Location Taken: Banff National Park, Alberta
Time Taken: June 2010
Hmm… What’s a good segue between the random mountain photo I chose and the cooking story I want to tell… Um… Mountains are caused by plate tectonics, which is powered by convection in the mantle, which works very similar to water boiling in a pot?
Eh, forget it.
I haven’t really talked about one of my favorite hobbies. I like to cook, from scratch. Now, if I was a normal cook, I’d probably have already filled this blog with all my favorite recipes. But alas, that’s not how I work.
I’m an experimental cook, neither working from recipes nor creating any of my own.
Well, sort of. I almost never cook the exact same meal twice, but I do make certain types of dishes, like burritos, quite often. I just add a slightly different mix of ingredients each time. I also will work off of recipes if I’m trying out a new technique, or when I’m baking. Baking’s rather reliant on getting the proportions correct so all the chemistry creates the marvelous results that we know as cakes and cookies and breads, so following a guide makes all the difference. I almost never bake.
Instead, I experiment, fiddling around with ingredients and spices and cooking techniques to find something that fits what I want to eat for that particular meal. Sometimes it’s simple: another variation of my standard burrito recipe, the meal I make most often. Other times, well, I get creative.
Let’s use the meal I made earlier today as an example. I bought some okra the other day, and well, okra goes bad fairly quickly so I need to use it up fast. There’s two ways I like it, with a light breading and fried, and boiled until it’s soft in a soup. I’d made the fried okra yesterday, so today I went with the soup. So I chopped up a bunch of okra and tossed it in the soup pan. Then I tossed in some black beans. That’s my bean of choice, and since I do like having burritos so often, I always have some on hand, and they go well with okra.
Then, well, I like having some meat in my meal. I didn’t feel like chicken or ground beef, my usual standbys, so I poked around the fridge until I spotted a container of lunch meat. And that’s why I tossed in a bunch of thinly sliced Honey Maple Ham into the pot. And what the hey, I’ve already got some sweet elements thanks to the ham, let’s chop up some of this butternut squash as well. That goes well in soups.
Add some water, and you’ve got a fine start to a soup. But it was still missing something. I’d only added two vegetables, the okra and the squash. I like having at least three in every meal. But none of my usual stock of veggies seemed quite right, so I started adding spices. I pulled out the packet of fennel seed from the cupboard – and noticed my bag of dried seaweed. Perfect! Just the texture and nutritional value I wanted!
After the fennel and seaweed went in the pot, I topped it up with water and set the burner on medium high. And let it cook for a bit so the flavors of the ingredients could enter the water. It’s tough to season things properly if you don’t account for that. After about ten minutes, I tasted the soup to judge the base flavor, and started playing around with the spices. Sea salt, cracked peppercorns, cilantro, some chicken broth, and a Moroccan spice mix all went into the pot. It was close, though not quite right. A bit more salt and pepper were added, since I under-season with those at the first pass, and then I pulled out the lemon juice. I don’t use it for soups too often, but it can really brighten up a meal, and this one was tasting a bit dull. That got it a lot closer, but it still wasn’t hitting all the taste tones I wanted. A bit of soy sauce brought it closer, as did even more cracked pepper. And then I just tipped the remnants of the cup of orange juice I was drinking into the pot, and that did the trick. A bit more time cooking and it was done!
So how did my okra and butternut squash soup with ham, seaweed and black beans come out? Rather tasty, of course. Not quite perfect, alas. Thinly sliced ham doesn’t take too well to both long cooking times and the acid from the lemon juice, so that part of the soup was a bit too tough. It would have been better with cubes of ham instead, but I didn’t have any. Otherwise, it was very good, with the butternut squash the star of the soup.
Don’t ask for an official recipe, mind you. This description is the closest I’ll get. Even if I do make this dish again, it’ll be a bit different each time, and I never measure my ingredients anyway. It’s more fun to play it by ear, or well, by tongue.
