Roasted Tomato, Red Pepper, and Chard Soup

I am very proud of this soup. Less so of my photos.

I have a chard problem. I considered it the archetype of disgusting vegetation as a child, and despite my later conversion to the Church of the Bitter Greens, I still find myself occasionally at a loss for what to do with it. When it's young, I just pop it into the salad along with everything else, but when it's older, it commands the attention and should probably be cooked. Mostly I saute it with sausages, but that takes meat, and I don't have enough meat to keep up with the sheer volume of chard that my garden is producing.

Hence, this soup. This soup will change your life. (Perhaps not as thoroughly as the Life-Changing Cabbage Soup, but I still give it a 73% chance of life-changing). It's incredible: the sweetness of the grilled peppers, the startling savoriness of the grilled tomatoes, are given this beautiful, flavorful depth by the bitterness of the chard. I'm eating a bowl of it right now.

The first time I made this soup, it was entirely with garden produce. The peppers are ending now, so I had to supplement them with store-bought ones, but it's a great end-of-summer dish, especially since the grilling adds extra flavor. It's good cold or hot, and like most soups, is even better the next day. 

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch chard
• 2-3 red peppers
• A lot of tomatoes (look, how much will depend on what size your tomatoes are - let's say enough tomatoes to give you about 3 cups worth?)
• One onion
• Handful of basil
• 1 quart chicken stock

Directions

Rinse your tomatoes and peppers and grill them on high heat. The peppers will turn black. Don't worry, that's exactly what's supposed to happen. Turn them so they're blackened on all sidesSome of the tomatoes will burst their skins. If that happens, go ahead and scoop it up - grill it any further and it might disintegrate. 

They should look about like this

Gather up your grilled vegetables and let them cool on a baking sheet. You'll want to use all the delicious juices they're giving off, so be sure to use something with sides.

Chop your onion and put it in a soup pot. Saute it in olive oil until it starts to soften. 

Wash your chard well, chop it finely, and add it to the onion. Saute it until the stems are soft and the greens are limp.

Finely chopped chard

Once your grilled tomatoes and peppers are cool, slip their skins off. This is most important - and easiest - for the peppers. If the tomato skins aren't already falling off, don't worry about them. But do take off the skins, the stems, and the seeds, from the red peppers. 

Put all your grilled vegetables into the soup pot. Rinse the juices from the pan into the soup pot. Add a quart of chicken stock. Or whatever stock you've got on hand. You do have stock on hand, right? I mean, you can get by without it, but your next project should really be stocking up on stock.

Simmer simmer simmer simmer.

Add caption

Once everything is looking well simmered (20 mins - 1 hour, soup is flexible) pull it off the stove and let it cool.

Once it is cool enough not to break your blender, pour it in the blender and puree it.

That's it! Enjoy!

New Standard Veggie Kebabs

It's summer, so odds are some or all of the following things are true:

• You can get lots of tasty vegetables for cheap
• It's too hot to cook inside
• You're going to a cookout
• You're throwing a cookout
• You've got vegetarian friends coming
• You are a vegetarian
• You're just too cheap to buy meat (actually these last two are season-independent, but whatever)

So you'd better have a good vegetable grilling option. The good news is, this recipe (which, as the title implies, has become my new standard both for cookouts and for dealing with vegetables when I don't have the time or brainpower to do anything fancy) is really all you need. I mean, if you want to get crazy grilling vegetables, don't let me stop you! In fact, invite me over so I can watch you grill them, and then eat the result! But this is easy, reliable, and so delicious you won't have any leftovers if you have guests. Which is a pity, because the leftovers are tasty cold.

This is so simple. Do I really need to do a post on this? You probably got the idea from the title, right? Chop some vegetables up, put them on a skewer, and grill them. But I know for me at least, it always helps to have a walkthrough, even - especially - for the most basic things. So here we go.



Ingredients

• Vegetables (onion I recommend having with everything since it caramelizes nicely and gives a savory flavor to its neighbors, summer squash of multiple varieties for extra color and flavor, mushroom another umami-intensive option, bell pepper also flavors its neighbors on the skewer, eggplant needs a long cooking time but absorbs flavor wonderfully, tomato not a vegetable but who cares, cauliflower tough to skewer but so worth it, potatoes or other root vegetables if they are small or par-cooked. Try others! If they work really well, tell me about it! If they fail spectacularly, tell me about that too!
• Olive oil
• Garlic
• Salt
• Spices (I like curry powder, thyme, and adobo. I bet you'd also have great results with dill, creole seasoning, maybe zaatar. Ooh, zaatar. I'm going to try that next time.)

You'll also need:

• Wooden skewers (You can use metal ones if you've got them, of course).
• A pastry brush

Instructions
Chop up your vegetables into large chunks; slightly larger than the size chunk you would like to eat off a skewer (since they're going to shrink as you cook them.

Start threading the vegetables onto the skewers. Try not to stab yourself. If you want very even cooking, you can separate the skewers by vegetable type, but personally I like to mix it up. Part of the joy of eating vegetables is that they mostly taste great in various stages of doneness, so adding that to the medley of flavors and textures you'll be creating just makes it more delightful. I like to include at least one chunk of onion on each skewer - it goes well with everything - but you should have more than enough vegetables to experiment.

Get a bowl and pour in about 1/4 cup olive oil - or however much you think it will take to brush your skewers with. Squeeze in a couple of garlic cloves and a pinch of salt, and stir around with your pastry brush.

Heat up your grill medium-hot. Pop your skewers onto the grill, and brush them with the garlic-oil mixture. Turn them over and brush them again. If the vegetables have started cooking while you were inside getting the oil, or the oven mitts, or something to put the cooked skewers on, that's OK. This is a very forgiving recipe; as long as you get the oil on sometime in the early cooking stage, it will be delicious.

What this recipe doesn't really forgive is ingredient quality. This is not really the place to use up the vegetables that are going to go bad if you don't use them tonight. I used an overgrown zucchini in this one (part of an experiment you'll read about in a few weeks time, if all goes well) and it came out too sweet-tasting and starchy.

Anyway, once you've brushed everything with oil, dust everything with your choice of spices. Here I've done curry on half and thyme on half.

Let grill for about half an hour or until vegetables are tender. You can eyeball this one. Watch out for the tomatoes sticking to the grill. Pull 'em off the grill and serve to your guests as is, or if you're spending a sad lonely evening like me, slide them off the skewers and save whatever you don't eat for later in the week!

Cost:
However much your vegetables cost. Let's see, here it's:
Eggplant:  $0.89
Zucchini: $0.50
Mushrooms: $1.00
Onion: $.10
Tomatoes: free! (garden for the win!)
Pepper: $.99
Total: $3.68
Serves: 3-6 depending on what else you're having.

Grilled Meatballs Variation 2 - Lentil Collard Meatballs

So last week we brought you the grill variant of Brooklyn Farm Girl's Baked Lettuce Soy Sauce Meatballs, but you know that I never make just one recipe at a time. So here's another variation on the grilled meatballs idea. As you can see from my garden box, I have lots of lettuce, but I also have lots of collards. Could they also be incorporated into meatballs?

Pictured, top to bottom: beets, collards, kale, lettuce

I think I'm trying to see how far from meatballs I can take this and still call it meatballs. Certainly meat is not the main ingredient here. It adds some nice flavor and holds things together.

These come out a bit blander and a bit drier than last week's variant - not unpleasantly so by any means, but they're less conducive to just popping in your mouth. These I would serve with some sort of sauce - maybe a garlicky yogurt-based one, maybe a chutney. Alternatively, you could just cut down the proportion of lentils and collards to meat.

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground meat (I used beef, you can use whatever you like)
• 2 cups cooked lentils
• 2 cups cooked collards
• 2 eggs
• 3 cloves garlic
• splash of oil
• splash of soy sauce
• seasonings (I used about a tablespoon of creole seasoning mix)

Instructions

Wash your collards and slice them finely. You can wrap your bunch of collards to form a tight roll and cut thin slices right through it; that'll give you about the size you need. Depending on how big and tough your collards are, you can also include the stems if you cut them finely enough. If they're particularly robust, though, tear out the stems.

Heat the oil in a large skillet, saute your garlic, dump the collards in and start cooking them down, stirring frequently. You may need to add a splash of water to help them cook down. Add a splash of soy sauce, at least two tablespoons worth. You want the greens to be thoroughly wilted. They won't lose as much volume as the lettuce you cooked last week, but they will shrink a bit.

Cook your lentils, if you haven't already. Actually, if you're not starting with cooked lentils, you'd better do that as the first step. Lentils don't take as long as other dried beans, but they'll take you at least half an hour.

Mix all ingredients - meat, lentils, collards, eggs, seasonings - together. If you want to, blend everything in a food processor. I didn't, in this case, but I would next time. It's a pain to clean and sanitize a food processor after having meat in it, but it does give a very fine even texture to the mixture.







Form the mixture into golf ball sized meatballs, and place them on a greased cookie tray.

Cook in a 350 oven or a medium grill for 30-45 minutes or until cooked through.

Grilled Lettuce Meatballs (Variation 1)

Grilled. Lettuce. Meatballs.

I have some garden boxes in my front yard, and despite the best efforts of April to kill off my first seedlings (snow halfway through April? for reals?) they are now flourishing, to the extent where I have to have a good excuse NOT to eat salad for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That was why I was so excited to see Brooklyn Farm Girl's Baked Lettuce Soy Sauce Meatballs.

Look at this! Isn't it pretty? It's an old bookcase full of lettuce!

The other thing I've been trying to figure out how to do more of: grilling vegetables. Meat's expensive, after all, and grilling, in addition to being delicious, doesn't heat up the kitchen. Turns out that if you put the heat on medium-low on the grill and put the top down, you can bake stuff in it just like an oven. It may be a bit more imprecise (well, for sure it's more imprecise with me; if you're the committed type you could maybe figure something out, I don't know) but that works just fine for a recipe like this.

The harvest from the box above

I really like these. The lettuce is both delicate and earthy, so these taste more complex than just a regular ball-o-ground-meat. You can, I suppose, treat them like other meatballs and put them in sandwiches or sauces, but if you put out a plateful of them at, say, a barbecue, I don't think you'll ever get that far!

Ingredients

Don't be afraid to squeeze the lettuce to bunch it for chopping.
You're going to be sauteeing it anyway.

• 1 lb ground meat (I used ground beef; you can try ground turkey, add in some ground pork, why not, if you can get it from a decent/affordable source)
• 1 cup breadcrumbs (this is a great way to use up stale bread, heels of bread, buns that you toasted but that nobody ate, that sort of thing. This is not a recipe worth buying breadcrumbs for.)
• 2 eggs
• 1 Whole Mess of Lettuce (I guess about 3 cups? 1 head? 1 garden box worth?)
• Splash of oil
• Splash of soy sauce
• 3 cloves garlic (or, you know, more. Garlic's good.)
• Seasonings (I used oregano, thyme, and adobo powder. Mess around. )

Instructions

Chop it up about this much.

Wash your lettuce and chop it nice and fine. I chop it crossways.

You'll lose a lot of volume here.

Heat up the oil in a large skillet, saute your garlic a bit, and then add the lettuce. That's right, you're sauteeing the lettuce like it was a bitter green. WHAT. I know, why didn't you think of that, right? It's all right, I didn't think of it either, but you bet I'm doing it now. It'll wilt up pretty fast, so keep stirring it around and don't let it burn. Add the soy sauce - a couple tablespoons or so. Turn off the heat.

It's about 1:1:1 bread:meat:lettuce by volume.

Get a bowl and mix together the remaining ingredients: meat, breadcrumbs, seasonings, eggs. Add your mess of lettuce. You can mix this together by hand or you can stick it in a food processor. I've tried both ways and they both work fine; it depends on the sort of texture you like in your end product.

Form the mixture into golf ball sized meatballs and stick them on a greased cookie sheet. You can put em right up next to each other. They're not cookies; they'll shrink rather than expand.

Ready for the grill

Cook in a 350 oven or a medium-low grill for 30-45 minutes or until cooked through.

Cost:

• Meat: $3.50
• Breadcrumbs: Marginal; come on. If you don't have leftover bread, wait till you do to make these.
• Eggs: $.50
• Lettuce: Free from the garden! Or about $1 worth, I guess.

Serves: However many people 18 meatballs serves. What else are they eating?