Wednesday Work: Lunch!

It's about that time around here - time for lunch! Almost (but not) more than eating my lunch - I love preparing my lunch, styling my lunch; and looking at pictures of lunch once the eating is done.

You can see my measly offering up above (we're talking some serious constraints here in accessibility and styling - the carrots would not agree to be shot head on: I'll have to check their contract).

But alas, there is puh-lenty of B E A U tiful pictures of lunch out there in web land for you to look at.

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I saw this cake as an angry face, until just now. I was attracted by the humor ... that apparently isn't there. But anyway,

Design Sponge has a lot of great recipes and A LOT of wonderful food photography.

You can find images like this below, outlining the ingredients of a dish,

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Or you can head over to Grass Doe 's Johnathan Levitt, who takes a viewpoint more so on the side of commercial restaurant photography.

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My favorite food photography is one that sets up a scene, a scene with a story. Then not only can I daydream about the food I would be eating, but imagine who it is I might be sitting across from and what we might be discussing.

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Some kind of "When Harry Met Sally" road trip rendezvous or an afternoon at home building a print shop in the basement,

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Or my favorite - - traveling with my lover through Iceland's cold countryside, boots crunching the snow, perspiration freezing us to our scarves, on our way to the next, then the next town for a bed and breakfast and a cross-country ski trail, stopping for a hearty bowl and a delicious brew,

Check out 101 Cookbooks for more images like the one pictured below.

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All this talk of food! With Thanksgiving right around the corner! What will your holiday table look like?

DEFY MONDAY: NOvember: Soup!

A "Kitchen -Sink- Soup" Fall Edition! What to do with all that overwhelming CSA? The weather is changing, cold salads are on the outs - unless (!) They are accompanied by a warm bowl of soup (and a crust of fresh bread) of course!

I had the good fortune to have a free chunk of time this weekend, a hankering, and with the CSA rotting - soup time it was.

On the counter up top we have: red cabbage! fennel! salt potatoes! a sweet potato! broccoli crowns! spinach! some carrots! and an onion! The counter below: cinnamon, Jamaican allspice, garlic powder, nutmeg, Nashville salt & pepper!

Not pictured: one pint of light cream, 2 lbs. of air-chilled boneless chicken breast, bullion cubes (both chicken and vegetable), and my super-secret ingredients: curry powder, and cayenne pepper.

The first thing I did was fill up the big old soup pot with 16 cups of water and bullion to start the broth. While I waited for that to boil, I cubed the chicken breasts and put them on the stove top to saute. I used 1 tbsp. olive oil, Nashville salt&pepper, garlic powder, nutmeg and curry powder.
For this step, I had a lot of help:

While that slow cooked, making a dark brown sweet garlicky syrup, I cut up the potatoes (both the salt and the sweet), then the broccoli and the carrot and added these to the stock pot.

The chicken was done, I put this aside in a bowl. Then using the sweet & sour syrup left behind in the pan, I sauteed two large white onions on the slow. (At this time I would like to thank my self-appointed sponsor: I would not have been able to get through this on the slow without my good friends from PBC. Philadelphia Brewing Company's Rowhouse Red today. Yum.)

Between sipping and onions cooking, I shredded the red cabbage, chopped the fennel and added them along with a large large handful of spinach to the stock pot to simmer.

While time continued to work its magic, I cut the chicken into even smaller morsels (I did not want a chicken soup, but I did want a hearty animal protein to peek in and out). Having that done, I added the chicken to the stock and then the onions, last but not least a pint of light cream, and all along, a shake of cinnamon here, a splash of allspice there, a forceful flick of garlic powder, a sprinkling of nutmeg, a dash of curry, a mild splash of cayenne pepper, and Nashville salt & pepper.

Put the pot on low and let it cook.

While I was waiting, PBC's Rowhouse Red and I cooked a pan of 101 Cookbook's Pumpkin and Feta Muffins, you can find that recipe here. I am not a huge fan of muffins, so I made it into a sort of large flat loaf using a 9x12 baking pan instead.

Suffice to say after an hour and half of this, the kitchen was rocking and the whole house smelled great! With the windows open, we even had company come by outside!

Big old cat on our cinder block fence. The backyard recently drenched. Dogs happy. Did I mention we were listening to Air? An unnecessary apple pie candle burning. The warm glow a of Rowhouse Red.

It was a wonderful, EASY, almost NOvember afternoon indeed!

***For your own twists on this recipe: cut the chicken and add sauteed tofu or seitan instead (now its vegetarian!), don't like cream? Try some unflavored soy milk. (mhmm - now its a vegan recipe!) Don't like spicy (Oh, I'm sorry! really.) Cut the curry, cut the cayenne - the cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice will leave you with a nice sweet soup- to this I encourage adding a diced apple, something hard, like a granny smith - but don't cook it with the soup, add it last minute to individual servings.

Anybody got a good crusty bread recipe? I need one!