Cooking through the sickness

What's a girl to do while she waits for her antibiotics? Cook, of course. I had these vegetables in my house (courtesy of my CSA):


These seemed like a natural soup choice to me. I got my mom a new cookbook this weekend (Deborah Madison's Local Flavors - a cookbook devoted to seasonal farmer's market cooking) and I flipped through it and found this recipe for a simple potage (which as far as I can tell means potato soup. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). It was so easy, I'm not even referring back to the book for what the directions were. I'm a maverick.

Leeks (I used two)
Potatoes (Yukon Gold preferred - I just grabbed a handful of small ones)
Baby Turnips (I just used a small bunch)
Chicken Stock (use water if you're a vegetarian. Or vegetable stock. But veggie stock is for losers)
salt and pepper
thyme
cream (optional)
1.5 Tbs butter

1. Wash and chop all your veggies. I chopped them, then washed them. I didn't peel the potatoes or the turnips. Potato skins are good for you and the turnips were really small. Wash the leeks really well, post chopping. Leeks are muddy little suckers.

2. Melt the butter in a large soup pot. Toss the vegetables in the butter and add 1/2 cup water or stock and some fresh thyme (or dried thyme if that's all you have). Simmer for five minutes.


Add 5 more cups of stock or water and some salt.


3. Bring to a boil, then bring down the heat to a simmer and let it simmer for 25-30 minutes. You can add some pepper here. And some more salt if you want. At this time, I decided I wanted to make my soup a little more pureed, but I didn't want to wash my food processor, so I just mashed it a bit with my potato masher.


4. There were still some larger bits, but I think that's okay. Varied textures! Then I added a little bit of cream (sinful, I know. But I added about 1/4 of a cup to a gigantic soup pot. You could even add less. Or no cream at all. Or some milk. Whatever floats your boat).


It turns a nice light color with the cream though. See?


5. Now eat it! I put a little more thyme on top as a garnish. Garnishes make my photos look really nice.


Enjoy!

I'm not ready yet for battle

In fact, I'm pretty tired. Some nights are like that. I was tired last night as well, so I made these quick glazed veggies - specifically carrots and baby turnips and small potatoes. The carrots and the baby turnips were left over from this week's CSA - I rescued them from rotting in Michael's fridge over the next few weeks. The potatoes I picked up at the supermarket (shhh, don't tell anyone) along with some flank steak (I love me some flank steak - plus, Meredith said she wanted to see me make some side dishes and I am nothing if not accommodating to my readers).

Quick Glazed Root Vegetables with Dill

1 bunch carrots
1 bunch baby turnips
a few baby potatoes, red or white (or both)
about 1 cup chicken stock
1 tsp butter
some fresh dill
olive oil

1. Peel your carrots and trim and wash them, along with the turnips (are you supposed to peel turnips? I didn't).

2. Chop them up! You want them all to be about the same size.


3. Put a sauce pan over medium high heat and heat up your oil. Toss in the veggies and give them a quick sauté.

4. Add the chicken stock (you want to almost cover the veggies - but not quite). Cover the pan, turn down the heat and let it all chill out for about 20 minutes or until the veggies are fork tender and the liquid is almost all evaporated, but not quite.

5. Add the butter and the dill and mix it all up. Make sure to spoon some of the leftover liquid/butter mixture over your plate. Eat it! It's good. I like it next to this nice cut up flank steak. Meat and veggies...yum.