Julia Child-ish Cooking
A few years ago, I discovered how incredibly easy it is to can tomatoes.
Time consuming, somewhat, and kinda messy, but nonetheless relatively easy. I took, and continue to take, great joy in pulling a pint or quart of home grown, home canned tomatoes off the shelf to use in soups and other recipes during the dark winter months. Yes, I know you can buy a can for less than $2 at the grocery store, but really, they don't taste the same. The only ones I've found that come anywhere near to the taste of home grown and canned are Muir Glen Organic, which cost over $2 a can.
So it's become something of a tradition for me to can on Labor Day weekend. This year, because I am retired :) , I didn't have to do it precisely on the weekend. Once you have the tomatoes ready to go, however, you are on a limited time span to get them processed and bathed in their jars.
It ended up that I had an excess of tomatoes which meant time to venture into the NY Times Cooking site to find a recipe for tomato soup/bisque. I went with Fresh Tomato Soup With Basil and Farro.
Quick side story about farro: 10 years ago, our youngest daughter, Bridget, spent a spring semester studying abroad in Florence. A study abroad program means a couple things to the parents of the student. 1: Get ready to shell out the big bucks, not necessarily for the actual tuition but for all the additional travel the student will want/need to do. 2: Put aside some of those bucks for you to go visit the student because it is a perfect opportunity to get to Europe or wherever else your student might be studying. In our case, we also saw this as a great opportunity to see our German exchange daughter, Claudia. She jumped on the bandwagon, put in for some of the amazing vacation time that most Europeans get, and developed most of our travel itinerary. I'm getting to the point of the story about farro. We were in Rome, and after a day of walking around the Eternal City, decided to have room service. I ordered a bowl of chicken soup with farro, my introduction to the ancient grain. I enjoyed the soup so much, I emailed the hotel and got the recipe but could never find farro. It is now rather trendy here in the States and easy to find at your local grocer store. End of story.
On to the Julia Child component of this blog. Bottom line--I made a giant mess while cooking. The farro boiled over repeatedly, which is difficult to accomplish with our induction cooktop yet I managed. The tomatoes did the same. The goopiest part was in processing the tomatoes and farro into soup.
I believe Julia Child was something of a messy cook; while cleaning up, I found myself thinking about Dan Ackroyd's imitation of the famous chef on Saturday Night Live.
Time consuming, somewhat, and kinda messy, but nonetheless relatively easy. I took, and continue to take, great joy in pulling a pint or quart of home grown, home canned tomatoes off the shelf to use in soups and other recipes during the dark winter months. Yes, I know you can buy a can for less than $2 at the grocery store, but really, they don't taste the same. The only ones I've found that come anywhere near to the taste of home grown and canned are Muir Glen Organic, which cost over $2 a can.
So it's become something of a tradition for me to can on Labor Day weekend. This year, because I am retired :) , I didn't have to do it precisely on the weekend. Once you have the tomatoes ready to go, however, you are on a limited time span to get them processed and bathed in their jars.
Here they are, neatly displayed, ready for the pantry
Quick side story about farro: 10 years ago, our youngest daughter, Bridget, spent a spring semester studying abroad in Florence. A study abroad program means a couple things to the parents of the student. 1: Get ready to shell out the big bucks, not necessarily for the actual tuition but for all the additional travel the student will want/need to do. 2: Put aside some of those bucks for you to go visit the student because it is a perfect opportunity to get to Europe or wherever else your student might be studying. In our case, we also saw this as a great opportunity to see our German exchange daughter, Claudia. She jumped on the bandwagon, put in for some of the amazing vacation time that most Europeans get, and developed most of our travel itinerary. I'm getting to the point of the story about farro. We were in Rome, and after a day of walking around the Eternal City, decided to have room service. I ordered a bowl of chicken soup with farro, my introduction to the ancient grain. I enjoyed the soup so much, I emailed the hotel and got the recipe but could never find farro. It is now rather trendy here in the States and easy to find at your local grocer store. End of story.
On to the Julia Child component of this blog. Bottom line--I made a giant mess while cooking. The farro boiled over repeatedly, which is difficult to accomplish with our induction cooktop yet I managed. The tomatoes did the same. The goopiest part was in processing the tomatoes and farro into soup.
I believe Julia Child was something of a messy cook; while cleaning up, I found myself thinking about Dan Ackroyd's imitation of the famous chef on Saturday Night Live.
It really was much messier than this.
The soup was delicious, by the way. I've frozen part of it. Making soup will be added to the Labor Day Tomato Tradition.
Now I have a question for you and hope you will take a moment to share your thoughts in the comment section below.
I've been ruminating about feeling filled and feeling fulfilled. I believe they don't always intersect and that in fact it may be unreasonable to expect that they do on a daily or regular basis. I'm just wondering what you do that leaves you feeling filled--feeling fulfilled--feeling filled but not necessarily fulfilled--feeling fulfilled but maybe not filled? Thanks in advance for weighing in.
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