Root Cellar Soup
(with extra sharp cheddar)

As so many of are learning to eat seasonally, use our own home canned goods, and even storing winter vegetables in a root cellar, it's important to know how the heck to make use of what we have on hand. If you're me what you have on hand right now is: old potatoes, super hairy carrots, slimy topped celeriac, and some gorgeous onions.

While potato leek soup is a perennial favorite of mine, sometimes you need to figure out a way to add more vitamins to your winter food and use up carrots which are no longer in their prime due to the less than ideal root cellar conditions provided by a plastic bin in your garage. Normally I never peel my carrots, but anyone would have agreed with me that it has become necessary.

I have no celery besides the few packages of frozen celery I put aside for emergencies so I'm using celery root which is in season and gives a delicate wonderful celery flavor. Before moving to Oregon I had only tried to use celeriac once and it did not go well because apparently if you have year round access to avocados and lemons you don't need to know how to grow celery root well. It was harder to find there while here it seems that all market farmers have it (and lots of it) in winter.

The main point though is to use what you have in your root cellar, which at this time of year, is most likely going to be roots. If you have some turnips, use one! If you have rutabagas, use one! The main thing to keep in mind is that the potatoes should still be present in a greater proportion to the other roots for the sake of the consistency and flavor.

Root Cellar Soup

Ingredients:

4 large potatoes, sliced thin in small pieces
4 medium carrots, peeled (if necessary) and sliced in thin rounds
1 celeriac, sliced thin in small pieces
1 onion, diced
2 tbsp olive oil (or butter if preferred)
2 tsp salt
1 tsp dried thyme
fresh ground pepper to taste

In a soup pot warm up the oil on medium/high heat and add the onions and saute until starting to soften. Add the rest of the vegetables and saute until some of the vegetables begin to slightly brown on the pan. You will want to stir frequently to prevent anything from burning. Add enough water (or broth) so that it's about an inch above the vegetables. Add the salt, pepper, and thyme, and put the lid on the pot. When the water has begun to simmer, turn the heat down to medium/low and cook, covered, for about twenty minutes or until all the vegetables are tender.

Turn burner off to avoid burning your whole house down. Use an immersion blender to puree the soup.* Sometimes I like to leave a little bit of texture, sometimes I like it completely smooth. At this point you need to take a little taste to see if you need to add more salt and/or pepper. I don't tend to add tons of salt to my food but I find that of all the things I cook, root vegetables can usually use extra salt.

If your soup is too thick for your pleasure, thin with either cream, milk, or broth. I like to serve it with sharp cheddar and buttered toast.


*If you don't have one of these, get one. Trust me, it is INDISPENSABLE in the kitchen. If you don't have one and aren't going to get one then you'll need to use a conventional blender to puree the soup and I recommend that you wait until the soup is cool before you do it.

Kale: shake it like a dog

(Eat Local Challenge- month 3)

Kale is not one of my favorite dark leafy greens. I know that all the cool cooks love it, but I would much rather cook with chard. It isn't the flavor, which is fine (I guess), but it never seems tender enough and generally I find it in its curly leaved incarnation which has one huge unattractive disadvantage: the curly leaves provide the perfect cover for aphids.

Which gentle washing cannot clean. Cleaning curly leaved kale is a colossal task if you don't like to eat aphids and prefer your produce untreated with the kind of gnarly chemicals that can shrivel human balls. It requires the following tools: a never ending gushing water supply, a microscope, nimble fingers, and a table top centrifuge. Just to get the plant lice off.

Or else you can wash it under fast running water and shake it like a dog over and over and over and over....

Since my centrifuge is in the shop I chose to shake my kale like a dog. I'm 99% sure that I was not able to get them all off. which means aphids are on the menu.

So why buy the kale? Good question. Being sick makes me crave green food, fresh produce, lots of vegetables. Being in the middle of the winter on month three of an eat local challenge means that produce is getting harder to come by. The fresh kind. The green kind. I can still get some produce from Oakhill Organics if I coordinate with their CSA deliveries, but if I just need something right now, from the local stores? Here's what I can get: potatoes, onions, kale, leeks, and mushrooms. Notice how only one of those items is green?

For several days now I have been craving a salad, or some soup with heaps of swiss chard in it, or steamed cauliflower and carrots over cous cous with vinaigrette and feta. For days now I have been craving fresh tangy fruit and thanks to Andrea from California who sent me a bag of kiwis, I actually have been eating the most wonderful fruit ever!!! I have three left and luckily no competition for them. I ate two for breakfast this morning and the body was very happy. I actually got my sense of taste back just as I bit into the first one. It was like green sunshine.

I just made a kale and leek quiche using a few tablespoons of the mustard powder I made for the tutorial. It's such a relief to not be eating potatoes with cheese. I love potatoes with cheese but that's all I've had the energy to make all week and I got really tired of it because being sick like this makes a body want more nutrients, less starch. Whenever I feel this run down I think about the scene at the end of "The Secret Of Roan Innish" where they're all back on the island in the little stone cottage and there's a kettle over the fire with soup in it. It's mostly seaweed, which I hate, but the scene is so visceral for me. It embodies all that is comfort and good and wholesome: shelter, family, warmth, and really really good soup. That's what a body needs when it's sick.

And boy oh boy is my body sick. It's in my chest now too so I've got a really nice cough developing.

I plan to keep up the local-produce-only portion of my challenge as a permanent change. In spite of how little there is available for part of the year. This is where the pantry, the freezer, and the protected winter garden come in handy. This year I find out what I need the most in my diet that won't be available during the winter and plan ahead to meet those needs. If I had had more energy for cooking this past week and a half I could have made all kinds of great meals using what I've put by, but most of those things require more energy to put together than I had. Much easier to throw a couple of russets in the oven and have baked potatoes. Or a grilled cheese sandwich.

The quiche was satisfying. A tiny bit bitter from the kale and a little bit horseradishy from the mustard powder which tasted like Dijon which always has an aftertaste like horseradish to me. Which I don't like. In spite of that it was quite good. I am simply not allowing myself to dwell on the aphid part of my meal. I think tomorrow I will be making a lentil kale soup.

I must report that there have been some shocking food transgressions around here which I absolutely blame on the various plagues that have been malingering in our house for the past two weeks.

1. At 1:30 am two nights ago I ate three handfuls of Cheetos.

2. Yesterday I ate Heinz ketchup on my country fried potatoes because I needed it. I really did. I needed the ketchup to cut the fatty richness of the cheese and sour cream I had put on the potatoes to make up for the fact that I wasn't going to use ketchup.

3. I made cornmeal that came from the Midwest because the stuff I had from Bob's Red Mill was too coarse and I really needed to have polenta. I have since bought a finer grind of it from Bob's Red Mill.

But don't worry, I'm not kicking myself too much over these transgressions. Life happens.

100% Local Grocery Haul
Eat Local Challenge: day 25

100% local grocery store haul. What's even better is that it only cost me $15.00 for one loaf of bread, one half gallon milk, two Danish squashes, one cabbage, two stalks of Brussels sprouts and one sugar pie pumpkin.

Note: I just talked to Casey and Katie from Oakhill Organics and they said that they can fill my requested order for produce-which means I'm going to have to cook a whole bunch in the next week because my fridge will not fit so much and a lot of them will wilt if left out. Their CSA is currently full but if you let them know what you want they may be able to sell you some produce if they have enough after filling their CSA orders.

This is the best pot pie in the whole world.*

I have homemade pot pie on the brain right now and while pulling one out of the microwave yesterday, this is the thought that jumped into my head:

Stick a hampster in a pie!

It is early morning here at the Williamson ranch. I've been up since 5:30 am which is when I stepped in some Chick vomit after feeding her and the mean kitty beast. I sat with her a while making soothing noises and after cleaning up the disturbing mess I just couldn't go back to sleep. It has been my dream for many years to be able to get up at 5:30 am to write. Before the kid is up, before the world is up. I love this time. Unfortunately, my childish resistance to going to bed early-ish makes it very challenging to get up before 7:30am.

I have chocolate burps. I'll bet you didn't expect me to say that, huh? I stayed up too late last night watching ER episodes and "needed" a midnight snack. I had been eating lots of Cheetos for late night snacks before I started my eat local challenge. I don't actually like Cheetos, I think they taste like greasy orange salt, but that's just what the mouth wants in the evening hours-crunchy convenient vessels for salt. Anyway, I have been a good girl and nary a Cheeto has crossed my lips since October first. So if I can't eat Max's snacks, then there isn't much to nosh on. I don't stock snack foods for myself. All I had that was quick and tasty and on my exceptions list was chocolate. Chocolate chips to be exact.

I'm not actually a huge chocolate fan. That didn't stop me from eating a big little bowl of them. My body is making its objections known. chocolate burps are more pleasant than green pepper burps though.

Just as my fridge was getting dangerously low on vegetables, as in: I have two carrots left, my local health food store came through with a few great locally grown items. The best of which are these great sticks of brussels sprouts-still on their stems. There's something rather silly about them, and charming. They are unwieldy and won't fit in anyone's fridge. At two stems for $5.00 it was also pretty inexpensive. The bonus for me is that the stems will make wonderful scraps for the hens who LOVE cruciferous snacks.

They also have some gigantic cabbages. I found a moderately sized one. I'm not sure what to do with it yet. I don't eat a lot of cabbage, though I like it. I'm thinking a Russian cabbage pie is in order.

Finding locally grown grains is proving problematic. Although I have decided to buy flour and grains from Bob's Red Mill, and I stand by that decision, I feel like it isn't in keeping with the spirit of the challenge to partake in all of their products when so many of them aren't even grown nearby. They have Teff, and Frikeh, and buckwheat, for example, none of which are grown in this region. I had decided that barley is alright because they get it from Washington (though they won't say where in the state) and I would like to find a grain that I can eat steamed vegetables with instead of with cous-cous which is not made anywhere locally. I grew up eating buckwheat and really like it...but if I allow buckwheat I'm beginning to get too far out of the parameters I set for myself.

So I have put in considerable hours of research for locally grown grains and, surprisingly, I found two sources of locally grown wild rice: Oregon Jewel, and Oregon Wild Rice. I have to admit here that I don't actually like wild rice. I'm not a huge rice fan to begin with (which amongst my acquaintances has always been a HUGE FOOD CRIME). I especially don't like rice that remains densely chewy even after cooking. Wild rice is the ultimate in toughly chewy grains. It's good for you though. So I am going to buy some for grain variety and dammit-I'm going to learn to like it!!

So here's what I have so far: flour from local mills, barley, and wild rice.

A big question mark hanging in the air right now is whether or not any corn meal is made locally. I can say with 100% confidence that a lot of corn is grown locally. But is any of it for drying and making into meal for humans? This bloodhound wants to know!

Researching local grains has got me thinking a lot about what people used to eat when they didn't have their fingertips glued to a keyboard with the whole world virtually at their feet for the price of credit card debt. What were Oregonians using for bread back when they were first settling it? Were they, in fact, growing hard white or red wheat? Is it easy to grow it on a small scale? Or did Oregonians not eat much bread? If they weren't eating a lot of wheat, what grains were they eating and growing? Barley? Were they importing it from traveling salesmen even back then?

What would my diet be like if I could only get soft wheat and barley and a little bit of wild rice? What if I didn't have access to pressed oils? I know that people used to use a lot of animal fat for frying and cooking, which I'll never do. Why? BECAUSE IT'S UNBELIEVABLY DISGUSTING AND I'M A VEGETARIAN. However, not being vegan, I suppose I would be eating a lot more butter than I am now. I would not be eating a lot of risen breads because soft wheat isn't good for that, so I would probably be eating a lot of pancakes, flat breads, and pies. Surely Oregonians were planting corn for both fresh eating, feeding their livestock, and for drying and grinding into flour for themselves, right?

This is just making me think about the pot pies I just made. I have been on a pot pie quest for years now. When I was a kid, one of the few convenience foods that made it into our house were frozen pot pies. These were only pulled out on nights when my parents were going out and we had a babysitter. They didn't have any vegetarian options so we would pick out the chunks of "chicken" and eat the rest. I loved them. I loved the gravy covered vegetables all mixing in with golden crust. Recipes for vegetarian versions of these pot pies are pretty thin on the ground. Most of them are highly unsatisfactory.

Frozen commercial vegetarian pot pies are always so disappointing to me that I am nearly driven to tears. Tofu is an unacceptable ingredient. So I have been on a quest. I have arrived at greatness, and you are all the first to know it. I had a similar success a few years ago but didn't know if I could repeat it. Oh yes.

Oh yes I can. The two key ingredients are: mushrooms and thyme. I only make food in enormous quantities so it's hard to come up with a recipe that feeds less than ten people. I am going to freeze some pot pies, and then I'm going to make them again, trying for a smaller batch that I can then write down for posterity's sake, and also for you, and my dear friend Sid who is a vegetarian on a similar quest.

Pot pies are the ultimate in comfort food (aside from macaroni and cheese, obviously) and perfect for making when the weather turns chilly and you are only allowed to buy local vegetables and are left with potatoes, carrots, and broccoli.



*Well, I'm not modest, am I?