The Cleaner Plate Club

It’s not quite Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Night, a holiday I’ve talked about before. But that’s coming. In the meantime, here’s an ingenious way to make use of summer’s bounty: no-noodle lasagna.

You know how to make lasagna, right? No need for me to go into it?

The layer of red sauce…
followed by a layer of noodle…
followed by a layer of ricotta, perhaps mixed with an egg and some chard or spinach…
followed by a layer of mozzarella…
followed by a layer of red sauce…
followed by a layer of noodle…
…and so on and so forth until your kitchen looks like it has been the setting of a massacre?

You know this. You’ve done it. I’m not gonna’ tell you to make lasagna. I will simply tell you what I have long-considered the biggest pain-in-the-patookis about lasagna.

To my mind, the biggest pain-in-the-patookis about lasagna is not the massacre-setting. It is those danged noodles. Unless you are gonna’ let the lasagna sit overnight (something I never quite plan for, because I am not a planner, and which always makes me nervous, anyway, since I tend to mix an egg with the ricotta), you must first boil the noodles, and then lay them out in such a way that doesn’t make them stick together, and now there’s an extra pot to clean, and dang it, those noodles stuck together anyway…

And now. Now I have found a solution to that problem. And this solution also happens to be a solution to the too-much-zucchini problem of summer. And? If you happen to be one of those South Beach types? You will also find this to be a solution to the carbs-are-gonna’-kill-us problem. Continue reading ‘No-noodle lasagna…a celebration of zucchini’

“Today is blue day,” Merrie announced yesterday, as she clomped downstairs.

Indeed, the girl was blue. All blue. Bright blue T-shirt. Bright blue barrettes. Bright blue shorts. Blue scarf. And, the piece de resistance, electric blue cowgirl boots that we’d spray painted last October to complete her Supergirl costume. The only other color was a shock of red on her lips from some gaudily applied lip gloss. The effect was somewhere between smurf and rodeo clown.

Blue day started out fun — blueberry smoothie, blueberry pancakes. But by the evening, blue day had made me kind of…blue. Nothing big, just a series of unfortunate events, family style — a playdate gone awry, a beastly (still blue) six-year-old, a tantrum, a punishment, and an hour’s worth of screaming. I will never, ever stop hating you, Mommy!!! Neverrrrrrrrrrrr!! Charlotte, too, sobbing literally over spilled milk. A smelly dog with a herniated disc problem, also howling and sobbing. Runny noses. Too much noise. Blue mommy.

Very blue.

Fortunately, blue day was rescued, rescued rather quickly. It was rescued by a soup, a quick, simple, one-pot, wholly healthful soup. This soup starred, of all things, escarole.

Yes, escarole.

Escarole isn’t anything new; this leafy green has been around for 5,000 years or so. The Egyptians ate it. The Greeks. Ovid mentions the stuff, as does Pliny. It’s a staple in Italian cuisine. But the truth is, this vegetable is relatively new to me.

Like all leafy greens, escarole is a great source of iron, vitamin C, vitamin A, vitamin K, and minerals. Unlike other kale or collards, it doesn’t require too much cooking. It resembles a kind of wide-leaf, tough, homely variety of romaine lettuce - just heartier and a little more bitter.

This soup isn’t anything unique; you can find a gazillion variations in cookbooks and online. But I thought this version was so, so good. Good enough to turn a blue day into something better.
Continue reading ‘What to do with escarole: Most delicious escarole cannellini bean soup’

…in spite of the fact that Mama is a paranoid nut about the leaching, endocrine-disrupting, early-puberty-inducing, obesity-promoting, fertility-limiting power of the stuff:

That would be the Pyrex bowl I recently used to serve Charlotte yogurt. One of the many, many non-plastic items that has broken into a million pieces in my efforts to break our family’s plastic habits. Pyrex is supposedly the toughest, most shatter-proof non-plasticky stuff out there. Oy.

Well, there are always stainless steel dog bowls. I’m considering those next. Not really. Well, maybe.

When Pyrex shatters,
Shards fly remarkably far.
Days later: feet bleed.

In Maine right now with Blair. Escaping small people. First time we’ve done this in years. And years.

And it’s good.

I whipped up a tasty, kid-friendly egg drop soup last night. There’s a recipe below, if you can hang in that long.

The short version of how this recipe came to be is quite simple: Merrie loves egg drop soup. She adores the stuff. At least three times a week, she begs to go to the local Chinese-Sushi-Korean dive just so that she can slurp up a bowl. This egg drop soup frightens me, however. It is yellow — bright, bright yellow. It is a shade of yellow that shouldn’t be allowed to exist. It is highlighter yellow. Neon yellow. I’m certain it’s filled with food coloring that’s going to knock five points off of her IQ each and every time she eats it.

Seriously. Their soup is so bright it’s almost…radioactive.

Which brings me to the second part of the story behind the soup. As many of you know, I’ve had a couple of bad weeks. Abdominal stuff. Pain. Bloating. Nausea. More recently, I’ve been feeling better. Not yet 100%, but so, so much better. When I was at my worst, my physician had ordered a bunch of tests (my endoscope went fine, thank you, and I have a very pretty stomach interior. I’d be happy to post the photos if anyone wants to see). One of the tests — a scan to see if I have a weak gallbladder — was scheduled for yesterday morning. I didn’t know much about the test beside the fact that I couldn’t eat beforehand.

Blair took the day off to be with me. We had an hour and a half between dropping the kids off and my appointment, so we went for a hike together. It was a beautiful, blustery spring morning, apple blossoms in bloom, gray clouds rolling overhead. Even with the test looming, we had fun. Lots of fun. After a decade of marriage, Blair still makes me laugh, and we still have plenty to talk about.

“We should do this more often,” I said. “We should do this on days when I don’t have to go take a stinkin’ test. We should do this, just the two of us, for no reason, and then go out to breakfast.”

Then, a short time later, we were sitting in a field of grass, looking at an expansive mountain view. Blair told me it was time to head over to the hospital. I sighed, picturing myself in a hospital johnny, lying on a table with a needle in my arm, some high-tech Siemens equipment taking pictures of my innards.

“Okay, but I like this part better,” I said. Then I sighed again. “I really wish we could go out to breakfast.”

Fast-forward 30 minutes. I’m seated in a hospital waiting room with Blair, marveling that there is a 2-year-old Time magazine is still on display (Al Gore: will he run for president in ‘08?). A friendly radiology tech in floral scrubs, cropped hair, us into a windowless, fluorescent-lit room. At the center of this room is an imposing machine. The machine looks like it could eat me. As she sets up the equipment, she asks casually, “and you won’t be around young kids today, will you?”

And I answer, “Yes, I will. I’ve got two.”

She stops what she’s doing, looks me in the eye. “Okay, well, I’m not going to say that you can’t be around them, but you don’t want to hold them in your lap.”

I stare at her. Not hold my kids in my lap? Why would —? Huh?

“You’ll be radioactive,” she says.

I try to make sense of her words. Surely I mis-heard. “I’ll be — what?”

“Radioactive. In this test, we inject you with a radioactive fluid. It will be in your system for 12 hours, during which time you will be radioactive. Please don’t hold your children.”

Blair told me later that at this moment, he thought, “Okay, THIS is not going to go well…” And he was right. Because this, friends, is where I start to panic. I gape at the radiology tech. I am picturing the scene in the opening credits of the Simpsons, the part where Homer gets the radioactive rod of plutonium stuck in his overalls. And I imagine that rod inside of me, lighting up my insides, house, my kids. Gee, kids, doesn’t Mommy have a special glow tonight?

And then the words come. I want to say something logical like, but I’m getting better! Not worse! Shouldn’t making me radioactive be a test of last resort? But I’m feeling trapped, and I can’t stop thinking about that plutonium rod — doesn’t Mommy look luminous tonight? — and panicked tears have started welling up in my eyes. I simply whisper, hoarsely, “This feels wrong.”

The tech eyes me carefully, then goes in search of a radiologist who can counsel me through this panic attack. Suddenly, I really notice all the “Caution: Radioactive” signs that are plastered around the room. But my kids! They’re too little to carry Geiger counters! For Pete’s sake, I try to keep them away from artificial food colorings! And if I’m too radioactive for them, how should I feel about this stuff being inside of me?

The radiologist arrives. Unfortunately for him, it is one of the two radiologists that I know personally — he owns a horse farm on our road, and he trot-trots past our house several times a week. We often chat. He and his wife bought a baby gift for Charlotte when she was born. They let the kids pet his horses. He thinks of me, no doubt, as a waving, smiling neighbor, not a crazy lady who panics in a medical imaging room.

He strides into the room, prepared to patiently counsel an irrational stranger. Then he notices it’s me, his neighbor, and that I’m crying. He is so caught off guard that he literally must turn on his heels, walk out of the room, regain his composure, and come in again.

We talk. “It’s a low risk,” he says. “But it’s not no-risk. Like flying in an airplane.”

I nod and look down at the floor. Gee, kids, isn’t Mommy just da’ bomb?

He thinks a minute. “But listen, if you’re feeling better lately, not worse, there’s really no need to take it today.”

I stared helplessly at him. He is saying the right thing, but I can’t get past the trapped feeling.

Gather ’round, kids! Mommy’s going to lead us in a round of “this little light of mine, I’m gonna’ let it shine…”

“Really,” he says. “Go home. If your symptoms get worse, you can come back. If they keep getting better, then you won’t need to worry about the test.”

The floral-scrubbed radiology tech smiles gently. “It’s okay to go,” she says. She wants to scream it, no doubt: Just go, Nutso! Stop wasting my time! Go! But she is too kind to scream. She’s in a healing profession. She’s a healer. A healer who was prepared to shoot gamma rays into my body. A healer who wields a terrifying medical device. But a healer nonetheless. “You won’t be the first to have decided not to do the test.”

Then I realize: they are handing me a get-out-of-jail-free card. I take it. I go. We thank them, walk out of the room, out of the hospital. We get some breakfast. Just like I wanted.

So then later, after picking up the girls, I’m able to hold them. I’m able to make egg drop soup with them — the first meal I’ve made with them for a while. After we eat, I help brush their teeth, read to them, and lie with them in their beds. On this night, these things feel better, more meaningful, than they do most night. While I do them, I do not worry about whether I should really be at Yucca Mountain (and with that comment I must confess that some Googling revealed that any risk to the kids was probably low, no worse than flying. But still. I never liked flying.)

And the soup? Merrie loved it. Charlotte loved it. Blair thought it was like the Chinese-Sushi-Koren restaurant’s egg drop soup, but “way-better.” It didn’t look radioactive. And you know what? Neither did I.

Here’s my super-easy, super-fast recipe for yummy non-radioactive egg drop soup:

Ingredients:
4 cups chicken broth, with half-cup reserved
2 scallions, chopped, white and green parts separated
1/8 tsp dried ginger
1/8 tsp white pepper
1/2 tsp sherry
1/2 tsp soy sauce
1/4 salt, or more to taste
Few drops of sesame oil
1.5 TBSP cornstarch
2 eggs, beaten

Directions:
Pour 3.5 of the cups of broth into a pan, reserving a half-cup for later. Add the white parts of scallions, the ginger, white pepper, sherry, and soy sauce. Bring to boil and let cook for 5 minutes. Add 2-3 drops sesame oil (a little goes a long way).

Mix cornstarch with remaining broth, and add to pan. Turn heat to low. Beat eggs, then add to broth while stirring rapidly in a clockwise motion. Stir for one minute, until the eggs have cooked and look like shreds.

Sprinkle with the scallion greens. Serve hot.

Note: if you’re not worried about a wee one’s palate, you can slightly increase the quantities of spice. But I preferred to ease into the spices, lest Merrie be turned off and then spend the rest of her life believing that the only good egg drop soup is neon in color.

Big thumbs up from the family on this one. As for me, I’m just glad to be back in the kitchen again.

Okay, omnivores. Here’s a great twist on an American staple, and a fantastic, foolproof dinnertime option: Expat Chef’s brilliant Meatloaf Florentine, which she posted last fall in honor of National Meatloaf Day. It’s awesome. And it’s easy. And it’s a flexible recipe.

But I don’t want to tell you about the meatloaf yet. First, please indulge me briefly while I tell you about the meat I used, and why I used what I did.

I don’t buy conventional beef anymore. I just can’t do it. Last year, thirty-three million pounds of beef were recalled during 20 different recalls. This year, we witnessed downer cows being forklifted so they could be processed for our food supply, after which the USDA recalled 143 million pounds of beef. All of which might make a person feel safer (I mean, the bad meat is recalled, right?), except that the majority of recalled meat is never recovered and likely eaten. And the downer cow scandal? The processing facility was picked at random by undercover investigators (from the Humane Society, mind you. Not from anyone who’s actually paid to be investigating this stuff). Just doesn’t make me feel reassured.

It’s tough to say ‘no’ to conventional beef, though, for one main reason: the pasture-raised stuff is much more expensive. Like most things, you do get what you pay for — grass-fed beef also has far less overall fat, less saturated fat, more of the good fats like omega-3s and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), and lots more vitamin A, vitamin E, and beta-carotene. The ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s is closer to 1:1, whereas in conventional beef, it’s as much as 20:1— an imbalance that is increasingly linked with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and depression, among other nasty things.

Still, I really can’t swing $12.99 per pound, particularly when I’m working with a recipe that calls for 3 lbs of meat. Thirty-nine dollars worth of meatloaf is just out of the question in our house.

So what to do? I did what so many people have already done on their journey toward Real Food: I went direct to the farmer. At nearby Cricket Creek Farm, pastured ground beef, from a facility that is exceedingly clean and lovely, and from cows that are some of the healthiest I’ve ever seen, goes for $4/lb. More expensive than grocery store? Yes. But in a more affordable range, particularly when the meal is stretched with veggies and lasts many, many days? You betcha’.

Here’s a nice photo of the farm, taken last summer (it’s not nearly so green in New England this time of year):

Besides, the experience of buying the meat was about as heart-warming as it gets. The kids got to pet friendly barnyard cats. They ate some fresh-baked cookies that sell alongside the meats and cheeses. They frolicked outdoors. Charlotte found herself enamored by the pigs:

Whereas Merrie discovered she was something of a chicken whisperer:

It was one of those gorgeous New England spring days, and it was an absolutely lovely way to pass the afternoon. The entire time, I just kept thinking how grateful I was to have a farm like this nearby, and a part of our lives.

Anyhow, the meatloaf. Yes, it’s great, and I like that Expat allows you to “stretch” your meat by sneaking in greens. My version was a variation of what’s on Expat’s site. To keep costs down, I used a can of tomato paste instead of ketchup (her suggestion).

But basically, I took all of these ingredients:

(that would be: 1 medium onion, finely diced; 1 large clove garlic, minced; 1 can tomato paste; 1.5 cups of fresh greens (spinach and chard, mixed), chopped; 1/2 cup of herbs (parsley, mostly, with a little fresh thyme and some dried basil); 2 eggs; 1 cup + 1 TBSP bread crumbs; a half-cup of grated parmesan; 1 tsp kosher sea salt; some black pepper; and a few sprinkles of red pepper flakes)

Then I sauteed the onion and garlic in olive oil first, then I combined it all — everything, all at once — with 3 lbs of grass-fed meat. Yes, with my hands. Which aren’t actually claws, despite how it may appear:

Then I stuck it in two loaf pans in a 350-degree oven for an hour, until my meat thermometer said that the meatloaf had reached 180-degrees:

And guys? It’s awesome. I mean, it’s a really nice meatloaf. Everyone ate it, and Blair kept saying, “what is it about this that’s so good? What’s the secret ingredient?” And I didn’t know the answer — maybe it’s the quality meat, maybe it’s Expat’s great touch, maybe something about the lovely afternoon we’d spent got absorbed right into those ingredients.

The recipe makes two loaves — it would have been plenty for a good-size dinner party; as is, we ate one over two different nights, plus a lunch. Then the rest of it we’ll be adding to other dishes, like pasta sauce, soup, and homemade pizza. I’m guessing that in the end, we’ll have gotten 4 family meals out of it, plus several lunches — not bad for $12 worth of meat.

When we first sat down at the table, Merrie turned her nose up at the meatloaf. “I don’t think I like this,” she said, grumpily, as soon as she saw it.

I ignored that comment, and then about 30 seconds later, I said “Hey, Merrie, this is made with the meat you helped me buy at Cricket Creek.”

Her eyes got bright for a moment, and she asked, “Mom, can we go back there again tomorrow?”

“Soon,” I promised.

Then I tried not to smile when I saw her lift her fork and start to eat.

Over the weekend, I took Merrie down to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. Yes, I know that Rockwell is the scourge of the art world. I know he is dismissed as saccharine, unchallenging, simplified, utterly corny. And I’ll admit that for decades, I myself have ever-so-slightly rolled my eyes every time I see a hokey Rockwell print hanging on a doctor’s wall, or adorning the hallway of some sentimental grandma. Something about him made my teeth hurt.

Still, I knew Merrie would enjoy his pictures, the way they tell a whole story in a single image. I knew she’d enjoy his images of happy children, and the safe, simple world in which they appear to live. So we packed ourselves into the car, armed with coffee (for mom) and a muffin (for daughter), and headed south.

As expected, Merrie dug the paintings. But here’s what surprised me: I was really moved by the visit.

It’s true: Rockwell’s world is relentlessly sweet. It’s a world of white picket fences and big-hearted grannies. It’s a world of backyard baseball games, humble prayer, and drug store soda fountains. The freckled, apple-cheeked kids are always smiling. Adults are all hard-working, earnest. In Rockwell’s world, the worst trouble a child can get into is to ignore a “No Swimming” sign only to be chased, naked, from the pond. In Rockwell’s world, every runaway child will be discovered by a gentle police officer, then taken out for ice cream. It’s Pleasantville, plain and simple.

Insipid? I’d always thought so. But while I was there, I began thinking about the historic context in which he painted — the Great Depression. The rise of Hitler, World War II. I tried to imagine what it would be like to learn for the first time about the horrors of the Holocaust.

I tried explaining some of these events to Merrie. I tried explaining that the world can be dark and depraved, and Rockwell’s freckled faces — even his goofy hobos and heroic returning soldiers — were a kind of antidote to this, a call to Americans to cling to our own goodness even as we lost our own innocence.

It is a difficult thing, explaining Hitler to a 6-year-old. It is equally hard to look at Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings, the ones inspired by FDR’s 1941 speech to Congress, and to try to explain that they are just as relevant today as they were in 1943. That even today, people are still hungry, they are still oppressed, they are still fearful, and they can’t always worship as they wish.

I’m frankly embarrassed to admit it. But I was moved.

The next evening, I baked oatmeal chocolate chip cookies — I typically make up a batch of cookies, then freeze them and take out a couple at a time for Merrie’s lunches. I’d been reading about natural sweeteners, and so I tried using sucanat — which is sort of like a grainy brown sugar that has more nutrients than most refined stuff — which I had bought in bulk, alongside my organic rolled oats, which I’d also purchased in bulk. The girls were tucked in their beds, the kitchen smelled fabulous, and I was feeling frugal and wholesome, filling up plates with fresh-baked goodness.

And that’s when it hit me — I was doing a Norman Rockwell.

Not just the cookies, either. I mean this whole thing, this whole return-to-the-table, go natural, make-it-pure, buy-from-a-farmer thing. It’s very, very Rockwell-esque. And not only because it looks picturesque to go to a farmer’s market, or to serve a fresh-from-the-oven family dinner. I mean because it requires turning toward goodness, toward something wholesome, in a world that is still, and may always be, dark and depraved.

Sometimes I wonder about what I’m doing here, on this blog, talking about food when there are so many important things to talk about. It’s not like I don’t know that there’s a war on. It’s not like I’m unaware that close to a thousand U.S. soldiers have been killed since I started this blog, or that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, or that that global warming is increasing the virulence of existing diseases and may very likely release some terrifying new diseases, or that today alone close to 22,000 children will die from a preventable cause.

I know all of these things, and you do, too. These things are always looming, always hovering in the shadows. They are there as I write funny stories about getting my kids to eat vegetables, and they are there as we talk about sippy cups and meat recalls and brussels sprouts.

It’s true that I deeply believe that changing how we eat is one tangible thing we can do to change some of the world’s horrors — check out the UN report if you want to learn more about that. We eat over, and over, and over again. We do it many times, every day — it is one of the only things we do with such frequency — and if we can make some of our eating choices with an eye toward how those choices impact the world around us, I do genuinely believe that we can improve that world.

Still, there is something else at work, too. For me, at least, food gives me something I can retreat into, some kind of escape from the world’s many nightmares. Food — real food — is nourishing, food is beautiful, food is grounding, food brings people together. And when I connect my food to the farm where it was grown, it is even more of these things.

I suspect I’m not alone here, that the eat-local movement, the anti-fast food movement reflects some kind of national zeitgeist that is in some way related to the fear and anxiety that exists elsewhere.

Take farmer’s markets, for example. Since 1994, farmers’ markets have increased by 150%; since 2000 alone, they’ve nearly doubled. Go to a farmer’s market, and you’ll wind up chatting with neighbors. Then you’ll take your produce home, and you’ll put on an apron, and you’ll chop and peel and then make a meal that reminds you of one that you once had at grandma’s. And it feels good. Not just right, but good, the way Norman Rockwell’s families appear invariably, undeniably, good.

Invite people over to dinner, and you’ll wind up around a table laughing. Stop by a U-Pick farm for Berries, and your kids’ faces will soon be smeared with berry juice. All of it, so Norman Rockwell.

High-art types be damned. It turns out that Norman and I have more in common than I ever imagined.

If you want to bring a little more Rockwell into your world, but you aren’t quite ready to hang a print on your wall, I offer you my recipe for Norman Rockwell-esque sucanat-based oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. They’re not just tasty. They’re good.

Ingredients:
Half pound (2 sticks) butter, softened
1 cup sucanat (buy it in bulk or it’s too expensive)
Half-cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 and a half cups unbleached flour
3 cups rolled oats (buy in bulk for best price, least packaging)
1 teaspoon baking soda
Half-teaspoon salt
Half a pound chocolate chips (again…go bulk!)

Directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix softened butter, sucanat, and sugar together. Add vanilla and eggs. In separate bowl, combine flour, oats, baking soda, and salt - mix these well. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the butter-egg mix. Blend in chocolate chips. Drop in small spoonfuls onto your baking pan, then Bake in oven for about 9-10 minutes. Note that because you’re using succanat, it’s hard to tell when the cookies are “browned.” You want to remove them when they’re formed, but still soft.

I know, I’m all like “Blah blah blahbity blah blah Monsanto blah blah blahbity Additives blahbity blahbity blah blah More vegetables blahbity blah blah My house is a mess blah blah blah Cook more blah.”

But as long as I’m on a roll….

Over in Britain, they’re phasing out a bunch of food additives that are damaging childrens brains. Apparently the damage to children’s brains caused by these additives (about 5.5 IQ points) is as bad as the damage caused by lead in gasoline before they phased it out. They’re thinking that this move will cut the number of hyperactive children by a third.

Over there, the suspect additives are food colors: tartrazine (E102); quinoline yellow (E104); sunset yellow (E110); carmoisine (E122); ponceau 4R (E124); and allura red (E129).

Don’t recognize them? Don’t feel reassured. Three of the banned additives are approved and widely used in the U.S. — their more familiar names to us Yanks include: FD&C Yellow 5; Yellow 6; and Red #40. Now you recognize ‘em, right?  Sigh.

Just another reminder to blah blah blahbity buy foods that are as whole as possible blah blah blah blah stay away from foods with ingredients that you don’t recognize blahbity blah blah farmers’ markets blah blah nutrition blah blah blah.

Many thanks to Jack from Fork and Bottle for the link.

Be honest. You came here expecting bad news. Something stomach-turning, probably. Am I right?

Tonight, there shall be no bad news. No food woes, no grocery store jitters. Nope. Tonight, the Cleaner Plate Club is all about comfort.

It’s been cold today, and snowing. Not a big snowstorm — something less dramatic and yet more relentless. Icky roads from morning until nightfall. Wiper blades that kept gathering ice and smearing slush across my winshield. By this point in February, frankly, I’m a little worn down from the cold, from the grey skies. It’s time for something cozy. Something warm.

So put a pot on the stove, light the kindling in your fireplace, shut the doors against the elements, and let’s settle in for the ultimate in a comfort food dinner: cheddar broccoli soup. Shall we?

This recipe was inspired by one of the Middle Earth recipes I found when I decided to become a hobbit — I took a stab at my own version of the cheddar stew mentioned over at the Lord of the Rings fan site.

A confession: I’ve always been a little afraid of cheddar-type soups. It always just seemed so milky, so…artery-hardening, somehow. That’s why I was delighted, absolutely delighted, to discover that you can make a cheddar soup — heck, maybe all cheddar soup is this way — that is almost entirely comprised of vegetables. Mostly vegetables! And yet it tastes just like cheddar cheese!

It does feel like there’s a little Elvin magic at work somehow. Plus it’s easy! And, friends, it is just the perfect thing for a cold, snowy February day.

And? Kids love it.

Ingredients:
Update: see Anna’s notes about making it more friendly for diabetics and low-carb types, in the comments section! Thanks, Anna!
4 small carrots
2 small-ish potatoes
1 large leek
1 stalk celery
1/2 teaspoon thyme
pinch of sage
1 clove garlic, chopped
4 cups of veggie broth
1-2 cups water
1 cup milk
big hunk o’ cheddar (about a quarter pound)
florets of 1 head broccoli, steamed

Okay, chop your leeks, potatoes, carrots, and celery:

Melt some butter in a pot. Add garlic and stir. Add your chopped veggies, thyme, and sage. Sautee them for about 3-4 minutes on medium heat. Then vegetable broth (for those of you using the Imagine boxes, it’s 1 large box). Add a cup of water if you want very thick soup, or 2 cups if you like your soup to be a little thinner. Let simmer away:

I’ll just point out: Tain’t nothin’ in that pot that’s not a vegetable! Not yet, anyway. Feel virtuous. Once the veggies are very soft (15 minutes if you sliced the veggies thin, longer if the pieces were larger), add a cup of milk. Then you need to run the whole thing through a blender. I used my hand-held “immersion blender”, the kind that you dip right into the pot. It might not be as effective as blending in an actual blender, but it works fine and oh-so-dramatically cuts down on the mess. (don’t have one? lots of options, many of them inexpensive. We have a cheapo, a Sunbeam, and it’s served us well for years).

Anyhow, then it starts looking more like this:

At about this point, you’ll want to have some broccoli florets steaming away. Add cheese. I started grating the cheese, then I realized “Hey, this is a waste of my time, because it’s all gonna’ melt anyway.” So then I took the lazy cook’s shortcut, and just started breaking it into little pieces. The total quantity filled a 1-cup measuring cup to the top, half of it grated, half broken. It looked like this:

Stir it in until melted, remove pot from heat, and dump the now-steamed broccoli in:

Add salt and pepper to taste. I didn’t add much, because the soup tasted pretty darned good without. In the end, it looked like this:

Actually, it looked much better than that, particularly with a big hunk of crusty bread. But my camera was running low on batteries, and that’s the only photo I was able to snap before the camera shut angrily on me, leaving me with inexplicable feelings of inadequacy and shame. Electronics can do that to me.

My kids loved this soup. And so did Blair. And you know what? I did too, and it helped me put years of cheddar-soup-skepticism behind me. I don’t mean to go all Jessica Seinfeld on you — I’m not a fan of the stealth-vegetable tactic — but it was nice knowing that this soup was far more veggie-rich than it appeared.

It was filling, cheap, and pretty darned easy. And it was comfy-cozy. The perfect thing to fend off midwinter’s chill.

Another kid-friendly vegetable-based option. This one I made up myself, after looking up all kinds of cauliflower-gratin type recipes and deeming them unworthy. They were not unworthy based on taste, mind you, but rather because they all had one too many dishes to be cleaned up afterwards.

We’ve established that I’m kind of a lazy cook, right? And I’m pretty sure we’ve also established that I am a lazy cleaner. It’s no joke; some days, I’m only a few steps away from becoming the kind of person who eats soup straight from the can while wearing an old dirty bathrobe. My biggest problem with all of the cauliflower-gratin recipes? They required steaming the cauliflower in a separate pot. Which makes an additional pan to clean. One pan too many, in my opinion.

So you care to point out that I could have cleaned the extra pot, probably many extra pots, in the amount of time it took to search fruitlessly for a one-dish recipe? Oh, hush up, you. It’s about inertia. You go-getter types wouldn’t understand.

Anyhow, this one is pretty simple, if inexact. It’s a good side dish, even without the separately-steamed cauliflower, and I also got two days of kindergarten lunch-box fodder out of the leftovers (it was perfect scooped over a baked potato).

I’m going to pause here to talk about dairy in general, because on the surface, this is a pretty dairy-intensive recipe. And some of you out there don’t dig dairy, because it makes you bloated and uncomfortable. I hear you, because the same thing happens to me.

We’re not alone in that. Marion Nestle says that 75% of the world’s population is lactose-intolerant, which means that we lack a stomach enzyme that can break down the lactose of milk. So the lactose remains intact, until it gets to our guts, whereupon the lactose-lovin’ bacteria that all of us harbor in our intestines have a field day gobbling up the stuff. And then? Those bacteria release gas and small molecules that attract water to our guts. Hence our bloating and, ahem, airiness. But, see, it’s not our gas. It’s the bacteria’s gas. They’re the ones who should be embarassed.

But anyway, I tell you all of this, simply to assure you dairy-fearers that you can make this recipe more tolerable-for-the-lactose-intolerant by doing what I did: using rice milk and a hard cheese. Why is a hard cheese better? Because the process of making cheese basically gobbles up all the lactose. Long diversion, I know, especially for those among you who can consume dairy with impunity and who don’t actually want to hear about the gas in other people’s guts. Anyhow.

Ingredients:

1 medium leek, chopped
Half a bunch of kale, washed, stemed and chopped into small pieces–So small that you hope your children won’t bother to complain about the green stuff.
Pat o’ butter
Florets from 1 small head cauliflower
About a cup of milk (rice milk, in my case)
1 cup cheese (cheddar in my case)
2 tablespoons flour, dissolved into a bit of milk
Few sprinkles bread crumbs
A little salt and pepper

Directions: Sautee chopped kale and leek in butter, until soft, about 5 minutes:

Chop and add cauliflower to pan. Stir, then add milk and let bubble away for a few moments, until cauliflower is a little soft:

Then add cheese, and mix through. In a separate dish, mix flour with a touch of milk. Add the flour-milk mix, and let simmer just until the milk starts to thicken. Pour the whole thing in an oven-safe pan (unless you are one of those lucky-duckies who isn’t too lazy to get out there and buy yourself an oven-safe sautee pan. As mentioned, I am not one of those, which is why I still, after all this time, do not own a single pan that can do double-duty. And because of that, I now I have an extra dish to clean. Doh! It catches up with you in the end, laziness. Yes it does. Let this be a lesson to you.):

Cover with a few sprinkles of cheese, and a few shakes of bread crumbs. Bake until browned on top:

So there it is. And it’s pretty tasty. With one less dish to clean. Just think of all the sitting-around-in-our-bathrobes that we can do with that extra time!

Wish me a happy anniversary. I’ve been blogging for a year now. A year! And I haven’t been chased out of the blogosphere by an angry, pitchfork-wielding cyber-mob! Not yet, anyway!

How shall we mark the occasion, friends? How about we celebrate by returning to the original purpose of this blog: a healthy, fast recipe that my kids will actually eat?

Let’s start with this one, which I call Merrie’s Chard Feta Pasta, With or Without Meatballs. Recently, I was experimenting with swiss chard, which I happen to think is about the prettiest vegetable ever, even if it does have a really ugly Latin name: Beta vulgaris. Who thought of that one?

Ruby red stems, vibrant green leaves….i’s a spinach-meets-beet kind of vegetable, which the World’s Healthiest Foods calls a “vegetable valedictorian.” Says they:

If vegetables got grades for traditional nutrients alone, Swiss chard would be one of the vegetable valedictorians. The vitamin and mineral profile of this leafy green vegetable contains enough “excellents” to ensure its place at the head of the vegetable Dean’s List. Our rating system awards Swiss chard with excellent marks for its concentrations of vitamin K, vitamin A, vitamin C, magnesium, manganese, potassium, iron, vitamin E, and dietary fiber. Swiss chard also emerges as a very good or good source of copper, calcium, vitamin B2, vitamin B6, protein, phosphorous, vitamin B1, zinc, folate, biotin, niacin and pantothenic acid.

At the time, I’d been trying to make a chard pizza on a baguette, which didn’t turn out exactly as planned. It was edible, but not great. Except that Merrie, my six-year-old, couldn’t get enough. She just kept scraping it off of the bread, eating it, and asking for more.

In the immortal words of Jiminy Cricket: I’m no fool, no sirree. My kid asking for seconds, then thirds, of one of the most healthful veggies out there? We’re going with it. In this case, we’re putting it into pasta.

As far as I can tell, there are two key things you’ve got to do with swiss chard: wash it effectively, and separate the stems and leaves. Washing it correctly is particularly important when you’re getting it fresh from the farm - like spinach, it can get a little gritty. The best strategy I’ve found is just to let it soak in a big thing water for a while, swishing it occasionally. Any grit falls right off:

Separating the stems is important, because the stems cook more slowly than the leaves. Note, I cooked the leaves a touch too long - you can remove them from heat before they’re completely wilted. In a perfect world, I would recreate this recipe and take new photos, but…perfectionism? Not for me.

Here’s what you do:

Ingredients:
1 bunch of chard
3 cloves garlic
Olive oil
Half teaspoon dried basil (fresh would be better, but it’s mid-winter here, and — drats! — I haven’t yet planted my aerogarden)
1 Tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 small can garbanzo beans
A few ounces crumbled feta
Salt and pepper to taste.
Pasta (I used about three-quarters of a spaghetti packet)

Directions: Start on pasta. Chop garlic, and sautee in olive oil until soft (not brown). Add chard stems and sautee for about 4-5 minutes. Add balsamic vinegar, basil, and chard leaves. Sautee another 3 minutes or so.

Oh, heck, add a splash of wine, because, let’s face it: you’re drinking as you cook (relax, the alcohol gets cooked out).

Add garbanzos, and heat through:

Remove from heat. Crumble feta over chard. Add salt, pepper, and mix. Drain pasta, add chard, and crumble just a touch more feta so it looks pretty:

Serve to your child. Note it is served here with two meatballs, only because she really wanted them. The recipe is plenty hearty by itself. No meat required.

Watch it disappear. Mostly.

Merrie declared it delicious, and Blair (who ate it happily without meat, even though he tends to be suspicious of all meat-free meals…AND who doesn’t particularly care for pasta) noted without prompting, “hey, this is really good.”

The baby? Well, she put the meatball in her ear:

And threw the spaghetti at the dog:

But she does that sort of thing all her meals, so I don’t consider her a credible judge of taste. The rest of us considered it a fine meal to celebrate a year of cooking and blogging.