White Columbine with bits of Purple Salvia
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I decided to just write up a review. And show off my white columbines with fuzzy purple dots that are really geranium sanguineum (cranesbill) in the background. I assume a deer ate the tops of some of my columbines; I don’t think the ground hogs can reach up that high.
I’ve been very busy with work and with a few (thankfully minor) family crises (an infected finger by one child, a tummy virus right before a big talk by another, a fall with only bruises by an older family member). Hope life goes smoothly in the future, (but it never does, does it?).
Creamy Yellow Soup with Curry, Celery and Beans
This soup needs a name. It didn’t originally have curried spices. I got it from a macrobiotic newsletter. It didn’t have amounts, so I’m not sure I can call the source a real recipe. And the main ingredient in the original was broccoli, which I didn’t have and I didn’t feel like going back to the store to get, and I felt broccoli was too rough for the creamy texture that I wanted. Surprisingly, it has no onion. I think every other soup I make seems to start with an onion.
Ingredients
1 cup white northern beans, soaked overnight and then cooked with kombu
2 pieces of kombu
1 tsp. thyme (I used fresh from my garden)
1 small sweet potato
3 sticks of celery
1 garlic clove
olive oil to saute the celery
1 heaping tsp. turmeric
1 heaping tsp. cumin
1 Tbsp. white miso
sea salt and pepper to taste
Soak the white beans overnight and cook with two pieces (about one inch) of kombu. Saute chopped celery and chopped garlic in olive oil or coconut oil. Cook the sweet potato; discard sweet potato skin. Puree the celery, garlic, thyme, sweet potato, beans and kombu in the food processor. Add the turmeric, cumin, salt and pepper. Reheat the pureed soup on the stove. Stir in a spoonful of miso just before serving.
Garnish with scallion or whatever fresh herb you have available. In the photo are some leaves of fresh oregano from my backyard.
Have any leftover matza? See any matza for sale and wonder what one might do with it? Here’s an easy dessert I made with my daughter during Passover.
Ingredients:
1 bag chocolate chips
1 sheet of matza, broken into pieces
1/2 cup of your favorite nuts (walnuts, almonds or pecans) broken into pieces
Paper plates, a large spoon and wax paper
If you want, you can soak the nuts for a few hours to make them more chewable. Melt the chocolate chips in a saucepan. Add broken matza and nuts and mix with the chocolate. Put a sheet of wax paper on a paper plate (the flat white kind that one puts in the microwave work best). Put a spoonful of the chocolate mixture unto the wax paper. Repeat until you have filled the wax paper (you can probably fit about 5 or 6 of these on a paper plate). Repeat on another paper plate (our mixture made two platefuls). Place flat in the freezer. Serve straight from the freezer.
My neighbor’s dogwood tree is once again flowering. My dogwood photos from 2008 are one of the most popular posts on this blog.
Dogwood blossoms are a pleasure, but one needs to be fast with the camera or the dogwood blossom season will be done.
One downside of the abundant blossoms in our area is my stuffed nose. Any of you allergy sufferers? A friend of my daughter’s hates spring because of allergies. Sigh.
Before Pesach we have a custom of burning chametz (bread, crackers, cereal, pasta, anything made of five grains: wheat, barley, rye, oats and spelt). When I was a kid, I remember burning chametz in our backyard. Now there are laws about creating fires, so observant Jews get special permission to burn chametz. This burning took place in Edison, New Jersey.
A tradition we have in our family (and others do as well) is to burn the lulav, the palm branch left over from Sukkot, the fall holiday in which we sit in a booth outside for a week.
In this photo you can see both lulavim (plural of lulav) and real bread. It got quite smokey – my husband doesn’t remember it being so smokey in the past. Maybe this is because the regular Edison staff were on vacation for Good Friday and a nice person was left in charge who didn’t quite manage the smoke? I don’t know, but I left there sniffing my clothes, wondering if I smelt like someone who had walked into a smokey bar.
I had enough time to attend biur chametz (burning of the chametz) this year because I managed to get all the cooking I had planned the day before and early in the morning. One of the most popular dishes among my sister-in-law’s family that I made was mushroom paté; personally, my favorite was the marinated beets with ginger and garlic. Planning to make both of those again tomorrow.
