2 hours or on low for at least 4. On the stove top, bring to a boil and then simmer for 30-45 minutes. With either method, add extra water if the soup gets to thick and starts to stick to the bottom of the pot.
5. Add salt if necessary, and more lemon juice and black pepper to taste.

This recipe makes 4 medium-sized servings (great as lunch with a side salad or some bread and cheese) and can be easily doubled.

Christmas crafting

This year’s hand-made Christmas gifts included:

A scarf for my mum, knit with some lovely yarn that Arin spun for me

A second scarf for my mother-in-law, knit from soft, shiny bamboo yarn.

And a lap quilt for Baba, t!’s Ukranian grandmother. She liked it a lot.

Perfect day

Yesterday was a just-about-perfect day:

• We spent the morning at the Farmer’s Market, catching up with our friends and buying yummy organic food from them
• We spent the afternoon snowshoeing in the fields behind the house with our dog
• We spent the evening (and well into the night!) playing cards with our neighbours, the dairy farmers up the road.

Homesteader’s Breakfast

Scrambled eggs fresh from the coop and toast made with home-baked bread. Yum.

For HRH

Front Yard

Back Field

Coop

Hearthfire

This morning we woke to a howling blizzard. I took more satisfaction than usual in the morning ritual of kindling today’s fire from the still-glowing coals of yesterday’s, and watching it catch and then roar.

Heating with wood is like baking your own bread. It takes a fair amount of planning, organization, effort, and hard work, but you have not only a greater appreciation for the end product (even an imperfect loaf of home-made bread tastes better than store-bought), but a communion with the process. You have to tend the fire throughout the day. Sometimes it doesn’t go as planned – a log is wet or rotten and doesn’t burn well. Sometimes you forget to check it and it burns down too low, and you have to waste kindling (which you split last week with great effort and freezing fingers) to re-start it. But it’s all part of the process – and part of a direct connection with the elemental energy of fire.

And even if it weren’t for the environmental and spiritual benefits, just knowing that if the blizzard should knock the power out, we’ll still be plenty warm is worth the extra effort.

Carter, our half-husky, took two steps outside, and turned around to come back in (we let him – who’s to argue when the dog thinks it’s too nasty to be outside?). I think I will spend a good part of the day baking, and maybe put some soup on in the crock-pot as well.

First Egg

This morning when I went out to let the chickens out of the coop into their run, like I do every morning around 10:30 or 11 am, I found our first egg sitting in the sawdust on the floor of the coop! It was all I could do not to race back to the house waving it in the air and shouting “Egg! Egg!” at the top of my lungs. As it was I did call t! quite loudly to show him our prize:

It’s small, which is normal. Young chickens start by laying smaller eggs, and “ramp up” to larger eggs. Here’s a comparison shot with an egg we bought from Hans at the market last week:

I’m hoping that the hens will start to lay in the nest boxes I made for them out of a couple of wicker baskets (I didn’t have enough spoons to build boxes out of spare plywood).

I need to try to find a couple of wood hen eggs to “seed” the nests with in hopes that they will figure out where they are supposed to be laying. Last time I went looking, I hit four different craft shops and the closest I could find were a couple of round wooden doll’s heads – since I know some people use golf balls as substitute eggs, the shape might not matter overly much.

Doesn’t that look like a cozy spot to settle down and lay an egg? The chickens didn’t seem to think so. They scattered the shredded paper all over the coop and knocked the wooden ball under the feed bin. Every morning I search for it and put it back into the nest box in hopes that they will eventually get the right idea.

So our little flock is doing well. Their diet of organic layer mash is supplemented by all our vegetable peelings and any other food scraps that they will eat and are safe to give them (pretty much everything except tea bags and leftover chicken):

And Chief, the head rooster, has been spotted doing his thing with the hens, which bodes well for some of the hens eventually raising their own chicks.

For now, I’m just thrilled that it looks like we’ll have our own fresh eggs all winter, and probably enough to pass on to family, friends and neighbors as well.

The 14-year-old sweater.

In 1995 I moved to Ottawa to start my first real grown-up job, working for Nortel (which, at the time, was still called BNR – Bell Northern Reasearch). I had a little one-bedroom apartment downtown, some disposable income, not many friends, and lots of free time. So I decided to knit myself a sweater. I found a local yarn shop, and bought a pattern, and some yarn, and a set of needles, and all the bits and pieces you need to knit a sweater, and I started knitting. My grandmother taught me to knit when I was about eight years old, and I practiced regularly during her visits and whenever I needed to knit something (Girl Guide badges, doll clothes, the occasional hat or pair of mittens) so the sweater went fairly well. It was an easy pattern: moss stitch with raglan sleeves.

Within the year (or so, my memory is quite fuzzy on the matter) I had knit the front and back and two sleeves, and had the remaining stitches for each segment on its individual stitch-holder. I started to sew up the seams… and ran out of yarn. I had the making up and the one-inch ribbed collar to go, and I was out of yarn. I failed to find any more of the same yarn, and so bought the closest I could find – which really wasn’t very close. The original yarn was a very lightly heathered beige in a wool blend (no idea what yarn it is, the ball bands were lost years ago). The new yarn I bought was a fairly close colour match for the beige, without the heather flecking, and 100% acrylic. It was the closest I could find, and I didn’t like it.

So the sweater pieces got put away in a box. Yep, I had a whole sweater 97% finished, and I stuck it in a box rather than finish it with the best matching yarn I could find. The box containing the sweater moved to the UK with me in 1997. It moved in the UK with me from my apartment to the house I bought in  Reading. It moved back to Canada with me in 2003. It moved from my house in Montreal to our homestead in Maxville with me 14 months ago.

And last month, I took it out of its box and took it to a crafting weekend organized by my friends who knit. They Oooh-ed and Aaah-ed over my sweater pieces and gave me lots of helpful advice and suggestions, and leant their moral support while I sewed up the rest of the seams and started to knit the neck with the not-matching yarn. I finished the neck a few days later at home, and had to research how to cast off – it had been so many years since I knit anything.

Disaster! My cast-off was way too tight, and the neck of the sweater won’t go over my head.

I was trying for a roll-neck, but I think I need to stay with the original (long-lost, but interpolated from the cuffs and waistband) pattern, and do an inch of ribbing for the neck instead. So I’m going to rip out what I have, back down to the stitches at the top of the of the front, back, and sleeves (yes, the same stitches that sat on stitch-holders for 14 years), and re-knit the neck in ribbing. I’ve found a bind-off that’s supposed to be extra-stretchy just for things like  sweater necks.

Wish me luck.