Sweet Corn and Squash Soup

Got lots of corn and squash? Have I got the soup for you! From Cooking Light:


This delicately flavored dish is a choice opener for a meal featuring seasonal vegetables. Chopped chives are a nice garnish if squash blossoms aren't available. Make this up to one day ahead; cover and refrigerate. Gently reheat before serving.

1 tablespoon butter
2 cups chopped onion (about 1 large)
4 cups fresh corn kernels (about 7 ears)
3 cups water
2 cups chopped yellow squash
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
6 fresh squash blossoms, thinly sliced (optional)

1. Melt butter in a Dutch oven over medium-low heat. Add onion to pan; cover and cook 10 minutes or until tender, stirring occasionally. Add corn and next 4 ingredients (through pepper); bring to a boil. Reduce heat, and simmer 15 minutes. Cool slightly. Place half of corn mixture in a blender. Remove center piece of blender lid (to allow steam to escape); secure blender lid on blender. Place a clean towel over opening in blender lid (to avoid splatters). Blend until smooth. Strain corn mixture through a sieve into a large bowl; discard solids. Repeat procedure with remaining corn mixture. Garnish with squash blossom slices, if desired.

Yield: 6 servings (serving size: about 3/4 cup soup)

RESULTS: I used my stick blender rather than the blender blender. I had a lot of "solids", but I also didn't feel like straining them all out, I kinda like a chewy soup, so I sort of did half and half. Maybe it's because all those solids were still in there, but it was surprisingly filling. It turned out really nice; delicate is definitely the word to describe the flavor. If you want to try this soup, I would recommend checking out the reviews at My Recipes. They had some good suggestions for rounding out the flavor. I really like the goat cheese idea.

Angel Biscuits

From Cooking Light:


1 package dry yeast (about 2 1/4 teaspoons)
1/2 cup warm water (100° to 110°)
5 cups all-purpose flour (about 22 1/2 ounces)
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
2 cups low-fat buttermilk
Cooking spray
1 tablespoon butter, melted

Dissolve the yeast in 1/2 cup warm water in a small bowl, and let stand for 5 minutes.
Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour and next 4 ingredients (through salt) in a large bowl. Cut in shortening with a pastry blender or 2 knives until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add yeast mixture and buttermilk to flour mixture; stir just until moist. Cover and chill 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 450°.
Turn the dough out onto a heavily floured surface; knead lightly 5 times. Roll dough to a 1/2-inch thickness; cut with a 2 1/2-inch biscuit cutter. Place the biscuits on a baking sheet coated with cooking spray. Brush the melted butter over the biscuit tops. Bake at 450° for 12 minutes or until golden.


RESULTS: Well, these didn't turn out like the picture, but they werew still good. I think I was having, in part, a similar problem as the fritters. The dough was really really moist, more like drop biscuits. It didn't really occur to me that it was too moist until I tried to "knead" the dough and got nowhere. The taste is really good, though, and I think as long as you add more flour if you need it, it's good. I put butter on it, and froze the rest for a rainy day.

Chocolate Fritters

1 cup all-purpose flour
Pinch salt
2 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1 lemon, zested
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus 2 cups extra-virgin olive oil, for frying (my cookbook says 4 cups)
2 tablespoons sweet white wine (my cookbook says dry white wine)
1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate, chopped medium fine
1/3 cup hazelnuts, toasted and coarsely chopped
1/4 cup apricot jam (cookbook says 1/2 cup)
1 egg, lightly beaten
Honey, for brushing the fritters

Place the flour on a clean work surface and add the salt, sugar, lemon zest, oil, and enough wine to make a firm but tender dough. Knead for 5 minutes, then wrap the dough in plastic and let it rest 30 minutes.
In the meantime, make the filling by combining the chocolate, nuts, and jam and mix with a spoon. Set aside, covered.
(Cookbook says to flour the work surface) Roll the dough out to 1/4-inch thickness and, using a 3-inch cookie cutter, cut out as many circles as possible. Place a dab of filling on each circle of dough, moisten the edges with a bit of beaten egg, and fold each round in half, pressing them shut with finger pressure or a fork.
In a tall-sided pot, heat the oil to 350 degrees F and fry the until they are deep golden brown. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Brush each fritter with honey and serve hot or cold.

RESULTS: Suz has never seen An Affair to Remember, so I made her come over last night to watch it, and we thought we'd try a recipe that we saw in Mario's cookbook that caught both our eyes. The picture looks gorgeous, almost like perfectly brown hushpuppies with chocolate inside them. Long story short, it was disastrous, and I'm not sure why. The dough was very damp, and I don't know if that'd because of the extreme humidity we've been having or what, but it was damp and greasy. When we put the filling in, the dough teared, and all the chocolate came out when we fried them. They didn't taste moist and gooey like the picture looks like they'd taste, they were oily and crumbly and awful. The filling was extremely tasty, though. Suz thought that maybe it was just a bad recipe, because we followed it really closely. I don't have a lot of frying, much less deep frying, experience, so I wanted to do it by the book, but it was just terrible. At first we thought we didn't have enough flour in it (because of the humidly), but we added some and the dough got really tough really quickly. Also, in the book he says it'll make 18 fritters, and we were rolling the dough as thin as we could without tearing it, much thinner actually than 1/4 inch, and we got 11. We tried making some with thicker dough, and it didn't tear so much, but we couldn't have gotten 18 out of it, and besides it still didn't fry up right. Maybe my oil was too hot? But it was on 350 on the nose.... I don't know...

Anyway, I did a search for the recipe online and I found this, which is exactly the same except for the parts that I noted. Nothing, I think, that would justify the extremely different results than what we got (I do think the filling had a little too much apricot in it, but it was still nice). Anyone have any ideas? I'm stumped. More so because a lady on Amazon says she makes them for her husband all the time, and the online recipe got 5 stars from another lady. I just don't get it!

I found this neat website called wordle.net. You enter in a block of text and it arranges it so the most commonly used words are bigger than less commonly used words, and then you can mess around with the font, etc. I don't know, it's indoor fun for a super hot day. Here's one I made from an article about Phoenix finding water on Mars. (I'm kind of geeking out about that, I think it's so cool!) If you click on it, it'll take you to the site and you can see a bigger image.

Red Cabbage Braised in Vinegar

I got this recipe from my new cookbook, Molto Italiano (thanks Jan!). It says it's supposed to be sweet and sour, but of course I didn't have all the ingredients so there wasn't so much.... well, you'll see.

1 medium head (about 2 pounds) red cabbage, tough outer leaves removed, cut into quarters, cored, and sliced into 1/2-inch wide strips
1/4 cup evoo
1 medium red onion, thinly sliced.
1 Tbls Caraway seeds
2 Tbls sugar
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
salt and pepper.

Heat a large heavy-bottomed pot over medium-high heat, add olive oil and heat until smoking. Add onion and caraway seeds and cook, stirring, until onion is soft (3-5 minutes). Add cabbage, sugar, adn vinegar, and stir well. Cover and cook until cabbage is quite tender, about 20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Serve warm or cold, with sandwiches.


RESULTS: I left out the onion. This recipe caught my eye because, although cabbage isn't something I normally pick up at the store, I did this week but when I got home I didn't know what to do with it. It turned out subtly sweet, subtly sour, but I bet the onion would add some heat and flavor. Beware overcooking it, or the sugar will burn to your pan. I speak from experience.

I sprinkled it with parsley from the garden. I had it with a grilled mozzarella sandwich with tomatoes (from the garden) and basil (also garden), and some other tomatoes that didn't make it onto the sandwich.

Green Cleaning

Back in March I mentioned that I was interested in trying out more natural, less toxic cleaning products. Mostly, this is motivated through love of a dog that loves to lick every surface she can find (I think she just likes the way things feel on her tongue), but I figured it couldn't be bad for the humans of the household, either. I found a website called www.realmama.org that posted an article about alternatives to commercial cleaners, mostly using borax, hot water and vinegar, so it has the added appeal of freeing up valuable storage space used by all the various cleaning products with specific purposes. Will let you know how it goes. I'm still looking for an alternative to cleaner for the kitchen floor, which is naturally a favorite of Harper's (aka, my sous chef).

Alright, it's time for a recap.

The week before last was my big week-long conference that I've been planning all year. I don't really want to talk about it. :) It went fine, but I'll be so glad when all the paperwork is over. I swear, red tape is the worst.

On to fun things that I've done. Friday I went to the Monroe County Fair, which was one of the smallest county fairs I've ever seen. They did, however, have funnel cake and elephant ears, the pros and cons of which had been the talk of the town all week amongst my friends. I've been looking forward to the funnel cake, and I got about two bites into it and was done. I don't know why they don't sell those things in bite-sized servings for the same price, they'd make a killing. Anyway, the elephant ears, which I don't think I've ever gotten because I always get funnel cake, tasted rather like warm, floppy cinnamon toast crunch.

We went to watch the demolition derby. So much fun. First, the crowd voted for favorite decorated car (mine was the Maroon Baboon car, which had a giant stuffed animal on the roof). Then, they went in heats, bashing each other up. The top three cars from each heat advanced to the final round. It was pretty cool, several engines caught on fire. Good stuff. The funniest thing was that Suz, one of the classiest dames I know, knows everything about demolition derbies. She's from a town in Idaho called Salmon, and there's only one big event all year and that's the derby. She's also quite the elephant ear connoisseur.

We left the derby early because the next morning, yesterday, we got up and went to Deam Wilderness for a hike out to the lake. Nine miles round trip, and I am beat. It was such a perfect summer day for a hike, though. The only regrettable thing is that I have never seen so many ticks in my life. I got five ticks off of me, four in my clothes and one already latched on to my leg. These were the big dog ticks, we don't have so many deer ticks out here so there wasn't a worry of Lyme Disease, but it's so gross! It took Chris and me three matches and some bourbon (we don't have rubbing alcohol) to get that sucker to let go of my leg. Moral of this story: wear a hat to go into the woods. Anyway, it was really fun. Poor Harper's not going to get any long walks for a while, though.