Soups

Chicken Soup with Wild Rice and Greens

April 11, 2012
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Recipe for Middle Aged Weight Creep

1 cup sit all day

2 lbs eat whatever is put in front of your face

1 dash too much work

1 generous spoonful of no exercise

1 pinch of laziness

Serves: two ever-widening hips.


I’ve got to do something about this. In the past I’ve tried cleanse diets, and they work, like any diet will, until you stop doing it and slide back into old habits.

This time, the goal is to simply eat healthier, limiting fats and simple carbs, and try to get my body moving more. Sounds easy, right? Maybe for you, but for me the “moving” part is harder than the “eating” part. So I’ll start with the food and hope the exercise follows.

I made this soup because it’s healthy and filling and doesn’t feel like “diet food.” If you are anything like me, “diet” is a four …

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Cannellini Bean Soup With Beef, Roasted Eggplant and Orange Gremolata

December 7, 2011
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Last week was one of the most personally challenging in recent memory. You know the expression “when life hands you lemons…”? Last week, life threw oranges the size of softballs at me. The week included the death of our beloved cat Basil (ode below), a wicked cold which left me gasping for breath (still am), and hurricane force winds (in Los Angeles!) which caused damage to our roof, left debris all over our yard and left us without power for 36 hours, all while I was working extra long hours. Any one of those things alone could leave a girl searching the heavens and asking “Why me?”, yet all together, I just had to laugh (after I stopped crying) and say “Seriously??”

The last thing I wanted to do was cook, and for the most part I didn’t. But when I read about the “Souperbowl” challenge my …

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Home Made Chicken Stock

April 1, 2011
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A couple of weeks ago I posted about how to brine and roast a chicken where I wrote how I always assumed that everyone realized that roasting a chicken was easy and how that assumption made an “ass out of u and me.” My second assumption was that people also knew how easy it was to make chicken stock and did not need me to provide that information. Again, I was disabused of this notion.

So, here we are with my easy-peasy recipe for home made chicken stock. You don’t need much more than a big soup pot, the leftover bones from that roasted chicken, and some vegetable odds and ends. There are a couple of options here as to how you make the stock.

Option #1 is the recipe below where the chicken bones are roasted first with onions. This results in a nice rich stock with a dark brown color which is …

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Moroccan Garbanzo Bean Stew

May 24, 2010
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Most chefs, like fashion designers, are easily influenced and inspired by those who have gone before them and by the greater world around them. We learn, we adapt, we modify and improve upon the food we eat and even read about. We’re inspired by our environment, our location and even the weather. Basically, like fashion, there is very little “new” in the cooking world unless you are someone like Ferran Adria whipping up a liquid olive in a fit of molecular gastronomy. Cooking is reinterpreting the basics, over and over, in new combinations, to keep it interesting.

When I was looking for ideas for vegan dishes to make during the 21 day cleanse I did a few months ago, I came across dozens of recipes for soups/stews made with garbanzo beans (a.k.a. chickpeas). This recipe is not any one of those in particular, but certainly influenced by many of them. Nor is it “authentic” Moroccan cuisine, but rather inspired …

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