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Peanut Soup with Rice and Scallions — Chopping Block Report

KC’s favorite soup is tomato, and she eats A LOT of peanut butter, so this recipe for Peanut Soup with Rice and Scallions seemed right up her alley! Sometimes, I think the beauty of the pureed soup is also its Achilles heel — the simple, smooth texture.  So, in order to avoid monotony from that texture, I generally serve smaller portions of pureed soups than of soups with more textural variety.  This recipes says that it makes 6 servings.  I halved the recipe, and I would say that I still got 6 servings from it.

It’s pretty foolproof.  You sautee the vegetables and aromatics.

Then, add stock and tomatoes, bring to a boil, and simmer for a while.  Then puree.  I use an immersion blender to puree hot liquids right in the pan, which makes life a lot simpler and less dangerous than using a blender!

 

Then after serving, sprinkle with sliced scallions. I omitted the tofu because the rest of our meal contained plenty of protein already.

When I tasted the soup, at first I thought, “Oh, this is just another tomato soup.”  Then, the peanut flavor snuck up and mingled with the tomato flavor in a way that was very surprising to my American palate.  Of course, if you were raised in Africa, this flavor combination will seem obvious to you!

I’ll definitely make this again!

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Big Girls, Big (Dinner) Expectations!

From my perspective, the dinner menu from one night last week consisted of an “entree” salad because of the inclusion of the chicken breast and baguette accompaniment, and the rest was just whatever fresh produce I had in the house to offer some variety and increase our consumption of fruits & veggies:

Caesar salad with chickpeas and grilled chicken breasts

french baguette with goat cheese and sliced fresh figs & plums

apple slices with sweet potato dip

In my mind, it was quick and healthy, but not particularly special.  KC, however, declared this to be her new favorite dinner.  So, I have to ask, did da Vinci know he was creating a masterpiece when he painted the Mona Lisa?  I sure didn’t know that this particular dinner table canvas was going to make history!  When I questioned KC about what made this dinner so memorable, she exclaimed, “Well, it is just so big!”

Then, last night, when I made a simple dinner perfect for eating while watching football on a crisp evening — black bean chili with Colombian arepas (corn cakes) — she pouted that “this dinner is not “big.”  I tried unsuccessfully to explain that the chili contained something like 20 ingredients, and it was a big dinner in a little bowl.  No dice.

Apparently, the new dinner yardstick is one that reflects the number of distinct items and amount of variety on the table.  Perhaps she is in cahoots with the dishwasher . . .

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Carpe Diem … and Stone Fruits!

  

When I talk or write about cooking, I emphasize the value of my kitchen game plans for helping me get a healthy dinner on the table quickly after a day of work.  However, there are some things that just can’t be planned, and that’s what crossed my mind this afternoon at my local farm stand. I was wrapping up my shopping, when I saw it from across the aisle.  

Each Box  $1.00  

  

Now, most of the boxes on the table adorned with this sign were: (a) quite small; and (b) full of vegetables that…well, let’s be honest…were approaching the “limp noodle” stage of life.  But one box stood out.  It was a flat box used for shipping tomatoes, about the size of a case of beer, and it was full of stone fruits — peaches, nectarines, and plums.  I could see that several were bruised, but many of them just looked a little miffed that they were being passed over for a centerfold in Farm Stand Quarterly.