Pea Soup... It's Green!

In the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to make something green this week.  Now if you’re anything like me, when you hear the words pea soup, you automatically think of split peas.  Well, pea soup can be made with fresh peas and it’s a nice, vibrant green with the sweet flavor of fresh peas.  I used frozen peas, but with spring on its way, take advantage of the season and use some fresh from the farm or your own garden. 

Here’s what you’ll need:

1 lb. of peas, frozen or fresh will work
2 – 2 ½ cups chicken stock
1 medium onion
3 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon cumin
½ teaspoon dried dill
Juice of half a lime
Salt and Pepper to taste

As good as this soup is, it’s even better with homemade croutons, so I’ll show you how to make those first.  They’re so easy and delicious, you might never go back to store bought croutons again.  Start with some good bread, a baguette or some ciabatta work well.

Cut the bread into bite size pieces. 

I had about 4 cups or so of bread cubes.  In a large ziplock bag, put 3 tablespoons of olive oil. 

Sprinkle in ¼ teaspoon or so each of cumin, garlic powder, salt and pepper.  Feel free to change this up with whatever spices you like.  Mix the spices into the oil and add the bread cubes. 

Seal the bag and shake until everything is pretty evenly coated, then dump them onto a sheet pan. 

Place the pan into a 225° oven.  If you didn’t preheat, that’s not a big deal this time.  Just turn the oven on and put the pan in anyway.  You don’t want to cook the bread cubes, we’re just trying to dry them out so they’re crunchy.  It took mine about 30 minutes.  When they’re crunchy, remove them from the oven and allow them to cool on the pan. 

I told you they were easy.  Now let’s return to the soup.  Dice your onion and put it, with a tablespoon of olive oil, in a saucepan over medium heat. 

Sprinkle it with a pinch of salt and stir it around, allowing it to sweat for about five minutes.  When the onions are translucent, add the minced garlic. 

Cook that, stirring frequently, for another two minutes then sprinkle on the cumin. 

Stir and cook that for one minute then add the dill. 

And finally, pour in two cups of chicken stock. 

Bring that to a boil and simmer for five minutes, then pour in your peas. 

As you can see, mine were still frozen.  Either way is fine.  Bring it back to a boil and cook the peas just long enough to heat them… about two minutes.  Turn the heat to low and squeeze in the juice of half a lime. 

You could pour it into a food processor or blender at this point, or even eat is as is.  I pulled out my new immersion blender and went to town. 

Once it’s pureed, it’ll probably be a bit on the thick side. 

Stir in enough chicken stock to get the consistency you like.  See?  It’s green! 

Top it with a few of your delicious croutons and enjoy! 

What’s your favorite green food?   

Muffin Win!

I really needed something to go right today.

Today was one of those crappy days. I didn't sleep well last night, we started double iterated integrals in calculus class and the prof warned we're going to speed through it toward the final, the grocery store told me they wouldn't exchange the buttermilk I accidentally bought for the real milk I really wanted (some stupid rule about not exchanging perishables after they leave the store.... um, I didn't notice when I grabbed it, how the hell am I supposed to notice before I get home??), it's quarterly report time at work, the line up at the post office was ridiculous and then the clerk took like 10 minutes and three phone calls to find the right form (yes, Recipe Guy, I mailed your headphones back to you), I forgot to get eggs on the way home and had to go back out for them, and then the applesauce I'd been planning on turning into muffins had turned into mold.

If I had railroad-train pajamas, someone would probably make me wear them.

Gah!

It was 8 pm and I hadn't even had dinner, nevermind finish the assignment that's due in my mechanical engineering class tomorrow.

And so, I decided to wing it.

Again.

I have now decided that March is wing it month. No clue what I'm going to make next week, but I'm sure as hell not going to have a recipe handy when I start.

So, with no applesauce, and utter determination to make muffins, I came up with these:

Oatmeal Date Muffins

What you need:

• 1 c quick oats
• 1 c flour
• 2 tbsp ground flax seed
• ½ c sugar
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• ¼ tsp cardamom
• 1 c chopped dates
• ½ c butter, melted
• 1 c plain yogurt
• 1 c pear juice (or apple, or orange, or even milk)
• ½ tsp vanilla
• 1 large egg

What you gotta do:

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Holy crap I remembered. Win! This is looking good already.

Put all the dry ingredients (oats, flour, flax seed, sugar, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, and cardamom) into a big bowl,

And mix them together.

In another bowl stir together the yogurt, egg,

vanilla (crap, there’s no vanilla in the ingredients pic), and butter.

Now, I wasn’t sure I’d need the juice, but once I had the wet ingredients all together I figured the mixture wasn't “liquidy” enough. It seemed too... gloopy.

So I decided to add ½ c of pear juice.

That helped. More liquidy.

Now the dates. They’re so sweet that sugar has started to form on their surfaces.

These things are sticky and sweet. If they were hot, you'd have Def Leppard in your head now wouldn't you?

They’re also really soft and easy to chop up. And if you use the same butter knife that you used to cut up the butter, and to level the flour in the measuring cup, you only have to dirty one knife. What? I had to use an extra bowl, I’m going to conserve any way I can.

Pitted dates. Yup, pitted. See the pit? Bastards.

Once you’ve mashed/chopped a packed cup of dates… hm. Add to dry or wet? I opted for wet. But the wet bowl was a little on the small side, and it was tough to bust up the packed cup…

So I just dumped it all into the dry ingredients and started stirring.

About half way through, I realized I didn’t have enough liquid. This is where I added the other ½ c of pear juice. This is a dangerous thing to do. (not easy to photograph either)

I've had to add liquid at the end of a muffin recipe before and what came out of the oven was more like a hockey puck than it was a muffin.

When you make them, put all the juice into the wet bowl.

Mix the wet into the dry just enough to get it all combined. The dates seemed to break up nicely as I stirred. The reaction between the baking soda and yogurt had already started and the batter was nice and fluffy.

Divide the mixture into 12 muffin cups.

Bake for 20 minutes. A toothpick should come out clean. If you don’t have toothpicks, and I never do, spaghetti works just as well.

Let them cool in the tin for a few minutes before taking them out to finish cooling on the rack.

I was a little worried about how these would come out since I had to add that emergency ½ cup of juice at the end, but OMG muffin win. These things are soft, dark, moist. Just barely sweet, and with nice chunks of dates.

And since Taneasha's always piling muffins up into little pyramids, I thought I'd try too...

So, what went right for you today?