Soupy Sunday!

Yesterday I had yet another example of how the simple things in life can be some of the best.

I woke up in the morning and baked bread. I have never actually done this before. I used the recipe for "Rancho La Peurta Whole Wheat Bread" that I found here: www.orangette.blogspot.com . It was a little denser than I like my bread, but very good. It was pronounced fantastic by AC, who is a connoisseur of homemade bread, so I'll take that as high praise. AC and his girlfriend KW joined Boyfriend and I for soup for lunch. The soup, as usual, was one of Julia Child's. It was the saffron potato variation on her garlic soup. I was a little nervous as I was spooning it up. It was far too easy to make, for one thing, and for another it looked like nothing. Small pieces of boiled potato in a clear broth. Oh dear, I thought to myself, They're all going to hate it.

But JC didn't let me down. It was delicious! Unaccountably delicious, in fact. One of those meals that are double or triple the sum of their parts. And just too simple not to make all the time. Add friends, homemade bread, cookies, port and wonderful friends and you get a perfect Sunday.

(I made my usual chocolate chip cookies as a fall-back in case the rest of the meal was a disaster. I aged the dough for 36 hours after reading an article that claimed that this was the holy grail of baking tips. I don't think it made that much difference.)

Julia Child's Garlic Potato Soup:

I haven't given measurements for some of the herbs because she called for dried and I used fresh. Herbs are something you can play around with anyway.

1 head of garlic
thyme
sage
four sprigs of parsley
2 cloves
pinch of saffron
3 cups chopped potatoes.

Separate the cloves of garlic and peel them. Throw them in 2 quarts of water with the thyme, sage, parsley and cloves. Simmer for 30 minutes. Strain the broth and discard the garlic and cloves. Add the potatoes and saffron to the broth and simmer for 20 minutes more.

And that's it! Seriously, that's all you have to do for a foolishly yummy soup.

Cooky

A little bit about myself, if you haven't gleaned it already: I am very sentimental about the past. Particularly my own childhood. There were issues, of course. Mean kids and everything that brings. But there were some very wonderful times in my home, and particularly in my kitchen. Most of these memories involve my mother, and almost as many involve Betty Crocker.

The Betty Crocker Cookbook, circa 1977, was a constant. Her happy face, the colours dimmed over the years smiled over hundreds of cakes, cookies and pies. Coming home to see that orange binder open on the table meant something delicious was on it's way. My mother's copy is an absolute mess. Most of the pages are falling out, a lot are out of order. They're badly stained with grease and chocolate. Some have my mothers neat handwriting amending the recipes so they will cook perfectly in our dishes, in our oven. I love this book more than anything. So you can imagine my joy when my mother gifted me with my very own copy, 1977 edition and everything. It's just the same, except this one is clean and neat. But that won't last.

Last year at Christmas, Betty Crocker released her* 1967 Cooky Book, complete with the controversial "y" spelling of cookie. You can imagine how excited I was. But I didn't find this until January. I decided to wait until Christmas to use it.

Working in a cardshop messes with my internal calendar, and for the last few weeks I've been humming carols and dreaming of shortbread. The day before yesterday I added an extra blanket to my bed and decided, that's it. It's Christmas now.

Last night was my inaugural cooky. Almond Butter Cookies. the simplest thing in the world to make. Cream a cup of butter with a half cup of sugar. Add a cup of chopped almonds. Then two tablespoons of vanilla and two cups of flour. Form into balls and press flat with a greased glass dipped in sugar. Oven for 10 minutes and there's your cooky!

The were done by the ever-obliging Boyfriend in the popchop. It's an interesting thing, the problem with the popchop is that it doesn't chop evenly, but in this case it worked to an advantage. Some of the almonds were reduced to powder while others remained in small chunks. The powder combined with the flour to infuse the whole dough with an almond essence while the chunks livened up the cookies.

These were a very simple taste. Crumbly, just a bit sweet, just a bit almond-y, just a little bit creamy, not too soft. A perfect cooky to have with a cup of hot chocolate on a wintry night. I froze half the batch for use in December.

*Yes, I know she's not a real person. I don't care. I'm pretending she is.

Yesterday's hill sprints really took a lot out of me and work was really stressful. So, to relax on my first evening off of the week I decided to cook pasta sauce and bake chocolate chip cookies from scratch. I should confess, I have a kind of "from scratch" complex when it comes to baking. I got it from my mother, who has never and will never use a mix. There are four main reasons I will never use a mix:

1. It doesn't taste as good. It just doesn't.
2. Most mixes contain weird ingredients and additives. Why bother with that if you don't have to?
3. Mixes don't really save you that much time. I've seen mixes where you have to add milk, eggs and oil. So all the mix does is combine the flour, baking powder and sugars for you. Is that really that difficult.
4. In "from scratch" baking, you can taste the love.

Anyways, I consider myself something of a chocolate chip cookie connoisseur, and there's one recipe I always found trumps all the others. It's the recipe that comes on the back of the Baker's brand chocolate chips. It can't be improved upon. I don't always use Baker's chips, but I long ago copied down the recipe and fixed it to my Betty Crocker Cookbook. My only advise is to turn the cookie sheet every five minutes while to cookies are baking, so they cook more evenly.

As for the sauce, it was nothing original, but impossible to mess up. Dice about 6 cloves of garlic (Did I mention I have a pop chop? Envy me.) Cook the garlic in about a half cup of olive oil until it's soft but not brown, add a can of diced tomatoes, oregano (fresh if you have it, and I did!) salt, pepper and whatever other seasonings you fancy. Give the tomatoes a quick mash if you don't like big hunks of tomato in your sauce (I don't) and let simmer for as long as possible (at least an hour). We had it over cheese totellini that was on sale at the grocery store.

It was a good time and made for a delicious dinner, but I probably should have been resting more. I completely collapsed afterwards and realized there would be no way to get my 8k in this morning. I'll try again this evening.