Food 13 Jul 2006 08:29 pm
local food: soup, beautiful soup
For One Local Summer dinner tonight: pea soup, bagels, blueberries with organic yogurt. The blueberries are from Rockport (97 miles, near Concrete), the yogurt is made in Auburn (32 miles), and the bagels were made about 1.25 miles away at Bagel Oasis. Is it perfectly local? Probably not; I haven’t found out where the yogurters and bagelists get their ingredients. But one of the excellent things about the Locavore Pledge is it’s not about a hair-shirt ideal of perfect personal purity; as Jamie’s mom says, it has “lots of options for doing something right.”
The pea soup is basically a rendition of Josh’s broccoli soup, but with peas from the back yard and without the proto-roux. (Mea culpa: I did use some non-homemade chicken stock, but I had some to use up before it spoiled, and let’s call it a condiment, eh?) I started with one white onion from Alm Hill Gardens and two small cloves of homegrown garlic, sauteed in organic butter, and added chicken stock and water sufficient to cook 20 oz of peas. I brought the liquid to a boil and added the peas, cooking them for four minutes and then blending the soup well with a stick blender. After tasting the soup, I decided to add a handful of parsley and thyme and blend it some more. The soup held for a couple of hours until Josh got home, and then I added a dollop of half-and-half. It was really good, and a beautiful color. Much more delicate than the broccoli soup; almost elegant, I’d say. (I’ll have a photo from Josh soon. I hate taking pictures.)
On the car-free side of the equation, I took advantage of a couple of free days in my schedule to push myself to do something that I’ve wanted to do since we moved here: I walked to PCC. It’s only 3.5 miles there and back, but it requires going up and over Heinous Hill. I’ve been trying to storm Heinous Hill off and on for years now; last time, several months ago, I had to stop several times on the way up and barely made it — and that was a triumph. But today I chugged right on over it. Hooray! I am feeling very buff!
It may have helped that I was animated by righteous anger — some brain-damaged Nordstrom blonde coming out of University Prep tried to turn right into the crosswalk that I was occupying. If I could choose a superpower, a very tempting choice would be the ability to instantly destroy internal combustion engines with the power of my mind.
on 15 Jul 2006 at 7:24 am 1.Liz said …
Another pea soup! Excellent.
Once I had a cop tell me (as I attempted to cross in a crosswalk in NJ) that the cars had “the right to run me over”. Pedestrians get no respect.