Recipe Time!

Alex had a bad dream last night around 2:45 that left him convinced there was a bug crawling around his bed. Seriously, when I made him get back into bed, he crouched on the very tips of his toes on his blanket and eyed the sheets with wide-eyed suspicion. "What's that dot, Mommy? What's that line? What's that, there? No, there!" (Of course his sheets have pictures on them that, in the dark, produce dark patches that could well be bugs. If bugs were, y'know, the shape of Woody's hat.) And of course, by the time I had him convinced that there were no bugs and it was safe to lay down and go back to sleep, he'd been awake long enough that he didn't really want to sleep any more.

He was up for the better part of an hour. Perforce, so were Matt and I. So I'm not terribly coherent this morning.

Luckily, I took pictures as I was making dinner last night (because Matt gave me a new camera lens for our anniversary and I wanted to try it out) so today's entry is going to be a recipe. With pictures! (Er, if you click through the pictures to look at the bigger versions, try to ignore how messy my stove is. Aheh.) This is one of my all-time favorite soups, and it's both cheap and easy to make. Get ready for some truly awesome...

Black Bean Soup

I had this soup when I was in Mexico and loved it. I looked up recipes when I got home, but none of them really matched what I'd had down there. So I reverse-engineered it (I'd say 'cause I'm awesome like that, but really, it was just luck).

You start with a big soup pot, a couple of tablespoons of your choice of oil (I like to use a combination of vegetable oil and butter), and a medium-sized onion, diced. Put it on medium-high heat and sprinkle a little salt on it to help the onion sweat out its flavor.

When the onions are getting translucent and soft, you open two cans of black beans. If you can, get at least one can of them "seasoned". I've been experimenting with the various brands at my store, but really, they're all pretty much the same. Do not drain out the liquid; just dump it all in the pot.

In fact, add about a quarter-cup of hot water to each can and swish it around to rinse out all that tasty goodness. (You're going to have to rinse the can out anyway if you want to recycle it, right? Right?)

Then you add about eight ounces (= 1 cup. ish. I don't measure it, as being off a bit one way or the other won't make a big difference) of your favorite salsa. I'm a certified wimp when it comes to spicy food, so I get mild salsa, but you should use whatever you like. Except this is not the time to go for those delicious fruit-flavored salsas. I'm a peach and pineapple salsa addict, myself, but for this soup, you want plain old tomato salsa.

Dump it on in there and stir it up.

And then you add four cups of broth. I use chicken broth for the light flavor; if you wanted a richer, more complex flavor, you could go for beef broth. If you wanted to go vegetarian, you can use vegetable broth. I buy these 48-oz cartons of broth by the gross during the winter, when I'm making soup two or three times a week.

Yep, just pour it all in there. I did say this was really easy, right? Dicing the onion is pretty much the only real effort involved in this soup. And dicing an onion isn't exactly heavy labor.

Put the lid on it and let it simmer for a while. How long? Eh. If you're in a hurry, five minutes will do. If you like a thicker soup, leave the lid off and let some of the liquid boil off. At any rate, there's no need to go longer than half an hour. Stir it every little bit to make sure the beans aren't sticking to the bottom. And taste it at least once to see how you like the flavor. Add more salsa and/or other spices to taste -- but I never do. (This picture isn't really useful at all. I just think my pot is pretty and wanted to show it off.)

When it's done boiling, move it off the heat...

...and get out your immersion/stick blender. You can do this in a standard blender, in small batches, but that's a huge pain in the ass. Plus, I have a friend who was burned badly making soup in a blender. You can get a decent stick blender for $20 or less, and a pretty nice one for around $50. (Beyond that, you're getting into professional-grade blenders, and if you're going there, you don't need me to tell you about them.) But really, if you're only going to use it for soups, a cheap one is sufficient; the higher wattage blenders are only necessary if they're expected to tackle hard items like ice or nuts.

Digression done. Where was I? Oh, yes. Soup. Blend that mother until it's smooth and creamy. This one turned out a smidge more watery than usual, because I was finishing off that jar of salsa, so I added a little extra water to rinse it all out. Waste not, want not. But I probably should've taken the lid off for a bit to boil off the extra.

Spoon it into bowls and serve with a handful of tortilla chips, or with a spoonful of sour cream on top if you want to be decadent about it.

It's not the prettiest soup, but it's so delicious. Both of my kids love it -- even Alex, who as a rule does not like dinner. I get five or six servings out of this recipe, but those are entree-sized servings. If you were going to serve this as a side dish on, say, taco night or with quesadillas, you could get twice as many servings out of it.

Today

I've got a pile of things to do today.

I've got a 50-page document that I need to consolidate comments on and re-write.

I've got a three-inch-thick pile of mail (no really, I got out a ruler) to open and sort and otherwise attend to.

I should try to wedge myself into my boss's schedule for fifteen minutes to talk about the next step on my six-sigma project.

While I'm at it, I should try to get him to make a decision on the other project I'm (technically) doing, but stalled on about a month ago.

I should go to the gym. (I keep trying to increase the difficulty level on the bike, but every time I do, my knee aches for the next several days. Stupid knee.)

I need to update my database and write my bi-monthly status report.

I need to do my meal-planning for next week.

I need to put some stuff on my wishlist that I want but can't get since I'm in a No-Buy Zone.

I'd like to finish writing the chapter I started yesterday.

Sometime soon (but not necessarily today) I need to get some new hand-weights, and re-work my office exercise routine a little

---

Last night I made a variation on tequila-lime chicken. I cubed some chicken breast and marinated it for the day in a mixture of good tequila left over from my trip to Cancun, soy sauce, lime juice, and olive oil. Then I threw all of it in a skillet and cooked the chicken, and when the chicken was done I added a can of diced tomatoes, a can of kidney beans, and two cups of frozen corn, and seasoned it all with a dash of onion powder and two dashes of chili powder. (No salt, since there was plenty of sodium in the soy sauce.) Simmered it all until the juice was nice and thick, portioned it out onto plates, and gave each a sprinkle of sharp cheddar and a few dollops of sour cream.

(Actually, I didn't use sour cream. I used plain, fat-free greek-style yogurt, which is exactly the right consistency, and closer in flavor to real sour cream than even low-fat sour cream. Someone suggested it to me a while back, and when I noticed our grocery store had it, I thought I'd give it a try. Color me impressed! Now I have to go back to the store to get some more so I can put it on the chili I'm making tomorrow.)

Anyway, Penny is pretty picky about all-in-one meals, and she's particularly picky about sauces on her chicken, but she ate all this without so much as a curled lip of "do I really hafta?". And it's healthy (excepting perhaps the tequila and the cheese, but it's not like either was excessive) and it was wonderfully filling. It goes on THE LIST! (Hrm. Guess that means I need some more quality tequila...)

Boredom?

I had an hour yesterday with nothing in particular to work on, and I thought I'd get my photo album all caught up, since the last time I updated it was at the end of July, and we're now into September.

Except that, apparently, I uploaded oodles of pictures to Flickr, but didn't copy any of them to my thumb drive. Getting the pictures back from Flickr was pretty much out of the question because my 'net connection is just absurdly slow in the afternoons (stupid corporate network; I can actually feel the enormous chunk when the west coast gets to work and logs in right around lunchtime for me).

So I... didn't do much of anything. I used to have dozens of little projects to work on when I had time, but now I can't remember what they were. Theoretically, I have a writing project I could be working on, but I can't seem to pull the pieces together in my head, and until I work out a decent actual plot, it's just a character exercise. (I do awesome character exercises -- I really do! -- but it doesn't really hold a reader for long if nothing is happening.)

I didn't even really surf around -- cf. two paragraphs up and the slow network.

I need to come up with some projects.

---

Having Penny take a snack at mid-morning seems to have done the trick! Her sugars were in range every time we checked her for the whole rest of the day, whoo!

(I'm looking at her chart from the last week right now, because I need to fax it in later, and we're burning through test strips like water -- she gets 5 shots a day, but we're checking her glucose level 6-10 times a day. We need to a) order more, and b) make sure we've got enough refills to get to December before her endo appointment tomorrow.)

Alex is doing great. As much as he's Mama's Boy at home, when we get him to daycare, he's all about getting down in the play area and babbling at his girlfriends (when I drop him off in the morning, there's always 2 or 3 little girl babies, and no other boys, and he's always so happy to see them!)

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I made a crockpot recipe yesterday that turned out really well, so I think it's a keeper -- pork roast with onions. I'd meant to make potatoes with it, too, but forgot to put them in the pot, so we didn't have potatoes. I put some strawberries on the plates to fill up the empty space that the potatoes would have filled, and it might have been even better that way.

Penny even ate it, which is a bonus - she's a little picky when it comes to meats. There's a dish that we'll be eating again!

Heeeeere, Feeshy Feeshy Feeshy...

Tonight was my second attempt at cooking fish, and I'm feeling pretty danged successful about it.

This time, I made tuna. Specifically, this recipe for teriyaki tuna steaks. (I followed it pretty precisely, except I only used half the garlic, and I broiled the tuna instead of grilling it.)

I got ambitious about the side items, as well. When I put the tuna back in for its final few minutes under the broiler, I added pineapple rings (fresh would've been better, but we don't eat it that often) and some halved tomatoes which I also brushed with the sauce. I also microwaved some edamame.

It made for a colorful plate (I wish I'd stopped to take pictures before we sat down to devour it), and the flavors all blended perfectly. Matt was enthusiastic, and Penny was at least willing to eat the amount we told her she had to eat in order to get dessert.

And when Penny was done, there was a slab of tuna steak left on her plate that was two or maybe three ounces -- not quite enough for a meal, but far too much to toss. There was also most of a tomato half that she hadn't eaten. I considered eating it myself, but I was already full from my own dinner.

So I chopped it all up, and tomorrow for lunch, I'm having the poshest tuna salad I've ever had. (Complete with some fancy pita chips to scoop it up.)

Ladies and gentlemen... we have another winner.

Something Fishy

The other night, as Matt and I were just settling down to sleep, he said, "Do you hear that?"

I lifted my head from the pillow a bit and heard... nothing out of the ordinary. "No," I said, and relaxed back into the cool fluff.

"It sounds like someone's playing a radio."

I strained to catch even a hint of bass rhythm wafting through the air. "I don't hear anything."

Matt sat up. Oh, for petesake, I thought. It's obviously not the kids, and what are you going to do about it if it's the neighbors?

He got out of bed, and headed for the bedroom door. He paused as he went by my nightstand, and stopped. "I think it's your alarm."

I still couldn't hear anything. I sighed and turned over to face him, the nightstand, and the radio alarm clock. "No, I haven't had the alarm set since-" With my face three inches from the clock, I heard it. Faintly. Barely. The radio.

Someone (likely Penny) had turned on the radio, turned the volume almost entirely all the way down, and then wandered off. I turned the volume back to something normal and then turned off the radio.

How long had it been like that? Would I have ever noticed?

We all know my hearing sucks, but seriously, I felt like a LOLCat: "LISNIN: UR DOIN IT RONG."

---

There was condensation on the cars this morning. Penny stopped at the first window she came do -- my front passenger window -- and drew a large oval with her finger. Inside one end of the oval, she drew a circle, and filled it in. At the other end, just outside the oval, she drew two more, smaller ovals.

"Look, Mommy! I drew you a picture!"

Having seen this picture before, I knew what to say. "What a beautiful whale, sweetie! Thank you!"

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Today is brief anecdote day because Alex woke up last night at 2:15, and then after Matt put him back to bed, he laid there and talked to himself for a while, so I couldn't get to sleep because I was braced for him to get fussy. That lasted until probably about 3 or so. And then he was up this morning at 5:15.

Today is not a day to split my morning coffee half-decaf, is what I'm saying.

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I made salmon for dinner last night.

And I mean real salmon, not canned stuff. I actually bought a 12oz salmon fillet and cooked it.

I don't eat fish. I've never been big into seafood. Fishsticks, which hardly count, and canned tuna or salmon, but not real fish, much. I used to love shrimp when I was little, but somewhere around middle school or so I developed an aversion to their kind of poppy texture that I'm only just beginning to get around now.

But about 90% of my friends are going to Weight Watchers or on some other diet right now. (No, really. K.T., Kevin, Elizabeth, Dave, Karen, Sam, John, my parents, most of the women and a couple of the men at work...) And even though I'm not really ready to join them, it's making me think about how to not-diet in a healthier way, if that makes any sense. And I've been hearing for years how fish is one of those really super foods -- nutritionally dense, low in bad fats and high in good ones, etc. One of the things that everyone should eat at least once a week.

And then I was watching one of my cooking shows (I don't even remember which one) and they had a slab of tuna that they just barely seared and served still rare and it actually looked really good. Maybe it's time to try fish again, I thought. I decided I would try real, fresh fish -- the last time I tried it, I went with a pre-seasoned, frozen thing, and Matt liked it but it had this nasty, back-of-the-throat freezer burn taste to me. And I'd try salmon and tuna, which my palate has at least a nodding acquaintance with, via the canned stuff. (I know, I know, it's like comparing fresh, sun-ripened tomatoes with ketchup, but there's a similarity.)

So this week was the first experiment, and it was salmon. I found a recipe that sounded both tasty and simple (a glaze, and then broil the fish) and I cut my fillet into three pieces and charged onward. The smoke alarm went off because the bits of glaze that pooled away from the fish burnt and smoked, but what was on the fish did what glazes are supposed to do.

I took the fish out of the oven when the timer went off and regarded it dubiously. "...or until it flakes with a fork," said the recipe. I did this once before, with another kind of fish, and never did figure out what "flakes with a fork" meant. I tentatively prodded at one piece with the spoon I was using for the couscous, and three big flakes fell off. Well, that answered that.

I brushed the last of the glaze over the salmon, and put couscous on the plates, and served it.

Penny was extremely reluctant to try the fish until Matt pointed out that it was pink, which is her favorite color. She wound up eating about half her piece -- maybe about 2 ounces of salmon, altogether, but at least she didn't take one bite and then stop completely. Mostly, I suspect, she was just full from the couscous.

Holy crap, I made a fish dish, and liked it! Matt was enthusiastic, and Penny didn't hate it... I'm going to make this again!

Here's the recipe:

Line a baking pan with foil, coat it with nonstick spray, and on it put:
12oz salmon, cut into 4-6oz servings, skin-side down (Next time, I might go with a bigger piece.)

In a bowl, mix:
2 Tbsp maple syrup (I used the real thing, but I don't know if that's important.)
2 Tbsp soy sauce (the original recipe called for low-sodium, but I like salt.)

Brush about half of it over the fish, being sure to coat all visible flesh.

Broil for 7 minutes, then take it out and brush about half the remaining glaze over the fish.

Broil another 6-8 minutes ("or until it flakes easily with a fork"), and brush on the last of the glaze.

Serve with rice or couscous.

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Speaking of Penny trying new things... At John and Sam's for Mother's Day dinner, John grilled up a bunch of fresh asparagus. I had a couple of stalks, I don't know if Matt had any (we were swapping out because of Alex), but Penny ate like... four or five of them. She preferred it to the chicken or any of the other vegetables I gave her.

It never would have occurred to me to try her on asparagus -- it's such a strong flavor, and it's traditionally one of those foods kids hate -- but she scarfed it right down.

Mind you, if I buy a bundle next week and serve it, she won't touch it.