A pair of soups for winter weekends.

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In an attempt to embrace the winterness that has been January, 2011 (and don't bother me about the fact that it is actually February now. There are several feet of snow carpeting the ground. I can't be expected to pay attention to the little details), I made a couple of different kinds of soup this weekend.

Tom Kha Gai

This Thai soup is one of my favorite combination of flavors. It's essentially a spicy chicken soup with coconut milk (as opposed to Tom Yum Gai, which is basically the same soup without coconut milk) . And it turned out to be ridiculously easy to make.
- 2 boneless chicken breasts - 6 cups chicken broth - 1 tsp or so of crushed red pepper flakes (better yet - 1-2 fresh red thai chili peppers, but go with what you have in a pinch) - 3 cloves garlic, chopped - 1-2 tbsp ginger, grated (properly speaking, you should use galangal, if you can find it) - zest of 1 lime - juice of 1-2 limes - 1/2 lb chopped mushrooms. Whatever kind you have on hand - 4 tbsp fish sauce - 1 cup coconut milk - 2 cups baby spinach - handful of chopped cilantro Freeze the chicken breasts for about 15-20 minutes (handy later) Combine broth, ginger, garlic, pepper, lime zest, lime juice and 3 tbsp fish sauce in a pot. Simmer for 3-5 minutes. Add mushrooms. Simmer another 3-5 minutes. Slice the chicken breasts thinly (this is why freezing it a little while helps so much). Add the chicken and the coconut milk. Simmer another 3-5 minutes until the chicken is just cooked. Stir in the spinach until it begins to wilt (about a minute) - add the cilantro and the last tbsp or so of fish sauce. Serve - enjoy! (some people like this with cellophane noodles - which you can simply prepare with a few cups of boiling water, and ladle the soup over. I prefer mine without. The soup is light and citrusy, with a mild sourness and peppery tang that the kids both love.

Chorizo & Kale soup

As I was finishing up the Tom Kha Gai soup (which is best when fresh, as the spinach stays bright and flavorful), I started prepping another soup for the next day. Most soups enrich over time, when the flavors have more of a chance to blend together, I find. This soup is another easy one, with an even shorter list of ingredients, but is a great lunch time meal almost any time of the year. But there's something especially good about the rich bittery kale that makes it perfect for a winter day.
- 1/2 pound of smoked chorizo, cut into small pieces (note: the smoked Portuguese kind. Not the loose, uncooked Mexican kind, for this recipe). - 1 large onion, chopped - a few potatoes, peeled and diced into small-ish cubes - 8 cups of water - 3/4 pounds of kale - cut out the center ribs and slice the leaves into strips - 2 tbsp smoked paprika - a healthy splash or two of red wine vinegar Toss the onion into a dutch oven (you do have a le Creuset, right? Of course you do) on medium high heat with a glug of olive oil, and cook until they start to turn golden. Toss the potatoes in as well, and stir around for 4 or 5 minutes. Add water and a bit of salt to taste, and let simmer for about 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender. Meanwhile, toss the chorizo into a separate skillet and cook over medium heat until brown. Stir a heavy spoon a bit heartily through the potatoes and onions a little, just to smash & break them up a little bit. Stir in the chorizo, the kale, the vinegar and the paprika and let simmer for at least 15 minutes, until the kale is tender. You can (as I did) then turn this off and cover the soup, coming back to it the next day at lunch to re-heat. The melding of the flavors only makes it better. Serve it with crusty toast for dipping and a dark, hoppy beer and laugh at the bitter cold outside.
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That's a whole lot of orange blaze camouflage

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I love all the statistics that come out at the end of a year. I like to see the various ways of measuring a year just passed that illustrate the progress of human achievement. Growth of our population. The expansion of the productivity of our society. Achievements in social connections, science and medicine across our nation's people. You'll have seen them on CNN and other places that spend a little bit of quality time navel-gazing, comparing the last 12 months to the rest of history. But here's one you probably haven't seen: Last year, Wisconsin alone sold 621,000 gun deer licenses (that's licenses to shoot deer with a gun, vs licenses for deer to carry rifles). By comparison? The total armed forces for modern Germany (pre-reduction) is 250,000. If I add up the available data for deer shooting licenses sold in just a handful of other states (Michigan, Pennsylvania,West Virginia, and North Dakota, as a sort of semi-random sampling), it's well over 1.8 million happy gun-totin' American hunters. Let's compare that to the size of various national armed forces I put together from available data:
True, there's some overlap of hunters who go nomad, and hunt across state lines (thereby requiring multiple licenses), but in Wisconsin, for example, this figure is tracked and is less than 5% of the total. And maybe another 5% of those totals represent the growing number of black powder hunters (those guys who, feeling the fully automatic sniper rifle option is just a trifleSurvivors - a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) production about the attempts of a small fraction of the population (less than 1%) to carry on in the face of a pandemic that kills off everyone else. In the first two seasons, I saw think I saw 4 guns being wielded by the roaming gangs of increasingly desperate survivors, never more than one at a time per group. 3 of which were double barrel shotguns. The most frequent weapon of choice was a cricket bat or, in one case, a crossbow. The acting Prime Minister is the only one in the quasi-official acting-government commune that has a pistol, which is an almost shocking possession because of its sheer scarcity.

Survivors BBC: Note the guy in the background trying to menace you with his crowbar

Now let's compare the American Movie Classic's new series of last fall: The Walking Dead. Where a similarly small percentage of the population seeks to evade flesh-eating zombies and maintain a sense of society. And every one of the survivors is a walking arsenal. Hell, the first episode ends with one character seeking refuge in an M1A1 Abrams tank (on the streets of Atlanta, not far from the state capitol. Ah.. memories). A single character in an American Apocalypse show carries more firepower than any two gangs of British counterparts.

The Walking Dead: loaded for bear, and hunting zombies

Is there a lesson in this? Well, I guess if you're worried about a zombie-fueled end-of-the-world scenario, the US is the place to be. Otherwise, I'm going to sleep better tonight, knowing that our armed militia will almost certainly be able to keep us safe, in the event that Canada gets uppity.
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Winter Farmers' Market

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For the past couple of months, my Bride and The Critter have been hatching a new scheme: cracking the Farmers' Market money pile. Our little village has a summer farmers' market from June right through October - it's how we got to know half the town, as we take the whole family and the dog there bright and shiny every Saturday morning. The produce is all locally grown, and you get to know the vendors you like, buying from them fresh each week. One vendor - we call her "The Tomato Lady" (though she does have a real name, Susan) - has a place over towards the Concord river. We got to know us so well that we ended up doing back-table deals for boxes of her 'not pretty' tomatoes at ridiculously low prices. I'd buy a few pounds of beautiful heirloom tomatoes, and she'd throw in a box of 20 or 25 lbs of split or blemished ones for cooking for pennies, if not free, just because she knew we loved to cook with her fantastic produce. We bring her canned tomato sauce or corn relish in trade, so she gets to try the end result. And then there's Clovis. I can't exactly tell where Clovis is from originally. I just know he's from someplace of warmer climate than Eastern Massachusetts. I'm thinking an island. I could ask, but I'm too busy talking to him about the fantastic vegetables that show up on his table and nobody else's. The first day I met Clovis, I was grinning at my finds, pawing through a big pile of dark green leafy collards piled on one side of his table. I separated out about half of them and asked him what he wanted for them. There was a pause. "What are you going to do with them?" Clovis didn't reach for his money box. He just stood there looking at me, waiting for my answer. I felt like I was being tested. "I... I'll probably cook them down with some leftover country ham, and maybe a half an onion, or some chopped ginger. It takes a little while, but that's how I grew up eating them." (This was only a slight stretch of the truth. You couldn't have paid me to put a collard green on my plate until I was in my late 20's, at which time, I discovered a love of bitter greens that I never knew I had). Clovis nodded solemnly, and reached for a large-ish garbage bag. I think he charged me about $3. (Like many greens, collards start out pretty voluminous before you cook them down. Don't underestimate how many you'll need). Now, when he sees me coming, he sets aside whatever particular crop he thinks we'll like. A bag of fingerling potatoes. A Guyanan version of a pumpkin, elongated and rosy pink. A hubbard squash the size of my neighbor's first grader. Each new treat is always amazing.
Through our farmers' market, I've also met other chicken people (what we call ourselves), cheese makers, and a half dozen children entrepreneurs. We occasionally trouble ourselves to schlep over to one of the neighboring town's farmers' markets, all of which seem to be much more professional affairs. Note: I do not mean this in a complimentary way. There are a growing number of lovely, organic, extra-smug-added farms in the New England area that are doing wonderful things to bring back all manner of crops, which is a neat trick to accomplish while standing on a self-constructed pedestal. Look, I'm all for freshness, and supporting my local farmer. Hell, I just bought an entire cow from the farmer down the road. But I do not need a lecture, stated or implied, on why the corn industry is destroying human kind, particularly from the guy busy selling me a dozen ears of just-picked-that-morning corn on the cob. I like food. You show up with a good product at a reasonable price, I'll buy your food. You throw in a little food conversation to the mix, and I'll almost certainly be back to buy more of your food tomorrow. You try and charge me six or seven bucks for a head of non-descript lettuce "to make a point" to the jack-booted thugs of the Agro-Industrial Complex, and I'm going to want to punch you in the neck. But the difference I didn't really notice until someone pointed it out is that none of the other markets really feature any kids selling stuff. Our market has a kid that sells garlic his dad planted last fall. 2 kids selling banana bread they baked to earn a couple of extra bucks. One kid taught herself to make duct tape wallets. And one kid has a sign hawking "free-range firewood" that makes me chuckle every time I see it.
As fall came this year, someone said they were going to have a 'Winters' market for the first time, hosting it inside the Union Hall off the town green. (How much do I love living someplace with a "town green," by the way?) The Critter had been itching to supplement her egg-selling money for a while, and pestering My Bride to make use of the Swiss sewing-robot she has, with all of its self-aware attachments. So the two of them signed up to be a vendor, and worked for several weeks putting together a collection of goodies for sale.
Blankets of various sizes (toddler, lap, baby). Burp cloths. Super-hero capes for little kids. Doll clothes. Embroidered monogram necklaces and hair tie doo-hickies. All put together and on display.
The deal was, the Critter could keep the cash from the necklaces, hair ties and doll clothes. My Bride keeps everything else. My contribution was building a blanket display rack, and keeping The Boy quiet and occupied during the 3 hours the market runs.
It's one Saturday morning a month during the winter months, and with a couple behind us, has become a fun event we look forward to. It's an early morning of coffee, hot cider and setup/preparation as a family affair. And then a few hours of greeting and chatting with friends and neighbors, occasionally tucking some cash into the box and handing over one of the fabric creations. We've gotten to know the vendors at the market a bit better on a different level. Several of them are the normal crew from the summer months. And there are still several enterprising kids (and my daughter's now proud to be in that club). With fewer market opportunities, there are also more farmers coming in from a little bit further afield, including a few of those 'professionals' I've bumped into elsewhere. Most of them really are lovely folks, who do it as much for the pleasure as for the income. But the first weekend, there were those 1 or 2 self-declared beacons of purity who took exception to the kids selling goods that might compete with their own wares. How are you going to compete selling hand crafted biscotti for $4 a smidge when the kid at the next table is selling "everything" cookies for fifty cents a bakers dozen? Admittedly, that's a tough one. On the other hand, that kid is my neighbor, and you I don't know. One thing's for sure. If you don't stop looking like you just ate a steaming turd every time you look at the cute little capitalist on your left, you're chances are not going to get any better.
But really, there was only one or two curmudgeonly foreign vendors, and they didn't bother showing up for the second time around. Which was certainly no great loss. In the meantime, the Critter made a killing, on an 8 year old scale, earning more discretionary income than I think I had until I enlisted in the Army. And several of the blankets and other fabric paraphernalia went home happily rolled into someone's re-usable go-to-market, I-used-to-be-a-Toyota-sedan collapsable sack.
I mostly just sat in the back with my book and a cup of whatever was warm, and tried to entertain the boy while the Grady girls sold things. I like listening to the conversations when my Bride humbly shows off some of her amazing handicrafts. Or the quiet glee that my daughter shows as she mentally counts up her loot. And some of the browsing customers provide their own amusement. One elderly grandmother type pawed through the blankets and other goods, and held up a monogrammed necklace in one spotted fist. "I'd buy this if it was pink." She somehow managed to make the statement into an accusation. Like there had been a conspiracy to change it from pink moments before she walked up, just to screw with her head. My Bride shrugged apologetically, and tried to show her some of the other pieces. "No. I want this one. Except it's not pink. So I won't buy it. I would buy it if it were pink." She tossed it back into the pile and stumped off. No doubt looking for something pink. Luckily, most people are a little less single minded. But we'll have more pink in the inventory, just in case she's back next month. Both times, we somehow got lucky enough to be right next to the couple of musicians that came to the market, lending it a fun old-timey air. A book, a cup of warm cider, a couple of hours of clawhammer banjo and fiddle tunes, and a chance to chat with my neighbors. Holy crap... I'm turning into Garrison Keillor.
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