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I have been working on getting into a pretty nice Saturday routine. Sleep in, take Gibson to the dog park, lounge around, make some delicious foods. Yesterday I threw in ordering The Joy of Cooking and subscribing to Martha Stewart Living (a long-time dream of mine). I am excited.
As previously mentioned on this blog, we bought into a CSA this summer. It has been great and not so great. As Steve puts it, "you really have to love vegetables" in order to enjoy the CSA. I do love vegetables, but have felt a little overwhelmed by the quantities of things that I don't necessarily know how to use, slash do not have the gastronomic capacity to consume it all on my own. Yesterday, I decided to do something about the tomato situation in our house. Again, love tomatoes but had about 4 gallons of them yesterday. I did a little internet research and "triangulated" recipes, as my dad would say, and made up this number. My true inspiration was the tomato-basil soup at The French Meadow in Minneapolis, which Steve and I often refer to as "crack soup." It has insanely addictive qualities.
Calley's Tomato Basil (Crack) Soup
About 20 tomatoes, various sizes and varieties (I honestly didn't count them)
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 small onions
1 can chicken broth
about a cup heavy cream
1 cup loosely packed basil leaves
3 tablespoons butter
Blanch tomatoes, remove peels and seeds. Puree in small batches in food processor. Try to get all the big lumps out. It turns out that tomatoes are really acidic and turn your fingernails yellow and your skin to paper. Awesome!!
In your big pot that you will be cooking the soup in, melt butter and saute the onions and garlic until soft. Add tomato puree, chicken broth and cream. Chop the basil (I used a mini-food processor) and add that in too. Salt and pepper to taste. Heat to your liking. I am going to freeze some of this, so I'll let you know how well it keeps in a couple of months.
Next on my list of things to do yesterday was to finish a birthday gift I had been working on for our friend Courtney. She loves robots--please, please! visit her blog and read her Wall-E story. Start here, then read this. It is truly heartwarming. I found this Sublime Stitching robot iron-on and knew I must put it on something for Courtney, decided on dish towels and then found out that her birthday was coming up. What a happy coincidence! She liked them, I am happy to report.
Finally, I decided to make this sage-walnut pesto recipe I found on this blog. I have a sage plant on my deck garden that I haven't used all summer, and decided this sounded like a pretty yummy dish. And I was correct. It tastes a lot like regular pesto, minus the sometimes-overwhelming garlic flavor. The sage flavor is pretty subtle, though I think you could mix pretty much any leaf with olive oil and cheese and get the same general flavor. Next week I am going to make geranium leaf pesto.
This one I ate on as an open-faced pesto and smoked swiss on wild rice multi grain bread. It went very well with the crack soup.
I discovered this blog called "A year of CrockPotting" in which the blogger has spent much of the past year making something in the crock pot every day. Ambitious. I was drawn to this Thai Chicken Curry recipe, but made a few modifications. I really like the sweet potatoes in the recipe, but the chicken turned out a little tough. I think next time I will try to cook it longer or keep the chicken closer to the bottom of the pot so it breaks down a little bit more and takes on more of the saucy flavor. I ate this with brown rice and made everyone at work jealous of my lunch. Yum!
I picked up some avocados and jalapenos at the produce market the other day, and made up some guacamole. 
Ingredients:
2 avocados
2-3 garlic cloves
1 Jalopeno, chopped with ribs and seeds removed
2 smallish tomatoes, chopped
Salt and pepper
Mash up the avocados and mix in all the other ingredients. Salt and pepper to taste.
I ate the guac with red-hot-and-blue corn chips, which are also hot.
This stuff did not last very long in our house.
Sorry I have fallen behind on my posting, I blame my computer and the internet for being rude to me. Also... State Fair!! Thank you to the 2-4 people who have continued to look at my blog daily. I seriously doubt it is on purpose. Allow me to return to business with a gastronomical summary of my two (2!) trips to the Minnesota State Fair. Beautiful. Let us begin with day one with Steve and Nell...bring on the unflattering photos
Steve was immediately drawn to the "Big Fat Bacon" stand...rightfully so. The bacon is large, is on a stick and is glazed with maple. Yes.
Mini Donuts...The world's most perfect breakfast food.
Sausage by The Sausage Sisters. Chunks of Sausage wrapped in some kind of breadiness, smothered in spicy peanut sauce.
Lemonade in a classic State Fair cup.
Cheese Curds. This picture will make everyone who has moved away from Minnesota insanely jealous and everyone else insanely nauseated.
I call this one the Bluth Banana. Chocolate-covered frozen banana with sprinkles (or jimmies, depending on how you roll). Sorry about the suggestive nature of this photo.
Sno-cone. Steve asked the vendor what the best flavor is, and without hesitation he replied, "Blue raspberry and lime." He was right.
Nell noms on some french fries.
Day Two with Amanda and Margaret!
Pronto pup. They use a paint brush to apply the ketchup and mustard.
The best damn ear of corn you will ever eat. I am not really sure how they do it. And they have compost bins for the ears. My personal trainer inexplicably called me at this point in my day at the fair, asked me what I was eating, and congratulated me on how well I was doing so far. Glad she didn't call me on day one.
Sweet Martha's Cookies and All-You-Can-Drink Milk. This is a feat, considering you have to jog half way across the fairgrounds from the cookie stand to the milk booth while carrying a teetering pile of piping hot cookies. It is truly a tragedy to see how many cookies fall to the ground and are stomped on my humans and animals alike. Milk and cookies go really well together, it turns out.
Best deal of the day! You buy a pitcher of really crappy beer and get a basket of fries for free! A total steal at 18.75. Not joking.
This was a new one for me: Walleye cakes from this place called Giggles. I guess it was the best new food at the fair in 2002 and I was still all caught up with getting my cheese curds and seeing the butter heads. These babies have walleye, salmon, wild rice and panko flakes in them...ohhhh so delicious. Excellent while watching the lumberjack show.
Aaaand finally, Australian battered potatoes by moonlight. I only ate a few bites of these but are adorable because they come with an Australian flag in them, and are smothered in ranch dressing. When I tried them, I thought of when Aunt Selma tries smoking a cigar for the first time and said, "That's like smoking five cigarettes at once!" Well, think of french fries x5. And smothered in ranch dressing.
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