“I've never been lost,
but I was mighty turned around for
three days once.”
Do you know why I smiled to myself when I learned that the great American Frontiersman admitted to sometimes being a little...disoriented?
Because I had just smiled to myself upon learning that Ikea- that baffling, nearly inescapable labyrinth of domestic wonders- Ikea hs recipes!
I wondered if even Daniel Boone was intrepid enough to cook his way from one end of an Ikea recipe to another- I mean, what if an Ikea recipe was like Ikea?
You know, like this-
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| Call search and rescue! I'm lost and I can't find my way to dessert! |
Daniel Boone may not be able to navigate through an Ikea store or recipe, but I realized that I probably could. After all, there have been days when I recognized in myself some brilliantly convoluted trains of thought. For instance, my astonishing ability to circumnavigate the cholesterol reducing Mediterranean diet I know we should be following:
observation 1. The Mediterranean diet is healthy.
Followed by the following observations and conclusion-
Followed by the following observations and conclusion-
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| 2. Italy is on the Mediterranean. 3. Pizza is from Italy .......therefore... 4. Pizza is a health food!
(cue the angelic choruses of epicurean enlightenment
and pass me a slice of pizza.)
|
My capacity to wade my way through bewildering kitchen quandaries was tested midweek, when I opened the fridge to find that someone (that would be me) had used up all the food and replaced it with leftovers.
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| Call search and rescue! I'm adrift in a sea of leftovers! |
Fortunately, even this mildly bad news is nullified by the good news that in Texas, soup weather still holds sway.
Ah, soup- it is to winter what salad is to summer. A flexible, forgiving way to use up leftovers and veggies. In winter, you can make entire new dinners just by covering leftovers with beef or chicken or vegetable broth! Here- I'll give you a couple of examples:
First, a soup from leftover beef and some slightly past-their-prime vegetables.
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| leftover beef, leftover chili, a few mushrooms, some veggies and leftover collard greens. |
The beef had cooked in beef broth and canned tomatoes and was leftover from Thursday's Coney Island Chili. I'd planned on using it in this Australian beef and vegetable soup but the need to clear a path through the fridge took precedence over following the recipe.
A few things to remember when combining leftovers into soup.
In general strong flavors like greens and cabbage are more at home in a beef or tomato based soup. That's not a rule- think cream of broccoli soup and chinese soup with cabbage- but it's a good guideline
I decided that I needed to decide to use either the greens or the chili. Because both of them are very strong flavors that would fight each other to the death if they were in the same pot. An interesting bowl of soup can hold any number of ingredients, but there's a line between
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interesting and downright confusing.
and your taste buds know when you've crossed it. |
Another thing- my plan was to put the beef in a pot with the mushrooms, collards, zucchini, celery,onion and bell pepper and cover it with beef broth. But I wanted the finished soup a little thicker than the broth alone would make it. This called for a thickening agent!
No, a thickening agent is not James Bond developing a middle-aged spread.
It's a thing that makes liquids, well thicker. I could try to impress you by saying that they increase viscosity, but I think viscous is a sort of icky sounding word, don't you? I sort of don't want to use the word viscous around dinner.
Anyway. Any starch will thicken a soup- you can use potatoes, mashed beans, cornmeal, cracker or bread crumbs, but these are the two most common thickener things:
The department of learn from my embarrassing mistakes has asked me to make sure you know that if you add either cornstarch or flour directly to hot liquid, it'll instantly cook into lumps and you'll be sifting spoonfuls of starchy blobs out of the soup while you growl and mutter to yourself that using up the leftovers should not be more frustrating and time consuming than making the firstovers . Stir the cornstarch or flour into cool liquid, then stir that mixture slowly into the soup.
Wanna know how it turned out?
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| pretty good for stuff I wasn't too keen on eating.... |
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| This is what's left after dinner AND the next day's lunch! |
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| good thing too. I couldn't have faced casserole again, and it would've been many days before I could've faced tossing it away. |
In the meantime, I want you to know that I know.
I know that you'll probably face problems this week far more baffling than making sense of a jumble of leftovers. I know that some of you may find yourself in tangles so dark and scary that even Daniel Boone couldn't blaze an easy trail through them.
And you'll take courage and hope and explore that new frontier step-by-step. A step back, toward who you know you love and who you know yourself to be, then a step or two forward, toward who you wish to love; who you want to be. With a few crazy wrenching "right! no left!" turns thrown in for good (or bad) measure.
I want you to know that I know that you'll find your way through.
I know you will, pathfinder.
After all, haven't you gone fearlessly into Ikea (or something like it) and emerged to tell the tale?
