Butternut squash and leek soup, cheese crackers











This is why the vegetables are roasted first.



Odds and ends of chicken parts, how macabre, I'm pleased to have them out of the freezer. I have chicken broth but I want to get rid of these. Pressure pot makes quick work of it.




Here is where the Cuisinart shines, just load it up and let it run for five minutes but I did not drag out that heavy thing. The immersion blender does a less thorough job of it due to all the fiber to process and the volume. I don't care about the mixture being smooth as silk. I don't mind if some of the fibers remain. 

Taste-tested this and decided it needs substantial increased body, the type that butter provides.

And dry vermouth.

This changed the delightful butternut squash sweetness to noticeably less. Sweetness returned with mere teaspoons of brown sugar.


Crackers turn out damp like bread. They're returned to the oven and reheated but not baked and cooled in series repeatedly (three times) until they are completely dry, light, and crisp. 



My oyster crackers are square and they're cheese-flavored. 


One pint of soup.


Two tablespoons heavy cream drizzled around.



Cinnamon is great but it discolors the soup. It's good sprinkled on top. So is nutmeg. Chile flakes would be good, any kind of chile powder. The natural taste is sweet, the mixture can accept any number of serious adjustments. I was considering parsnips, carrots, and celery, and this time the full range of herbs is omitted. The rest, the bulk of it, can be changed to anything with tomato, avocado, tahini, peanut butter, fennel, chicken, bacon or ham, cilantro, mint, basil, cheese, citrus, anything

Asparagus salad


With London broil, oh yeah, I'm going to eat the whole thing. Eventually.





Obviously they're boiled or steamed first. This ice bath is to arrest the cooking and to shock the chlorophyll to dark green and hold that delicious color. If you don't it turns a less attractive green. This is ARTS! 



1/2 teaspoon sugar.







The vinaigrette is taste-tested and found wanting. Too much lemon. 1/3 dumped out, replaced with oil, adjusted with body-imparting anchovy and heat-imparting chile flakes and with purple onion.





This is it right here. This should be the picture on top but it's shown with a tomato instead. 

That happened at the store where I got this idea. The asparagus looked okay on its own and next to the tomato salad looked okay on its own. I told the guy they'd look a lot better together. He laughed and said, "Yeah." 

I realized later I could have bought both and mixed them myself.

Extra potatoes were baked a few days ago for London broil. All the potatoes are small. Three are refrigerated and they turn into something else. They' dry and not so good by themselves. One potato is opened up. It's cracked throughout. Broken to pieces and reheated in the microwave for one minute so the crystallized starches are dissolved, moisture spread throughout by a moment of steam heating through the potato pieces making them easier to accept the marinade in the bowl. The potato is tossed all around. Now the asparagus salad has potato and no tomato, although that too can still be added again. This serving has chunks of cheese. It's versatile.

Macaroni and cheese


With cold London broil. 


These packages are noticed in large boxes by what would be a discount end of an import aisle. The area has oddly mixed norteamericano influences on labeled brands manufactured in Mexico, apparently, while marketed back in the United States, if not produced here, to satisfy a mostly if not entirely immigrant target market. Coca Cola for example made with cane sugar and different than what we've become accustomed, and sold here in the U.S. in very small historic size bottles at a premium price of imported products. It says on this package in English made from durum wheat and that is a crop of northern United States and of Canada, cold climate with short summers, not of Central America. This very well could be produced here. They caught my eye because they looked like Ramen noodle packages and they're sold for 35¢. I think they are cute so I bought 3. 

A whole dollar worth.



"Hey, look at this." I half expected the woman to ignore me. Who speaks to strangers at the grocery like this, with an imperative no less?  Later I would speak to another woman gathering green beans, she gave me the idea to buy them, they look good. Her head was wrapped tightly in a scarf and she wore long gray heavy for summer unrevealing frumpy clothing. She smiled and responded mildly and her husband, I presume, moved directly straight in from near distance, like an arrow, ping, disrupting our incipient harmless confab. "DO NOT SPEAK TO MAN" the tacit command. Religious proscription no doubt.

What a fuck'n bummer. 



But this woman in dairy, a random black woman who happened to be there, the only person around, joined me in discussion of the remarkable discount on cheese. Both of us could not understand it. Asiago. Most confusing. It's good to look at these discounts. Their reasoning is odd. They must move things. Nothing can linger. It's all customer driven. Customers rejected this cheese for some reason, usually bad reasoning. Asiago. Reason alone to at least try it. I have plenty of cheese already, but c'mon, who can resist this weird serendipitous discount? Carpe caseum, seize the cheese. I bought three. What the heck. After all that friendly cheerful cheese-related discussion the random woman chose not to buy any.

What a minor bummer. 


Ready and waiting, the last thing added to sauce when it's finished off the heat.

Sauce: 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour.



Salt and pepper, of course, goes without saying, but there I just said it so apparently it does not go without saying. 




When you see this it looks like magic. It does. My buds are amazed seeing it. "Thank you for showing that," I've been told repeatedly like I'm some sort of magical chef or something. I'm not.  

Sometimes a sauce like this is done in two stages whisked off the heat. First an alcohol of some sort, to sludge, reduced a few seconds. 

Boiled down until a new sludge is formed and the remaining liquid whatever it is, whisked in to full boiling. It goes very fast and changes forms stunningly at hand while whisking, it looks a hopeless mess then looks too thin to use then as it reaches boiling temperature thickens right there in seconds. With cheese flavoring and thickening further, clogging it up off the heat. 

Nutmeg the last thing scraped on after plating, or last thing scraped into the sauce.

London broil, jacket potato


London broil to the faraway towns with the mustard smeared on whole grain and brown, London broil with with Rosemary pine smelling of forest and chopped very fine with zest of one lemon stripped to the pith high level flavors that shouldn't go with London broil don't look at us the standard dry rubs taste too much like rust, London broil. 






Denver broil, actually. 

The show tonight. 


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