Skip to main content

Food Friday–Two Day Soup


100_3129
This fall I have been making good use of our slow cooker. I have been making lots of what I call “Poor People Soup”.  Basically it is a collection of meat bones , onions, carrots, parsnips and and perhaps cabbage or a can of crushed tomatoes. I put a collection of whole spices in a tea ball and let it all cook away.

I have discovered that if you let the soup simmer away for two days the vegetables caramelize. The flavor becomes deep.  I started the soup last night before I went to bed. This morning I added two pieces of chicken to the soup. I suppose if I were more refined I would strain all of the vegetables out of the soup.
Tonight’s company are people were are really comfortable with, so I am going to serve the soup in it’s unrefined version.

Chicken is cooking away in the oven  made with lemons, basil black pepper and rosemary. I also have rice and hard wheat cooking away at the same time. I need to figure out a vegetable and dessert.

Yesterday was a big baking day for me.  Our rabbi’s child is having his bar mitzvah tomorrow. Some of us were asked to bake dessert. I made mini cheese cakes.  Did I use a recipe you ask? No, because you don’t need one for cheese cake.
Cheese Cake Formula
1 stick butter melted
enough dry stuff to mix with it- the dry stuff can be crushed cereal, crushed cookies, pretzels  or flour . This mixture needs to be sweet and just a little salty.  I like to add spices to the crust. Clearly you need to add more flavor to flour than you would to crushed cookies.If you need to add sugar, use brown .
The finished mixture should be crumbly, like wet sand. Pat/smoosh into baking dish and bake for 15 minutes @325

cheese mixture
You need 1.5 lbs of soft cheese. Sour cream , cream cheese, ricotta cheese, drained cottage cheese, farmer cheese, pot cheese, labne, Greek yogurt can be used in any combination.
3 eggs
sugar, pinch salt
flavor – grated orange peel, grated lemon peel, vanilla, rum, caramel,chocolate…use what you love in the combinations you love

mix pour into pan with par baked crust. Bake at about 300 until mixture has set. Turn off oven and allow to cool in the oven so the top does not crack.

*******
I also put up  a roll of refrigerator cookies. My building is having a big Halloween decorating party on Sunday. Kids decorate cookies as part of it.   Rolling the log of dough up I realize that  the slice and bake cookies stoners love so much, are really easy to put together.  I used the recipe from Joy of Cooking, the perfect source for bland American food. Since these are cookies for kids, bland is the way to go.
Shabbat Shalom to all. My house smells great.
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 26, 2012 at 6:09 PM

    I love these sort of "no recipe" recipes.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...
1 comment
Read more

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...
8 comments
Read more

A Passover loss

 My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of  linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin.  You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...
2 comments
Read more