Sunday soup (and salad)

I just completed a week's worth of cooking and am now relaxing with an omelet scramble with diced ham, a few shakes of Cholula hot sauce and pepper Jack cheese, topped with the salsa I just made. Eggs, hot sauce and salsa...mmmm.

As to my culinary exploits: I realized that tomato season is drawing to a close and I have not yet made Classic Gazpacho. I follow this recipe loosely: I use more fresh tomatoes and less juice, substitute lime juice for vinegar, throw in a minced hot pepper instead of the roasted red bell pepper, etc. This time I added half an avocado left from the salsa. I puree the soup very smooth, since I will garnish with the crunchy salsa (tomato, hot pepper, cucumber, onion, cilantro, avocado, lime juice, a pinch of cumin, S&P, tossed with a little olive oil).

Speaking of cold soup, I made Carrot Soup with Cumin and Lime from my favorite soup cookbook of all time: Sunday Soup by Betty Rosbottom, published by the ever-fabulous Chronicle Books. (I think I can use the photo if I give Betty and Chronicle credit, which they totally deserve.) Anyone who wants to branch out from basic vegetable soup should have this book.

Finally, I assembled a pasta salad with cannellini, roughly chopped baby arugula, diced onion and red bell pepper, chunky-chopped cucumber, and crumbled feta in a lemon vinaigrette with Penzey's Greek seasoning. I will serve it on a bed of more arugula, my new favorite green.

Whew. This concludes the cooking portion of our program. I am set for the week, food-wise. Now I need to find something to knit...

Done and done

As previously confessed, I am fickle in my knitting ways.

I feel no particular pressure to complete one project before starting another. Therefore, I always have an undisclosed number of works in progress (WIP) and unfinished objects (UFO) in various stages of completion.

In spite of my short attention span, vis a vis knitting, I am happy to report that I have finished no fewer than four projects this summer. Three of these are shown in the photo.

In the same three months, I started three new projects that are still WIP, so that's a net finished object (FO) score of one. (Wow. Somehow I thought the score would be higher. I probably should have left it at four FOs.)

Two of the summer WIPs are proceeding apace, and I'm determined to finish at least one before turning my attention to fall knitting: cables, wraps and woolier yarns. I shall not be distracted by the four new patterns I just downloaded or the three gorgeous yarns that somehow found their way into the stash collection over the past couple of weeks. Until I finish at least one WIP, I will NOT start another project.

Well...maybe just one.

Thinking outside the [fruit] bowl

I went nuts at one of two local Russian vegetable markets this morning. I spotted lemon plums and white peaches and decided to make a fruit salad.

To my environmentally correct canvas shopping bag, I added kiwi fruit, a mango, Mandarin oranges, limes, and a guava. I also got poblano and jalapeno peppers.

A trip to my favorite farm stand yielded tomatoes, cucumbers, orange and purple (!) sweet peppers, and corn.

At home, I began to peel and chop the fruit. The only non-starter was the guava. What's with the seeds? Is it like a pomegranate and you're supposed to eat them? I don't care for seeds in my food, so I carved out a few chunks, diced them up, and moved on. I squeezed in some lime juice and started to think about that jalapeno. I Googled "Mexican fruit salad" for inspiration, then minced the jalapeno and added about a half-teaspoon, along with diced cucumber and tomato.

Then came the boldest move yet (for me, anyway). After some deliberation, I added about a half-teaspoon of chile powder and some lime fresco salt from SaltWorks. I believe this will be totally swell for dessert following tostada salad and avocado-cucumber soup.

If not, I'll just set it out on the table and admire it.

Woolly enthusiasms

I love yarn. I don't knit because I want or need another scarf. I don't knit sweaters, so there are no fashion or wardrobe motivations. I knit because I cannot resist the infinite variety of fibers, textures and colors.

When I first took up knitting in my early 20s, I had one place to buy yarn: Rose's department store in Boone, North Carolina. There was one kind of yarn to buy there: Red Heart Knitting Worsted. I remember walking back and forth along the yarn aisle, carefully considering colors and calculating how much I could afford to buy that day. It was enormous fun.

It's hard to imagine that quaint department store when I go into a yarn shop now. The choices fairly boggle the mind. Yarns are available in every imaginable fiber. You don't just get wool; you can choose from Merino, Bluefaced Leicester, Corriedale and Shetland. And that's just the sheep. Llamas, alpaca, cashmere goats, angora rabbits, bison, musk ox and yak all give up their coats (but not their lives) for the knitters.

Then there are the plants. There have always been the classics: cotton and linen. Now enterprising yarn companies (and maybe farmers) have discovered that bamboo, sugar cane, soy and corn can be spun into knitting yarns. Sometimes you wonder whether to knit it or put it in a salad.

And don't even get me started on color. Just when I think I will never need another skein of red yarn, a silk cashmere blend the color of ripe cherries leaps off the shelf as I walk by. I didn't know there were so many variations of purple (Plum Blossom, Grapevine), blue (Mood Indigo, Sapphire Trail), and even black (Shadow, Victorian Gothic).

With all those choices, who can resist just one more skein? I certainly can't.

Soup's on: Summer Ed.

Is there anything more refreshing than cold soup on a hot summer day? Maybe spicy gazpacho, chock full of fresh juicy tomatoes, diced cucumber and onion, cilantro and garlic. Or silky avocado topped with fresh tomato salsa.

As this scorching summer drags on, I have stepped up my search for cold soup ideas. I've already made several good ones, including the much-loved Icy Cucumber with Smoked Salmon and Dill and Chilled Carrot Soup with Cumin and Lime, both from Sunday Soup. If you are a soup enthusiast, I can't recommend this book highly enough, along with Love Soup.

This weekend, I'm trying Moroccan-Spiced Cold Tomato Soup. As much as I love gazpacho, I want to try something a little different. I will have it with Curried Chicken Salad from Raising the Salad Bar. For an all-veg dinner, I think I'll also make this tabbouleh, only with Israeli couscous instead of farro.

I confess that I have not yet ventured into the land of fruit soups. Something about that just doesn't seem right. I'm sure it's wonderfully refreshing and I'll try it one of these days. Just not today.

If you'd like to try some cold soups while summer vegetables are available, there are dozens of recipes on Epicurious and Foodnetwork. Just search on Cold Soup and you're sure to find something to keep you cool on these hot August nights.

In praise of the tomato

Nothing says summer to me more than a garden-fresh tomato.

Corn on the cob and homemade ice cream have their place on the summertime table, but for me there is nothing like a tomato right out of the garden.

I remember standing at my mom's kitchen sink when I was a kid, eating whole tomatoes still warm from the sun. I have even fonder memories of grilled burgers and BLTs and pimiento cheese sandwiches with thick slabs of tomato from my dad's garden.

In those days, the vines along the fence behind our house hung heavy with tomatoes all summer. Mom set out a platter of sliced tomatoes with every meal (tomatoes with breakfast, mmm), and she canned whole tomatoes, homemade spaghetti sauce, and tomato juice so we could enjoy the bounty all winter. Dad doesn't do much gardening any more, but he still has a few tomato plants. He starts them from pots in the spring and tends them indoors until it's time to plant them outside.

My favorite thing to do with summer tomatoes is to cut them up in bite-size chunks and put them in a pretty glass bowl with some sea salt and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. If I'm feeling fancy, I might toss in some thinly sliced basil and a drizzle of good olive oil.

Usually, though, I keep it simple. Some things are close to perfect just the way they are.

Overhyped books are dead to me

Nothing kills a book for me faster than over-exposure. Same thing happens when I see a trailer for a movie or TV show 187 times before it even comes out. I don't just get sick of it; I get hostile. And if I see one more article, review, Amazon recommendation, or web pop-up ad about this book, I am going to declare a one-woman war on Sweden.

Not that I don't admire the talents of the late Stieg Larsson. I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in the Millenium Trilogy, and found vivid characters, a tight plot, and plenty of suspense. I also found plenty of violence. Most of the time I saw it coming in time to skimreallyfast past it, but it slipped up on me a couple of times.

And it wasn't just violence; it was the T-word, and it is a known fact that I avoid  like the plague any TV show, movie, or book with even the faintest whiff of the T-word. 24? Prison Break? Not a fan.

I read that the second book in the trilogy was even more violent than the first, so I decided to pass. Now the third one is out and it's hotter than Baltimore in July. There might as well have been no other books published this summer. The only media topic hotter than this book is the burning question of who will play Lisbeth Salander, one of the the main characters, in the U.S. versions of the movies.

It has reached a level of over-exposure so pervasive and annoying that I wouldn't read it now even if I wasn't scared of it. You can't pick up a magazine, open a newspaper, or log on to a website without seeing it.

Apparently, you can't even read a blog without seeing it.

Making the world safe for UFOs

I am a fickle knitter. I admit this freely and make no apologies.

At any given time, there are at least four or five works in progress (WIPs) in my A-list basket. Several other barely started, half finished, and almost forgotten projects, also known as unfinished objects (UFOs), languish in B-list cedar chests, storage bins and boxes.

I can be fully engaged in a project one minute and be totally distracted by another pattern or yarn the next. If I walk by the A-list yarn bin and my eye falls on a beautiful silk-wool blend in ocean colors, I can have stitches on the needles in five minutes. It's not that I have forgotten the first project; I will get back to it. Eventually.

Many knitters do not engage in this kind of knitting polygamy. These knitters won't start another project until the current one is finished. This concept is foreign to me. Faced with the temptation of an infinite variety of luscious fibers in gorgeous colors, how can I be expected to remain faithful to a single project?

Not that I don't finish projects. I finish plenty of projects. So far this year, I have finished no fewer than 14 projects. Sure, I started a few more that are in various stages of completion. And, yes, there are several others in hibernation. I'm OK with that. I am, after all, the boss of my knitting and I can have as many WIPs and UFOs as I want.

As William Hurt said in The Big Chill, I'm not hung up on this completion thing.

Heard any good books lately?

I'm listening to a wonderful audiobook, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. I am captivated by the stiff upper lip voice of the very British Major and have made a couple of trips to the grocery store just to hear what happens next between him and Mrs. Ali. 

For me, audiobooks work best when I'm driving or during my early morning walks around the neighborhood. It's not always easy to find good ones. I'm just as picky about books on CD as I am about books in print -- even more so, in fact. If the narrator is simply reading the book aloud, it's all over for me in about two minutes.

That's probably because the audiobook bar was set high from the beginning. The first books I remember listening to were John D. McDonald mysteries. Darren McGavin didn't just read The Dreadful Lemon Sky and The Long Lavender Look. His gravelly voice brought Travis McGee to world-weary life.

Listening to Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, performed by a full cast, it's easy to imagine families gathered around those big radios in the 1930s, riveted by Orson Welles as The Shadow and Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.

Those guys had nothing on the great Jim Dale, who narrated all seven Harry Potter books. From Harry's boyish heroism to Voldemort's bone-chilling hiss, Dale created unforgettable voices for every one of the dozens of characters who roamed the halls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Sometimes I suspect the audio version of a book surpasses the printed version in entertainment value. I'm not sure I would have made it all the way through The Help, but the three women who gave voice to Skeeter, Minnie and Aibileen propelled the story to its final dramatic confrontation.

Sometimes books really should be heard and not seen.

Buying local

It's hard to buy local produce year round. That's why I love when farm stands and farmers' markets sprout in parking lots and along the roadside during the summer.

There's nothing like bright red and green peppers, ripe tomatoes, and crispy cucumbers right out of farm gardens and fields (unless, of course, you grow your own). Once, while I was browsing my favorite farm stand, a flatbed truck loaded with corn drove up from a nearby field. It doesn't get any fresher or more local than that.

With my first farmers' market haul of this summer, I prepared a "make it up as you go" corn salad. I separated the kernels from the cobs using the great OXO corn stripper, then tossed them into a bowl with chopped sweet red pepper, green onions, and cilantro. Dressed it with salt and pepper, chili powder, the juice of half a lime, and a generous drizzle of olive oil. Gave it a good toss and served it up with chunks of cucumber and cold chicken.

This idea can be adapted easily to larger quantities (I used three ears of corn and got about 3.5 cups of salad) and whatever add-ins (black beans and tomatoes would be good), herbs and seasonings you like and have on hand.

For those who like their corn cooked and hot, I'll share a recipe for Asiago and Corn Risotto that my friend Cathy spotted in the Washington Post this week. I will be making this before the summer corn is gone.

All too soon, the farms stands will pack up for the season and I'll be back to searching out the least tasteless form of tomato at Fresh Market or Wegmans.

For now, though, I get to enjoy the full flavor of summer in tomatoes that didn't travel across the country to get to my table.