A Simple Soup

I like to think of this soup as a minestrone but I actually don't have any idea what defines minestrone soup. When I looked it up I found out that minestrone actually means "hodgepodge" and it is generally a vegetable soup often with rice or pasta, can be vegetarian or not, contain meat or not, and can be made from different types of stock. So I feel somewhat comfortable calling this soup a minestrone.

Its a simple recipe that can be made from what ever you have in the house or a trip to your pantry with a few fresh ingredients thrown in. I should do another post on what I consider to be a proper pantry but that's another post. The reason I like making soups is that they are almost entirely improvization. To me soup is anything that you add to broth. My dad used to make us tortilini soup and just added store bought pasta to canned chicken broth and some spices. You really can't go wrong with soup unless you add a really fatty meat to a broth soup. I don't do cream based soups so that's probably why I can say that.

A Hodgepodge Soup
Serves 4-6 people
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 1 hour

1 tbs olive oil
2 large containers chicken stock (can be veggie stock)
3 cups fresh or frozen veggies like carrots, celery, peas, or other traditional soup veggies
1 small onion
3 large cloves garlic
2 large cans kidney beans
1 bunch of kale (washed and cut into small pieces)
1 large can diced tomatoes
1 cup small pasta (like elbows)
1 egg for each serving
Salt, Pepper, and dried basil to taste

Saute your onions in a large dutch oven in the olive oil. Add the garlic when the onions are soft. Add the remain ingredients and simmer over a low flame until the pasta is cooked and the kale is wilted and incorporated into the soup. Add spices to taste.

When you are ready to serve, crack an egg in the bottom of the serving bowl and add the soup on top. Add more stock or water if necessary. Still around to cook the egg.

If you want to make this vegetarian or vegan, use vegetable broth, add more beans, and you could probably throw in tofu. You can also add left over chicken if you want meat.

A Windy Saturday

Yesterday's weather was wonderfully windy. We're pretty high up so the wind howled all Friday night through Saturday. We woke up today and it is clear and sunny. It was also about 65 so surprisingly warm. I was in bed with a cold but my husband suggested that we drive to Coney Island. He always knows when I should probably get up and do something and suggests and activity that is the exact right speed.

We grabbed the camera, our rain gear and headed out. By that point is was really windy and rainy but there were people out, mostly people like us just out checking it out but there were some groups of tourists! The water was really rough and the sand was snaking its way along the boardwalk beginning to form dunes. We were pretty quickly soaked and covered in a fine layer of sand. We also snapped a bunch of shots but given the rain we didn't want to get the D70 too wet.

While the visual was great it was the sound of Coney Island in a storm that was the most interesting. There was a pervasive, eerie howl of the wind through the cyclone and wonder wheel and a clacking of old metal signs beginning to tear loose. The wind was so strong we had a hard time walking and I began to worry a bit about those old metal signs flying through the air.

Suspending the Work Day, Dinos on the Loose

I am incredibly lucky to work in a very cool place. While my job has nothing to do with dinosaurs they live very close to my office and I often go out of my way to walk through their gallery. The galleries were redone recently and are both archetecturally and curatorially beautiful.

I brought my camera with me on Friday and took some quick shots on my lunch break. Its a crazy place to take pictures. One: It's filled with tourists taking pictures. Two: The sunlight that does come in is very angled and you get highly contrasted pictures. Three: There is glass everywhere and only a few areas have both natural sunlight and no glass. All of these mean that I found it challenging to take pictures until I started to play with the glass. They're not great but they were fun.

A Tempting Rumor

In early July the coffee shop across the street closed its doors and its been vacant ever since. Since then there has been much speculation on the Brooklyn blogs and in our building as to what would come and we were all very excited to hear that a Vietnamese sandwich shop would open. You, like me, may ask "What is a Vietnamese sandwich?"

A ton of friends expressed their deep and undying love for these tasty morsels and recommended many different places around the city to test them out.

Then we heard that it would be a real estate office and basically forgot about the whole thing. Yesterday a Brooklyn blog, www.gowanuslounge.com brought up the rumor again and I quickly squeaked "Stop teasing me". Today a number of blogs ran the story and there seems to be more and more support for the idea.

I quickly emailed our neighborhood friends and one of them suggested I try Sidecar on 15th and 5th since they had a Banh - D sandwich. I grabbed the latest issue of the New Yorker (a must for any dinner on one's own) and headed down there. I should start by saying I rarely head south and there are tons of restaurants that looked great and I hope to hit a few more in the coming weeks.

Okay the sandwich. It has a weird list of ingredients: pate, mayo, marinated pork, carrots, cilantro, cucumber, and jalapenos. They put it on ciabatta bread and it comes with a small shot of cucumber juice and its totally delicious. It was a bit clumsy and needed a lighter bread and tangier marinate on the pork but even this admitted imitation of the sandwich left me hoping the latest rumor of a Vietnamese sandwich shop was true.
Link to a review of a Lower East Side Vietnamese Sandwich shop

A Not Surpising Observation

I bill this blog as being about gardening, food, photography and there are many other people out there that write these types of things. When the election heated up many of us wrote not about food but about politics and this was probably an affront to the 50% of the population who do not share our political views. Gardening, food, photography etc are not partisan issues but politics is an area of great divide and disagreement.

In the past few weeks I've noticed some of my favorite non-political bloggers write about losing loyal readers because of their political posts and I too have felt that. I wish that there was a way to tag those political posts and to say "Politically Sensitive Material- Skip if you don't agree with me".

The reality is that most people agree a lot more than disagree and that it's only a few key issues that rile us up and I wish we had a political system where a pro-life and pro-choice person weren't forced to take the good and the bad with their candidate. Do gun owners have to be R's? Do pro-choicers have to be D's? My guess is that on a local level most of us who live the same area agree on just about everything. I'll blame the feds, as usual.

Left, Right, Up, Down

In times of political chaos and confusion I have always relied on my Uncle PG. When Bush was elected I asked what he, being 92 or so, thought about it. I asked him because he'd lived through everything, was a world traveler, and a master of history and geneology, and he could provide some wisdom in the face of chaos. When I asked him about Bush he said "Meg, I just got over FDR."

At the time I intrepreted his remark to mean that a single election was minor in the face of history. If I were to ask him now, after the recent semi- nationalization of the banks, I wonder if he would bring up FDR again. Sadly, I can't ask him as he died a few years ago, weeks after finishing his last book at the age of 100.

The reason I bring up FDR is that his policies changed the relationship of the American government to the people. His new deal solidified the government as inherently Democratic with entrenched ideals of social safety nets and expanded the reach of the government well beyond helping people at crisis points. For PG, this infusion of his tax dollars going to give someone else a job ran against his view of a small federal government and listed us heavily towards socialism.

When Bush was elected, his presidency was sold as a return to small government. What we've experienced is an expansion of the federal government unrivaled in recent history that hits at many different levels of life. The federal bailout of companies and an injection of capital into banks is not unprecended in American history but it runs directly counter to Republican, small government principals. The explosion of the federal department of education and the regulation of individual schools through No Child Left Behind is another example of direct contradiction with Conservatives who call for dismantling of the USDOE. Even the expansion of government powers over women's rights seems to fly in the face of small government.

It feels like the compasionate conservatives are currently socialists and its very confusing. It was a bipartisan effort to get us into the current mess and I think we're all going to come out as leftists in the end.

I wish Uncle PG was here but I have a pretty good sense of what he would say. When the Republicans allied themselves with the Religious conservatives they created the biggest mission creep imaginable. Religious conservatives and Republican conservatives are only really linked by the word conservative and I've never understood why small government proponents link with religious people. We're now at a point of giving federal money to religious groups when religous groups were filling the private niche that old school republicans relied on to provide social services.

So while Republicans may have the rhetoric of small government they have constantly expanded the federal government.

So what distingishes an R from a D? Aside from these social issues it's really hard to tell. I think what I want is a new political party based upon effeciency. What ever is the most cost effective solution to the problem should be chosen. In my mind this would be privitazion of many services, a nationalized health care system (because those are consistantly cheaper with better levels of care), a reduction in federal intrusion into uteruses and marriage ceremonies, increased levels of investment in education especially at the early childhood level, and perhaps a shift to worship the gods of end justifies the means. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't lower the tax burdon but it may shift it to consumption taxes but it would provide more services.

Banking Time

Okay, I admit it. I'm blogging to kill time. I'm not only trying to kill time, I'm trying to bank time. Why? Because it's the finale of Project Runway and despite my complaints that I hate this season, I am still very excited to see who wins. But I can't stand to watch commercials and the debate is on every other channel so I'm blogging.

So to kill time I thought I would tell a little story. I was coming home from a meeting with the head of my organization and she mentioned an episode of Monk. In this episode, Monk is climbing a bookcase to get away from a snake. His assistant points out that he's afraid of heights and he replies "Snakes trump heights" and further explains his heirarchy of fears. Just for context his list goes like this: "germs, needles, milk, death, snakes, mushrooms, heights, crowds, elevators". They all make sense but the true comic genius of the show is revealed in his fear of milk. Who is afraid of milk?

This got me thinking, what is my milk? Most of his list are not irrational fears but milk is totally irrational (now I'm not a loyal fan so maybe this is rational and I just haven't see that episode). So what is my list.

1) The dark- this trumps all fears and is inclusive of all things that thrive in the dark like ghosts, zombies, monsters, boogie man/woman, etc. I have a very active imagination and I have a vivid dream and sleepwalking combo so you could imagine why I slept with the lights on until...well sometimes even now when I'm by myself. I should also note, to make this more irrational that it's not the idea of criminals that makes me scared of the dark, it's unreal things like zombies.

2) Dark Water- This is really a subcategory of the dark and includes all of the scary things of the dark plus the fear of drowning. You can get me to go in the dark but you'll have a really hard time getting me to go in dark water (unless you dare me and then I'll do just about anything to prove a point).

3) Snakes that live in the water- Just the thought of them made my blood pressure skyrocket. I think a fear of snakes is normal but I'm not afraid of most snakes, only snakes in the water. Just the thought of them wriggling through the water...

So there is my milk. The dark, dark water, and snakes. I also don't like watching people kiss on TV, is makes me all grossed out inside.