I am feeling all gourmet and shit tonight. I had leftovers from my roasted root vegetables that we had last night and decided to make a soup with them and some sweet potatoes. For the base of the recipe I used the one found here, which I have made before and love. My soup tonight will have no butternut squash in it at all, but instead, sweet potatoes, carrots, turnips, purple sweet potatoes, onions and apples. (Note: purple sweet potatoes are not very sweet.)
I also picked some of my giant mustard leaves and some kale and have some of those cooking with one slice of chopped Very Good bacon (not from Papa Jay's) and onions and tomatoes.
AND...I've made up a loaf of oat and molasses bread with cloves and golden raisins although that is going to be one heavy, hearty loaf because it is just not rising but who cares? Mr. Moon and I both have a full set of teeth and we know how to use them.
My soup already tastes good and it doesn't have the coconut milk in it yet, nor the Thai green curry paste that I'm going to add to the pot in a while. And oh! My kitchen smells like heaven and so does my yard which smells sweetly of tea olive and wisteria and I don't know if this is true everywhere but the bees are showing up in large numbers and they did not last year and I am heartened by this.
I am so glad that I got to go to Europe when I was young to taste real food, as opposed to the mostly-crap I'd been raised on from cans and boxes and bags (the joy! the joy! when instant mashed potatoes flakes were invented!) and for the presence of the old woman we called Granny Mathews who cooked with real food, grabbing a bit of this, a pinch of that from the dried peppers and herbs she had hanging in her kitchen, to add to the pot while smoking an impossibly long cigarette with an impossibly long ash at the end of it and wearing a negligee and last, but not least, to the ultimate in hippie restaurants I used to eat at in Denver, Colorado in the early seventies, called Hanuman's Conscious Cookery where I once saw Alan Ginsberg dining at the same time I was and yes, I have talked about all of these things before but it bears repeating.
I do love to cook as I do love to eat and I feel comfortable cooking everything from what we might call traditional soul food to hippie vegetarian to hunter's wife venison cuisine to homemade pizza. A good part of my life is taken up with the garden which provides us vegetables and the chickens which provide us eggs. And give me some fresh grouper and I'll do it justice.
It's been a good day in all regards and I'm about to go blend up the vegetables and cashews to make the creamy soup and I'm not sure that Mr. Moon will enjoy it that much (he's not a big curry fan) but I will and he'll eat almost anything and appreciate it so it will be okay.
We are all hungry. We all need to eat. We who can cook are blessed in that we can make what it is that we want to eat and we who are blessed to have dirt to grow things in and who are married to hunters and fishermen are possibly the most blessed.
And may I add that when I went to make bread I realized I didn't have enough flour and then remembered that I could simply walk down to Papa Jay's and buy some?