Cooking with Marisa Part 1:

Strategies for the lazy and distracted gourmand

Ingredients:

some red bell peppers, I think I had five or six
a couple bulbs of garlic
a bag of dried mushroooms
some chicken broth
some fresh mushroom stems I happened to have lying around
salt
olive oil
butter

Heat oven to 350. Cut the peppers in half, clean out the seeds and the bitter white part. Toss them in the oven along with the garlic after brushing a bit of oil on them. Roast. Forget you’re roasting something and go back to work for a while. When the entire house exudes the aroma of slightly burnt garlic remember suddenly and dash downstairs to take them out. Roughly an hour, hour and a half. Who’s counting?

Heat up some water, chicken broth and salt; throw in the mushrooms, turn off the heat, go on about your day. Take a client phone call or two.

Later on, throw everything you’ve made so far in the blender - the thick mushroomy broth and even the blackened parts on the red bell peppers, but not the skins from the garlic (duh). Let it sit there just marinatin’ for a while. Long enough for the ingredients to really get to know each other. Remember an important proposal you needed to get out today.

Some time later, think, hey it’s a half hour before dinnertime, what about that soup I was supposed to be making? Enlist gadget-curious little person’s help to push the button on the blender. Whichever one he hits first is fine. Watch the hypnotic rotating stuff in the blender together. Heh. Cooool.

Hmm. Texture’s a little too thick. Throw in some more water and put it on to simmer. Rush around doing last minute things. Ah! soup’s almost there. Needs some butter. Hey, in my opinion everything needs butter. Half a stick looks about right. Mmmm … creamy.

Here’s where the ridiculously delicious part comes in: the garnish. Here’s what I happened to have lying around:

Some walnuts
Some ricotta cheese
Some seriously stinky blue cheese
A couple eggs
Some really rich organic plain cream-top yogurt

(I wish I had green onions, parsley or cilantro, it was missing an accent of green. But you do what you can with what you got, right?)

Boil up the eggs. Throw the walnuts in a hot-hot pan and sing a silly song to your little person while tossing the walnuts around in the pan on high heat. Burn em just a tad, for fun. Why not?

Crumble up the cheeses. Little people love to help do this! Good fine motor skills for them. And so fun to lick off the fingers.

Dish up heavenly-smelling dark crimson soupy goodness. Get a big ole spoonful of the yogurt. From the top, where all the cream is. Yum. Anyway glop it right into the middle of your bowl. If you did it right you have a little iceberg of yogurt on top of your soup. If you’re really inspired you get a second big ole spoonful and do the drizzle thing over the whole soup. Ribbons of white creaminess on crimson velvet. Just lovely.

A handful of walnuts goes right on top of the yogurt glob. Then cheeses a-sprinkled hither and thither, and hey, be generous with the cheese! Mmmmm. Cheese.

What was I talking about?

Oh. Sorry. So yeah, throw the sliced/diced/whole boiled eggs on top. And then get out of the way pronto because one very hungry little person is about to eat your arm if you don’t let him at this amazing smelling soup. Stand in amazement as he eats so fast he nearly chokes, finishes one entire bowl and goes back for more.

Wow. There is a really nice earthy, slightly bitter but mostly sweet flavor from all the roasted/burnt veggies.
The yogurt gives you a fantastic sour-creamy layer on top of every spoonful. The walnuts keep it interesting and the eggs are great. But it’s that cheese, pungent, textural delicious cheese that really puts it all together.

Mmmm.

Cheeeeeeese.

Finish dinner and figure out what devious strategy to use to keep all the rest for yourself because you know it’s going to be just as good or better for lunch tomorrow!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 at 2:17 am and is filed under Life in Marisaland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.