Three Soups! Bonus Recipes

October is soup season, and we are posting three soups! These are some of our staff’s favorite recipes to add to your repertoire. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

Here are the recipes for Thai Hot and Sour Chicken Soup, a delicious Minestrone, and Spicy Chicken and Rice Flu Chaser Soup. Read more…

Traditional French Cassoulet

When it comes to cooking, I’m always up for a challenge.

The first time it happened, was maybe my sophomore year in high school—or possibly even younger, and I was desperate to make this incredibly difficult chocolate cake that I saw on Great Chefs. It had dark and white chocolate, chocolate ganache, and chocolate shavings.I had no business attempting to make this cake but I did it anyway.

The cake was beautiful. Though it didn’t turn out exactly as it was supposed to, it was still impressive. (So was the mess. Just ask my mother!)

Over the years I have attempted many other considerable challenges. Fresh butternut squash ravioli was one. There were also a couple of dishes from the master, Julia Child. Lately I have found that most recipes from Thomas Keller can be tough to make look “right”. They tasted pretty good, though.

There is one dish I have really wanted to make over the years that isn’t exactly difficult, but does require some time: Traditional French Cassoulet.

The main reason I have put it off is that it usually requires a Confit of Duck that I really don’t have time to make. A few weeks ago, I found a post on Serious Eats, the clouds parted, and the sun shone down. (Cue angelic singing.) J. Kenji López-Alt’s recipe made making a cassoulet so much more approachable, that I just had to try it. So over the weekend, I did.

It still required work and time, but the end result was worth it. The beans were unbelievably tasty and creamy. The chicken was tender. My only complaint was that it was too salty for my tastes (López-Alt warns about this in the post.) The rest of my diners didn’t think so. I include my kids in this—they actually went back for seconds. I think next time I will cut the amount of salt pork in half just to see. And there will be a next time.

This is definitely a Sunday dinner type dish because of the time involved, but the recipe is a keeper and it is the perfect lazy, rainy weekend dinner. Read more…

Double Cut Pork Chops with Garlic Butter

Lucky Thirteen

My husband and I celebrated our thirteenth anniversary over the weekend, and I gotta say while we haven’t really been married that long, the celebrations are a bit different now than they were in the long-ago days—when we first got married, and life was less complicated.

In the beginning there was wine, romance, a great night out, and the rare (very rare) piece of jewelry. These days we’re lucky if we remember it’s happening. We didn’t even remember until it was right on top of us. A gift to each other? We bought a sofa, ‘cause that ripped, dog/kid/cat/gravity stained one had become utterly intolerable.

I know. It’s okay to be jealous. Nothing says love and forever than paying a lot of money for a piece of furniture that in a few years will end up looking like the one we have now. #livinthedream

If we can’t go out and celebrate, I will often make a special dinner for all of us. That didn’t work out this year, so we celebrated with a bowl of ice cream. (Do we know how to party or what?)

If I had been able to make a special dinner, I would have made these pork chops. Recently my husband went cuckoo for cocoa puffs over them. It’s the brine that makes them so good.

Full disclosure; he’s a big fan of pork chops in general so take that with a grain of salt. But these were really good and very easy to do on the grill. Read more…

Cock-A-Leekie Soup

Rooster In The Hen House

We have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first eggs from our chickens since they are now of age. It has been fun to watch them grow from chicks to hens, and to get to know their personalities…and they do have personalities. Some of the biggest characters have been given names.

There’s Trouble, who got her name because if the chickens are found doing anything naughty, chances are she’s at the head of the pack egging the others on. She is also the one who likes to come and peck at our back door to see what we are doing.

Then there’s Turtle and Seagull. They were the easiest to name because Seagull looks like one and Turtle is short for Turtleneck. She has a ruff of feathers around her neck that makes her look like a Shakespearean reject.

The kids named one of the Rhode Island Reds Huevo—short for Huevos Rancheros. Apparently, sarcasm and irony are genetic.

And then, there’s Sparkle who got her name because she’s just not that bright. Now, I realize it’s relative. They are chickens after all, but she is exceptionally tragic. I watched her continuously run into the wire fence the other day, because she couldn’t figure out that she needed to fly back over it, which is the way she got out in the first place. I took pity on her and picked her up to give her a hand. Sigh.

We missed the mark on one of the chickens. As we watched the chicks grow bigger and bigger we noticed that one of the Rhode Island Reds was really tall. We figured she was part of the blessed 1% of poultry who could be referred to as Super Model Chickens. We named her Cindy for Cindy Crawford. The problem is Cindy is actually a rooster. So we changed his name to RuPaul.

Ru has become a problem, as you can imagine any adolescent rooster would. The girls want nothing to do with him, and unfortunately he’s the guy at the bar who just won’t take the hint. Therefore, we were compelled to find him a new home. This weekend he will be going to a nice farm where he can speed date with other chickens who might be more accepting of his nature. It’s a way better fate than the soup pot.