I give up
July 8, 2009 by MarthaSoup TV
July 3, 2009 by MarthaAs we gear up for bingo season, Kelly Reiss, the Vegetarian Librarian, who made some very tasty vegetable-leek soup back on March 25, sent over this video account of her spring soup adventure. Thanks Kelly!
We’re back, with more free food
June 29, 2009 by Martha
That’s right. It’s the summer event you’ve been waiting for!
VEGGIE BINGO.
Join us at the Hideout on Wednesday evenings from July 8 to September 9 for a friendly round (or six) of bingo to benefit Chicago’s community gardens. Each week we highlight a different local garden. Prizes range from jars of locally produced honey, bottles of hot sauce, and handmade soap to the grand prize of a box of fresh, locally grown fruits and vegetables, courtesy of the very generous folks at Irv and Shelly’s Fresh Picks.
Veggie Bingo runs from 6 to 8 PM every Wednesday for ten weeks. The actual bingo games start at 6:30, and run about an hour. Cards are $1 a pop, or six for $5, and can be purchased from your bartender. All proceeds benefit NeighborSpace, a nonprofit organization that acquires and preserves community open space in the city.
In addition to the veggies, we’ll also be loading up the grill with free hot dogs and tofu pups. Bingo games will be led by an all-star team of callers, starting with dapper country crooner Lawrence Peters on the 8th. See the Hideout website and this blog for upcoming celebrity callers as we book ‘em.
The particulars
What: Bingo!
Where: The Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia
When: Wednesdays, 6-8 PM, from July 8-September 9
Who: The Hideout, NeighborSpace, and Irv and Shelly’s Fresh Picks
Why: To raise money to help Chicago’s gardens grow.
About our partners
NeighborSpace is a nonprofit urban land trust dedicated to preserving and sustaining community managed open spaces in Chicago. Their network of almost 70 gardens provide thousands of people the opportunity to grow fruits, vegetables and flowers; to restore habitats; and create unique gathering places in their own neighborhoods. NeighborSpace’s partners in the community can rest assured that the land will remain dedicated to conservation and their efforts will never be displaced. To volunteer in a community garden near you email info@neighbor-space.org or call 312-431-9406.
Irv & Shelly’s Fresh Picks offers year-round home delivery in the Chicago area of local and organic produce, meat, dairy, eggs, baked goods and more. We are partnering with sustainable farmers to grow the supply of local food in a way that protects our health and the environment. Come join us and make a difference One Bite at a Time!
Got veggies?
May 6, 2009 by Martha
Have you always wanted to join a CSA, but never knew how to start? Are you intimidated by the beefy boxes of bounty sitting in your friends’ pantry? Might you, perhaps, be curious about kohlrabi? Wondering how to get your hands on some free-range chickens?
Come to the Hideout on Wednesday, May 13, for a casual Q&A with farmer Vera Videnovich, who’ll be talking about what she’s growing this season on her family’s farm in southwest Michigan and signing up subscribers for her 2009 CSA — which starts with May asparagus and wraps up in late September with mini-pumpkins, eggplants, peppers, and sweet basil.
Vera’s boxes are small and priced to move: $15/week for 20 weeks, which comes out to $300 for the summer. It is, in her words, “intended for the smaller household or for those with limited food budgets.”
Which is just about everyone these days, yes?
And, if you want some meat and dairy to go with those peppers, Jody Osmund, of Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm outside Ottowa, Illinois, will also be on hand to tell everything you ever wanted to know about his sustainably raised beef, pork, and poultry. His meat CSA runs $255 for three months and each box includes a variety of beef, sausage, ham, pork chops, chicken, and eggs. (Jody estimates each one’s worth about $80 retail.) Sound like a lot? Share with a friend!
If there’s enough interest both Vera and Jody will include the Hideout on their delivery routes — which means that you can pick up your food and enjoy an Old Style on our scenic patio, complete with view of the Streets and San parking lot, at the same time. Can you do that at the Green City Market? I think not.
It’s next Wednesday, May 13, from 6 to 8 at the Hideout — and it’s free. See you there.
Squash Soup with a side of TIFs
May 1, 2009 by Martha
I don’t know what prompted this breach of protocol. I can only plead that the infectious high spirits of the crowd got the better of me.
And, wow, what a crowd. Who knew so many people wanted to spend their happy hour talking about tax increment financing? Though, I suppose most municipal financing mechanisms do go down better with a pint or three of Bell’s.
In any case, it was SRO in the back room as Ben Joravsky, Daniel X. O’Neil, Scott Waguespack, and moderator Mark Bazer talked TIFs for a good hour and a half. We had the feed from the back piped through the speakers in the front, but honesty, I didn’t really follow much of what was going on, so if anyone out there happened to document it, please let me know. Did I mention it was really busy?
It was a race to the soup line all day, in fact. I woke to discover that not only had Anastasia come down with the flu, she had a house full of chicken pox and pinkeye to boot. So, no soup from her.
Luckily, I had picked up some soup fixings the night before. In honor of Helen’s squash ring, I settled on a recipe for Butternut Squash Soup out of Jessica Prentices’s Full Moon Feast, one of the ur-texts of the local, seasonal cooking movement. (And a great read full of a lot more folklore and digressive storytelling than actual recipes.)
By Prentice’s calendar, which divides the year by cycles of the moon, the end of April is the “Milk Moon.” But the Milk Moon chapter only yielded recipes for yogurt and kefir. So, contra the seasonal-eating ethic — but fully in the spirit of storing winter veg in the root cellar — I flipped back a few months to the Wolf Moon chapter and picked up the following recipe:
2 Tble butter or olive oil
2-3 leeks, sliced into rounds
1 fresh, seasonal butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into chunks
Chicken stock or filtered water to cover
1 bouquet garni (bay leaf, parsley, thyme,rosemary)
1/2 c cream, creme fraiche, or yogurt; or 1 cup buttermilk or half-and-half
Salt and pepper to taste
Creme fraiche or yogurt for garnish
Finely minced rosemary, thyme, sage, or parsley leaves (or a combination of these herbs); or a grating of nutmeg; or a grind of black pepper, for garnish
I multiplied this recipe by four, and used a total of 3 butternut and 3 acorn squash, roasting them the night before to bring out their sugar. Wednesday morning I chopped up the leeks and set them to saute with butter in the bottom of the soup pot. When they were soft I added the chopped, roasted squash, the bouquet garni, and covered with chicken stock.
Simmered that for about 40 minutes, then pureed in the blender in batches, adding a splash of buttermilk to each batch (went through a quart of buttermilk in all). Added salt and lots of pepper, recombined all into one big pot, and left on low heat till it was time to head to the bar. Served with a dollop of greek yogurt and some chopped parsley, thyme, and rosemary, it was, I have to say, pretty damn good.
I didn’t get a chance to try Celeste’s Spring Pea Soup with Creme Fraiche, but the Spinach-Pepper-Zucchini-Cheese Delite, which showed up from trusty Swim just as the other crocks ran dry, was crazy good. Very rich, but hearty thanks to heaps of rice and tangy thanks to …. pickles? Yes, pickles.
We raised $210 in additional donations for the Food Depository, for a grand total of $2,771. I’ll be sending the balance off today.
And now, we really mean it. No more Soup and Bread till next winter! But watch this space for news of our exciting summer plans (currently in committee). It’s going to be good. And if we can persuade any more local politicos to come lend a hand, I promise to keep a respectful distance. Sorry, Alderman Waguespack!
Nothing to do with soup, really
April 28, 2009 by MarthaInspired by Terri’s party, I started poking around in some of my own “period” cookbooks today. I was looking for an easy recipe to make for tomorrow’s TIF talk – it seems like a fair number of people may turn out and I started to think we might need some backup soup. I wasn’t about to essay Tuna and Tomato Bisque again, but thought the pages of “The Sunset Cook Book of Soups and Stews” (1967) might yield some inspiration.
Instead I found this, tucked inside a copy of “Thoughts For Buffets” (1958). It’s a note to my grandma from her friend Helen, and it moved me to, if not tears, at least a moment of quiet.
I don’t exactly know how this book came into my possession. My beloved grandma died in 2003, at 93, and I guess I must have picked it up when we were cleaning out her apartment. It’s been sitting there on top of the fridge ever since. Just waiting to body slam me back to a time when people typed up little notes on index cards to warn the recipient off the Squash Ring.
“Thoughts for Buffets” did not, unfortunately, give rise to any thoughts about soup (though I am intrigued by some of the cocktails … ). Any requests?
Late Winter Soup (With Italian sausage, prosciutto, kale, and white bean)
April 27, 2009 by Martha
[Ed: This just in! An abbreviated, recipe-ized adaptation of last week's Late Winter Soup novella. Thanks, Jeanelle!]
From Jeanelle HaynerBecause of the high volume of pork products in this soup, I felt compelled to avoid chicken stock for fear it would make the soup too, well, chicken-y. I do imagine, though, if you didn’t want to make this particular stock, that you could cobble something together using the cooking water from the beans, a bit of whatever stock you might have lying around, and water. This was the first time making this soup, and I didn’t use a recipe, so there’s lots of room for improvisation/tinkering.
Yield: 1 enormous pot.
For the prosciutto stock:
1 lb prosciutto end(s) (and/or a prosciutto or ham bone if you can find one)
1 onion, halved
4 cloves of garlic, smashed
handful of fresh parsley
1 T black peppercorns
salt
water
If you’re working with ends, it’s a good idea to render a good bit of the fat off of it before plopping it into a stockpot. I cooked the end, the onion, and the garlic in a pan on low heat for a while — until the meat was falling apart a bit and the garlic was golden and very soft. **Save the drippings from this. You might decide to flavor the soup with some of it later.
If you’re using bones (or if you’ve worked your ends down), put everything into a large pot and cover with water by an inch or two. Simmer forever, or for however much time you have. The main thing is that you need to end up with stock that tastes like stock and not “hot ham water.”
For the rest of the soup:
1 lb Italian sausage, uncooked, in casing
1/2 lb prosciutto, thinly sliced, then roughly chopped into small pieces (quantity is less important here– you’ve already got prosciutto stock, for crying out loud– you just want enough to highlight the background flavor of the soup)
1 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 T fresh thyme leaves
1 bunch lacinato kale, rinsed, de-ribbed, and very roughly chopped
2 heads garlic, roasted and mashed into a paste (use a bit of olive oil and salt to do this, if you like)
about 3 cups cooked white beans. depends on how thick and bean-y you like your soup. also, canned is okay, but if you cook them yourself you’ve got the advantage of using that tasty, tasty bean-water in the soup if you need it.
1 parmesan heel
olive oil
salt & pepper
(special equipment: immersion blender)
In a large pot (likely that pot you used for the stock), combine the stock, white beans, and roasted garlic paste, and give the whole thing a good whir with the immersion blender. The idea here is to leave about half the beans intact, and smithereen the other half to make a nice, thick, soup base. Turn heat to medium and add the parmesan heel; simmer for about 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, heat about 2 teaspoons of olive oil in a large saute pan over a medium flame. using the sausage casing like you might use a pastry bag (ew, I know, but this is kind of handy), squeeze the sausage out into small meatball-sized pieces. When the sausage is just brown, but not cooked all the way through, add the onion and garlic. Cook until the onions are quite soft; about 10 minutes. (Lower the heat if need be so that the garlic doesn’t burn.) Add the prosciutto and thyme, and when the prosciutto has shriveled nicely and gets a little brown on it, turn off the heat.
Remove the parmesan heel from the stock, then add the contents of the saute pan to the pot. Let simmer together for just a few minutes, then taste for seasoning. Add salt & pepper as needed, as well as any of the pan drippings you might have saved from earlier. Add kale– it’ll wilt and cook relatively quickly in the hot soup. Once the kale is done (just taste a piece of it), so are you. Enjoy!
From thought to pot
April 21, 2009 by MarthaJeanelle Hayner, aka “Graficionada,” aka a Soup and Bread cook from March 18, walks you through her creative process.
Soup and TIFs
April 17, 2009 by MarthaHey Soup and Bread fans!
Mark your calendars: we’re teaming up with our alderman to stage a
SPECIAL ENCORE SOUP AND BREAD
on
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29.
JOIN! 32nd Ward Alderman Scott Waguespack as he talks TIFs with Reader political columnist Ben Joravsky and Everyblock.com’s Daniel O’Neil.
EAT! Soup prepared by Celestial Kitchens‘ Celeste Dolan, Hideout bartender Anastasia Davies Hinschsliff, and the ever-delicious Swim Cafe.
DRINK! Your libation of choice.
DONATE! Proceeds again/still go to the Greater Chicago Food Depository.
It’s from 6-8 on Wednesday, April 29, at the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia. See you there!
