Super Easy Recipes: "Kitchen Sink" Minestrone

When I was 12, I decided I wanted to be vegetarian.  That lasted until I was about 18, and during that time, I did much of my own cooking.  One particular cookbook, The Teen's Vegetarian Cookbook, was pretty much my cooking bible.  I still have my very dog-eared copy sitting in my kitchen and occasionally browse it for inspiration.

Anyway, this minestrone soup recipe is adapted from the one in that book.  This was one of the very first meals I ever learned to cook for myself, and it's still one of the "go-to" meals in my cooking rotation.

What I love about this soup recipe: It's versatile, it's easy, it's filling, and it's cheap.  It will never be exactly the same twice, but you can make it with anything you have in the kitchen and it will turn out will.  Here's what you need to make this soup happen:

Kitchen Sink Minestrone Recipe

• Carrot, celery, onion and garlic (or whatever you prefer in your mirepoix) 
• A large can of crushed tomatoes 
• A cup or so of stock (or bullion) 
• A small can of tomato sauce 
• About a cup each of frozen mixed veggies, pasta, and beans
• Season with salt, pepper, oregano, thyme and basil 

Saute together your mirepoix until softened, then add in your stock, tomato products, and about six cups of water.  You can use whole peeled tomatoes or diced tomatoes instead of crushed if you want -- whatever tomato product is on sale, use that one.


For the veggies, I always just make things easy and add whatever frozen veg I have on hand.  You can certainly use fresh instead.  This soup is a great way to use up some of your excess harvest.


Add about a cup of dried pasta.  I like shells, but elbow macaroni or any other smallish shape would work just great.  Just dump the dry pasta right in the soup and let it plump up.


Add your beans.  Canned is fine.  Dried beans that have been cooked are fine.  Frozen are fine.  Whatever you're comfortable with and have on hand.  I like navy beans, garbanzo beans or kidney beans for this.  But feel free to experiment.


When you season, don't be scared to put in a lot of herb.  If you happen to have fresh herbs from your garden, awesome.  If not, dump in some dried or whatever else you have on hand.  If you don't like having floating herbs in your soup, gather them up into a tea ball or something before dropping them in.  Taste as you go to see if you need to adjust. 


Boom.  That's it.  You're done.


You could probably do this in the crockpot, too, if you waited til the end to add the pasta.  I've never tried it -- this whole thing comes together in less than 30 minutes, and you can leave it gently simmering for as long as you need to after that while the flavors meld and you clean your kitchen, play a round of League of Legends, throw a stick for your dog, have a cigarette, whatever it is you do in your free time.


If you don't think you're any good at cooking or don't know where to start...start with this recipe.  It will open doors to whole new worlds for you!

Are You Missing Hostess Yet?

I'll save the in-depth discussion of Hostess Company's long-awaited demise for people who are better-equipped to provide that opinion, but I will say this:  Every time I hear the phrase "union greed," my eye starts to twitch. 

I admit to being both passionate and biased on the topic.  I'm fourth-generation in a union family.  My great-grandfather, grandfather, father and brother were/are all union workers, and my grandfather was even named for Eugene Debs. 

Anyway, I can't say I'm exactly sad about the end of Hostess.  They are certainly an iconic American brand, but that's  not necessarily something to be proud of -- not something to strive for, if you follow me. 

Besides, how can the Nonconsumerist support a food with so many ridiculous ingredients that it takes an entire book to deconstruct the recipe?

Nevertheless, if you're really aching for a little taste of Americana, I've got your back.  Here are some recipes for homemade Hostess products.  These are made with real food (or at least approximations of real food) and are available any time you like, and I guarantee they're way better than the over-processed efforts of underpaid factory workers. 

Homemade Hostess Recipes Listing 

• Homemade Twinkies recipe from Instructables.  Twinkies are essentially pound cake with a cream filling.  This recipe uses hydrogenated vegetable oil for the filling, just like the Hostess brand; the result will be very authentic but not necessarily healthy.  If you'd like a more real-foods approach, substitute it with sweetened whipped cream.  
• Homemade Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Cookies.  These were my personal favorite Hostess product.  These use marshmallow cream and shortening in the filling.  I'm willing to bet you could sub out nearly anything in the filling; the real trick is making a soft, chewy oatmeal cookie. 
• Homemade Hostess Cupcake.  This is David's personal favorite Hostess product.  As an extra bonus, this recipe looks positively delicious and does not use Crisco, which I count as two major benefits.  
• Homemade Hostess Snowballs.  These give me fond memories of eating out of the vending machine at work on days I forgot to pack a lunch.  Chocolate cake filled with fluffy cream and rolled in coconut -- is there anything better?  (or, y'know, more packed with calories)
• Homemade Moon Pies. These were never as popular as the others, but they're a popular Southern treat (and this recipe looks positively amazing). 

Did I miss one of your favorites?  Let me know and I'll track down the recipe.  Better yet, when I get some free time, I'll hit the kitchen and experiment with some real-foods recipes evoking the heart and soul of these snack foods without partially hydrogenated anything.  Until then, happy snacking. 

Need Some Dinner Ideas?

I discovered a lovely new website today: Supercook.

The premise of the site is pretty simple:  You plug in the ingredients you have on hand, then the site trawls through recipes online and finds things that can be made with the food in your pantry.  Of course, you can do this yourself by plugging in ingredients to a site like Epicurious or Allrecipes, but Supercook is nice because it excludes recipes that you don't have the ingredients for.

You can write in all of your ingredients, but it's probably easier to choose a recipe type and click the ingredients you have from there instead since the way you input an ingredient will make a difference in how it will show up.  For example, "potatoes" will bring up different results than "potato."  Once you get over those simple glitches, though, this is a pretty awesome and powerful tool.

Of course, you can't count on Supercook to tell you every possible recipe that you can make, and you might get several versions of a single recipe.  Nevertheless, this should be a good source of inspiration for you the next time your kitchen goes bare.  Another useful feature:  After you input the ingredients in your kitchen, it will generate a basic grocery list of items that will help you make the maximum number of meals.  Definitely helpful.

Anyway, here's my projected meal plan for the week (with extra options for variety):


BREAKFAST:
-----------------------
French toast
Pancakes
Breakfast tacos
Cheese omelet
Cornmeal mush
Baked oatmeal
*English muffins
*Bagels
Grilled cheese & scrambled egg sandwich
Potatoes & eggs on tortilla
*Homemade granola

LUNCH:
------------------------
Grilled cheese sandwich
Mac & Cheese
Cornbread dogs
Pasta salad
Bean dip & chips
*Quesadillas
Parmesean pasta
Edamame and mushrooms

DINNER:
----------------------
Peking Style Chicken
Potstickers
*Asian dumpling soup
-- Fried rice
-- Korean squash
*Cheese potato casserole
*Potato cheese soup
-- Bread bowl
Pizza
Pasta la vista
-- Maple carrots
-- Stuffed zuchinni
-- Maple glazed green beans
*Lentil soup (shorbat addas)

(If you're wondering, the astericks designate meals that will take a little bit of extra time to prepare because they're predominately homemade or have several ingredients.)

How 'bout you guys -- what are y'all cooking this week?

Homemade Chocolate Pudding

My first use of the vanilla beans was quite conservative: Chocolate pudding.

(I was going to take a picture of it, but then I ate it all instead....oops)

The wonderful thing about vanilla is that it lifts up and enhances other flavors that come close to it, and vanilla makes chocolate taste positively divine.  That said, if you'd rather have straight-up vanilla pudding, you can use this same recipe and just omit the cocoa powder.

Recipe adapted from Alton Brown:

- 1 vanilla bean, split and with seeds scraped out
- 5 cups milk and 1 cup cream (you can use all milk, if you want)
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 3/4 cup cocoa powder
- 1/2 cup corn starch
- pinch of salt
- 2 tbsp butter

Pour five of your six cups of liquid into a pot and add the vanilla bean.  You can toss in the whole pod if you want, or you can just put in the scraped-out seeds.  Let this simmer until it starts to steam, then mix in your sugar and cocoa powder.  Mix your remaining cup of milk with your 1/2 cup of corn starch until the starch is completely dissolved, then pour that into the mixture on the stove.  Add your salt.

Let this cook over medium heat for about 20 minutes, stirring frequently.  It might start to get lumpy; that's OK, just whisk the lumps until they break up.  You'll know it's done when the pudding coats the back of a spoon.  Take it off the heat and mix in your butter until thoroughly melted.  If you're using vanilla extract instead of whole vanilla, add it at this point.  Strain the pudding off into a bowl or individual serving cups -- whatever you want -- and chill for a couple of hours to let it set up.  If you don't mind pudding skin, you can chill uncovered; otherwise, you'll want to cover it with plastic wrap touching the top of the pudding.  This makes about 6 cups of pudding.

---

There's a lot of things you can do with this pudding if you want.  You can make it low-fat by using 2% or skim milk, but it won't be quite as thick and rich-tasting.  You can play around with the flavor profile and add various other extracts, like mint or coffee or rum.  You can use flour instead of corn starch to thicken it, but the texture will be a bit more grainy. 

The finished product can be eaten as-is or incorporated into cake.  You could make eclairs and stuff them with the pudding.  You can freeze it to make some really excellent fudge pops.  You can tweak the type of milk you use to make it richer or more low-cal.  I suspect you could add more starch or some gelatin to make a pie.  You could probably make vegan pudding by using rice, almond or coconut milk, but I've never tried it.  You can also mix up all of the dry ingredients and keep it in a jar in the cabinet to make single-size servings of pudding whenever you want.

Anyway -- chocolate pudding = amazing. 

I put my scraped-out vanilla bean stalk into a jar of sugar in the pantry.  It should infuse it with flavor and make some really yummy vanilla sugar that can then be used to sweeten tea, sprinkle over cereal or baked goods, whatever.  I'll buy some liquor this week so I can make some vanilla extract, too. 

Soup is a Super Food

The dog days of summer are, slowly but surely giving way to the autumn, and I am so glad.  I've always hated summer -- but fall is one of the best times of the year.  There's bountiful harvests of in-season produce, the weather starts to cool down, my favorite holiday happens...and you can start eating soup without anyone thinking you're nuts.

Soup is one of my favorite foods.  It's cheap, and you can feed a crowd of people with a tiny amount of food.  It's also the first thing I ever learned how to cook and one of the easiest things for people who want to get their feet wet cooking but aren't sure where to start.  I have a lot of friends who don't do much cooking -- so here's a few tips for soup-making. 

Start by making your own stock.  

It's super easy.  By definition, stock requires bones; if you're making a "veggie stock," you're technically making a broth.  Either way, the great thing about stock is that it uses up all of the bits and pieces from other things you cook.  Save all of your vegetable ends, your bones from meat, your shrimp tails, etc. and make stock with them.  Keep it to one type of animal per meat stock -- pork stock, chicken stock, beef stock -- but you can get by with putting several types of fish into a seafood stock.

The way I make my stock is pretty simple.  Take a big pot and chop up some onions, carrots, garlic and celery.  If you have other vegetable "bits" floating around, put those in too! Toss that in the pot and start heating it.  Add your bones -- if they have a bit of meat on them, all the better -- and then cover it with lots of water.  Add some salt and herbs.  Cook this at a bare simmer for a few hours.  Even better, put the whole concoction into a crockpot and forget about it overnight.  Then just strain off the stock and put it in the fridge.

The fat will rise up to the top.  You can peel this off to use in cooking if that's your thing, or just toss it.  The rest of it can be frozen.  Freeze in an ice cube tray and them dump the cubes of stock out into a big plastic baggy.  That way you always have just the right amount of stock on hand. 

Tips for Making Soup

Once you have a nice, homemade stock to work with, you can make just about anything taste good.  You don't need stock in order to make soup, of course, but the stock does add some richness and depth of flavor.  Here are a few really simple soups to start off:

• Make chicken noodle by combining chicken stock with chunks of fresh chicken, fresh vegetables, and noodles.  You can make homemade noodles if you want, or substitute noodles for rice, barley or some other grain.  Carrots are essential.  For flavorings, I like to use salt, pepper, marjoram, thyme and rosemary.  Seasoning salt is good too.  
• Make a wholesome vegetarian minestrone by combining a big can of stewed tomatoes with veggie stock, beans (I like white beans like cannelinis, or chickpeas) and vegetables (I like corn and green beans in this a lot) and either some pasta (shells or macaroni is my favorite).  Finish it at the end with a splash of red wine vinegar to kick it up a notch.  
• Make a super simple chili by combining a can of crushed tomatoes, two small cans of tomato sauce, a cup or two of beans and chili powder, cumin, salt, pepper and garlic.  You can add the meat of your choice if you want.  Use the leftovers over pasta or rice. 
• Want a stupidly simple, shockingly delicious soup?  Boil some potatoes (the little white or red ones are best, but any will work) in fish or veggie stock.  Poach some fish (something fairly sturdy - I like perch for this) in the same stock after the potatoes are softened.  Add some salt to the broth if necessary.  Finish it off with an ample squeeze of lemon.  Trust me when I tell you that this is amazing and has saved my hide on nights when there was essentially nothing in my pantry that I could eat. 
• One of my favorite soups is to combine stock or water with crushed tomatoes and tomato sauce, fresh onions, bell peppers and jalapenos, chili powder, cumin, garlic, salt and pepper, corn and any other miscellaneous veggies I have on hand. Finish it off with a fresh squeeze of lime.  
• Make a super easy chowder by combining potatoes with stock and slow-simmer until the potatoes are softened and mashable.  Even better, upcycle leftover mashed potatoes.  Add broccoli or corn and cheese if you wish.  Finish off with some milk or cream at the end of the cooking process.  Season simply with salt and pepper, or put in just a smidge of mustard to bring out cheese.  You can boost the nutrition and lower calories by replacing some of the potatoes with cauliflower.  
• Around Halloween, I like to do a hearty pumpkin soup.  Sweat out some leeks in the pan, then combine pumpkin and stock.  Add salt, pepper and a bit of nutmeg.  Blend all of this, then add some currants or raisins at the end and garnish with toasted pumpkin seeds.  

I could go on and on.  Just suffice to say, it's pretty hard to screw up soup.  You can even toss everything into a slowcooker and neglect it for several hours and it'll still turn out delicious.  Here's a few tips for rescuing a soup that's suffering:

• Add some salt.  Do it in small quantities, so you don't get overwhelmed, but you'd be amazed at how much it fixes flavor.  You know you have the perfect amount of salt when the food tastes suddenly better without tasting salty.  
• Add a splash of vinegar or lemon/lime to brighten up flavor
• Add tomato to basically any brothy soup to make it taste good
• Add cheese to basically any creamy soup to make it taste good
• If you add too much salt, just dump in more of everything else and make a double or triple batch.  Freeze the excess.  
• You can cook pretty much any grain in soup.  Don't try to cook beans in soup, though, because they won't absorb liquid properly if there's any salt in the liquid.  

So there you go.  I hope you're inspired to make some soup once the weather starts cooling down.  

Homemade Chips and Guacamole Dip

What you're looking at is lunch from today:  turkey, havarti and avocado sandwich with homemade guacamole and homemade oven-fried chips. The bread is Earth Grains 12-grain, which is probably the best commercial sandwich bread I've found so far. 

I've always been quite proud of my guacamole, so I decided to be adventurous and try making some tortilla chips to go with it.  The tortillas are made by hand in the bakery of the HEB.  They still have a few more ingredients than I'd like, so I'll keep searching for good local tortillas (considering the neighborhood I live in, that shouldn't be too hard), but they're still better than the commercial ones. 


 Chips are so stupidly easy to make that I don't understand why anyone would ever feel it necessary to buy them.  These are crispy and fresh and you only have to eat a handful of them to feel satisfied -- it's not like regular chips where you pound through a bag in one sitting.

All you have to do is dip/brush/spray the chips with oil, sprinkle with salt and bake them at 375 for about five minutes.  If they still seem a bit soggy or under-done, pop them back in the oven.  It's as simple as that. You can use the same technique to make taco shells, rolled tacos, etc.  You could also deep-fry them if you wanted, but this is much less messy.

Your method of oil preparation will determine how much fat the chips have in them.  You can also spray them with cooking spray, or just put the oil in a regular spray nozzle bottle.  This allows you complete freedom over what type of oil you use, how much salt goes onto the chips, etc.  You definitely don't have that same flexibility when dealing with commercial chips!

And here's my famous Guacamole. I could eat this plain with a spoon, it's that good.  People get intimidated by guacamole -- I've even seen grocery store guacamole mix, which seems ridiculous -- but it's actually insanely simple.

Here's what you need:

• 1 large avocado 
• 1 tomato
• A bit of diced onion - I use about two tablespoons of finely diced onion
• A clove of garlic
• A tablespoon or so of freshly-chopped cilantro
• Fresh lime
• Salt & pepper to taste

Just combine all of the ingredients together in a bowl.  Mash up the avocados as you fold in the other ingredients to be sure your flavor gets distributed evenly.  Everything goes in by taste, so adjust it to the way you like it.  This makes just enough to serve two people comfortably.  You can scale up or down accordingly.

Other than eating with chips, guacamole is a great replacement for mayonnaise on sandwiches.  If you happen to have leftovers (blasphemous, I know) just cover it up with plastic wrap. Be sure the plastic wrap is touching the surface of the guacamole or else it oxidizes and turns brown.  It doesn't hurt it, but it does look pretty gross.  I've also heard you can freeze guacamole, but I haven't tried it myself so I can't make any guarantees there.

Anyway -- I hope this inspired you to experiment a little.