Roasted tomato soup; or, Twitter is surprisingly useful.

I love my stand mixer.

I love it so much, I will go ahead and do something I almost never do, which is name-drop: Big Blue is a Kitchenaid. And I love it. I love it so much, that when the time came for me to invest in a food processor, I decided to stick with a name I knew, and buy a KitchenAid. Not blindly, mind you–I did my research, and ended up with a model that seemed to have garnered good reviews. I hemmed, and I hawed, and I gave in to the madness. And there was much rejoicing…

…until I discovered that the dratted thing leaked like a motherfucker. By which I mean the whole business was not sufficiently substance-tight to make breadcrumbs, much less sauce or anything else interesting, without taking down the whole kitchen. Which I didn’t think was a particularly big deal (I have never been accused of being terrifically fastidious), until I tried making tomato soup for someone I was hoping to impress.

Generally speaking, when I’m cooking a meal, I’d rather not wear it–nor do I want it to end up ALL OVER my worktop. Which, naturally, is exactly what happened, to my eternal chagrin and Peter’s sympathetic amusement. By the end of the night, I was mentally composing the hate mail I was going to write to KitchenAid chronicling the event–a letter that was probably far too satisfying to write. Then, after penning my email, I did what any self-respecting social media fiend would do: I tweeted it.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Not an hour after I posted that charming little message, I got a shout out from none other than @kitchenaid, inviting me to direct message with a customer service rep. Wholly unconvinced, I did as they suggested, figuring I had nothing to lose while waiting for a response from whomever ended up with the email I wrote. Imagine my surprise, gentle reader, when the mysterious person on the other end of that Twitter feed turned out to be both personable and genuinely helpful. By the end of the day, the lovely Cheryl had determined that it sounded like my bowl was, in fact, faulty, and that another one would be dispatched to me posthaste. It was amazing, particularly when compared with the utterly useless response I received to my email three days later, which was impersonal, kind of rude, and made it clear that my message hadn’t actually been read properly.

When I think about it, it makes perfect sense to use Twitter for customer service purposes–the public nature of it makes it easy to spot who is SERIOUSLY disgruntled (who else is going to bitch about their processor in that forum?), and equally easy to have the brief exchange necessary to sort out these kinds of problems. I’d just never seen it in action before. And I’ll say: I was impressed. I was impressed that KitchenAid had thought of this, and impressed that they actually decided to have useful customer service reps–the kind that ACTUALLY SOLVE PROBLEMS–manning the feed. Brilliant! And so, KitchenAid, I salute thee…at least until I need to avail myself of the system again.

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Pod People: Kale and Fresh Cannellini Bean Soup

It seems that I’ve become one of those pod people. I just can’t help myself— fresh legumes show up at my local farmer’s market and I’m spineless. Shells full of chickpeas are too adorable for me to resist. I find myself grabbing pods and pods of flageolet beans when I’m not even planning on being home for dinner! And the other day, I fell for these sweet cannellini.

Unlike my slightly less-than-lifechanging fresh garbanzo experience, it turns out that fresh cannellini beans are quite distinctive and delicious. They get a beautiful creaminess with perfect firm skins after about 20 minutes of simmering.

I threw them into one of our standard sick-day soups: homemade turkey broth, a few smashed cloves of garlic, assorted greens. I added some tortellini, too, though you could also try any other pasta or dumpling.

I grew up in a chicken-soup house—my mother’s matzoh balls would be quite confused to find themselves in any other broth. But Matt grew up in a turkey-soup house, and that’s not a bad thing. Turkey stock is much more flavorful than its chicken counterpart—it has a richness and depth that is unmatched. I made my broth the day before our soup dinner with wings and necks from the farmer’s market, but if you don’t seek those out, at least keep this in mind for your Thanksgiving leftovers.

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Take that, swine flu! Comforting duck noodle soup

It’s the cardinal rule: thou shalt not blog about work. And so I shan’t, except to say that for reasons best left unelaborated, I’ve spent the last week or so hearing an awful lot about Swine Flu; a very bad state of affairs for a certified hypochondriac such as myself. That being the case, I’m sure you can imagine how I reacted when Bench revealed to me on Monday that he was feeling a bit, shall we say, under the weather. That’s right. SWINE FLU*. Cue the sirens and the respiratory mask.

*Note: Bench does not have swine flu.

After my hysteria subsided, I decided that the best thing I could contribute to the situation was soup, for both our sakes. Specifically, duck noodle soup. Conveniently, I still had the remains of the duck from the Cherryaki duck experiment kicking it in my freezer; I also had a lot of fresh scallions, some star anise, some udon noodles, and a long-standing desire to replicate the rich, delicious duck soup from Q2 thai in midtown. All I needed was a reason, and here it was: Bench was sick, and I needed to come up with A Project to keep from hovering and making it worse. Win win!

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Eating Well In Season: Asparagus Soup

It took me awhile to get this post together, because it took awhile for Spring to get her act together here in New York. It was gray, and dark, and we ate grilled cheese until we couldn’t see straight.

When the publishers of Eating Well In Season: the Farmer’s Market Cookbook first sent me a review copy, I wanted to start right away. But it was cold in April, and the farmer’s market didn’t cooperate, unless I wanted to eat potatoes and pretzels. In the meantime, there were plenty of introductory pages to peruse in the book: short essays about farmer’s markets around the country, informational charts suggesting which produce is most important to buy organic, guides to healthy serving sizes, and a colorful display explaining some of the nutrients in red, orange, yellow, green, and blue fruits and vegetables. This is a book I could come back to as a reference, but I mostly collect cookbooks for their recipes. So I waited.

And then, suddenly, we were drinking iced tea on the balcony. The greens I’d been craving all month were finally piled on the weathered tables at the Union Square farmer’s market. Fronds of baby kale! Purple-stemmed broccoli raab with teeny yellow flowers! Dirt-encrusted ramps with smooth green leaves! And yes! Asparagus! In spring, my morning walk to work through the market becomes a treasure hunt. I’m unable to limit myself, an come home at night with bags full of greens. I pile bouquets of vegetables on the kitchen table.

For me, spring resolutions are more powerful than New Year’s resolutions. Each spring, when the sun and the greens come out again, I can commit to healthier living, to walking everywhere I can and getting to the gym, to focusing my diet on fresh produce. These spring resolutions are easier than the vows you make to yourself in the depth of winter. I’m inspired by the farmer’s market again every time I walk through. But then I usually just throw something together: green + grain + protein = dinner.

This book might be helpful if you’re just starting out eating seasonally, or if, like me,  you’re looking for recipes to inspire you to use produce beyond your basic pasta or stir fry. The Watercress & Sugar Snap Salad with Warm Sesame-Shallot Vinaigrette is on my to-make list when the peas show up (soon, please?), and there was a nice-looking Apricot-Almond Clafouti I’d like to try down the line. The recipes are light, and nutrition facts are provided, but they seem satisfying: steak salad and strawberry rhubarb cobbler (topped with a biscuit dough that features nonfat buttermilk) aren’t exactly rabbit food. There’s nothing really wacky here, no difficult-to-find ethnic ingredients, so it might be a good book for slightly less-than-adventurous cooks and eaters.

The Garden-Fresh Asparagus Soup seemed just exotic enough for me to give it a try. Gently spiced with a sprinkle of curry powder and ground ginger, it has a touch of warmth. Light coconut milk and potatoes give it an elegant creaminess, though I actually would have preferred more of a focus on the asparagus itself, rather than thinning out its flavor. The texture is lovely, and the swirl of lemony creme fraiche made for a pretty presentation.

Me, I think I’d rather just stuff spears of asparagus into my mouth. Raw, roasted, grilled, you name it. It’s been a long time since we’ve had great local greens. Maybe I’ll come back to the soup when the craving has quieted down a little.

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Spring is just around the corner (I hope): Sunchoke soup with ginger and rosemary

When we make it to this point in the year, that terrifying hinterland just on the cusp of Spring, I start to find the farmer’s market a little depressing. It’s hard enough navigating the endless fields of parsnips and swiss chard that appear all winter when you KNOW that other vegetables are ages away; getting this close to the real show, the return of variety, every day that passes without the tender greens (and purples, and yellows) of the warmer season gets harder to stomach. We are so close, and yet so far. The only way to remedy this malaise, in my experience, is to make something totally new, totally bizarre, something that you’re not sure will work.  Something like sunchoke soup.

The sunchoke, also known as the Jerusalem Artichoke, is  variable that’s been kicking around my head for some years now, ever since I had an amazing bowl of sunchoke soup in (of all places) a tiny, ramshackle pub in Kent, England. I, of course, remembered no details of the soup  when I stumbled across the sunchokes (or, come to think of it, the flavor of the sunchoke itself), except for the fact that it was creamy and savory and delicious. This hole in my memory, while slightly daunting, left me wide open to just do what I do best: throw crap in a pan and see what happens. This particular day,  the fates smiled on me, and the sunny astringency of the aromatics complemented the nutty sunchoke beautifully. Throw in a little greek yogurt for creaminess, and you’re laughing!

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