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Macrina Bakery’s Tomato and Fennel Soup with White Beans

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I talk to Mr. Faraway a few days later, on the phone, and spend a lot of the time crying, although the conversation isn’t really unpleasant; nothing happened that he didn’t expect, and he’s not one for saying unkind things, no matter the circumstances. A few days later, I receive a birthday gift in the mail, the one he’d bought to give me at the now-canceled dinner; it arrives complete with a typed note on formal letterhead, and finally, one of us gets mad, and it’s me.

Really? Letterhead? I text him. I didn’t know we were at that point.

He calls me a bit later, and protests, but it’s my personal letterhead, because you’re a friend.

Lawyer, I tell him. You’re such a lawyer.

We feel strangely normal again, and I feel less lonely after we chat for a while and hang up.

I try to be careful – stressful times are always when I gain weight, and I’m at the point where I desperately need to lose it, rather than gain more. It’s not that I care what the scale says, but the last pair of pants I own that fit are telling me it’s time to do something, so I resolve to manage my stress with dog-walking rather than eating, and to try to eat healthily.

Eating healthy and comfort food don’t have to be mutually exclusive, I decide, and check out several cookbooks from the library in an attempt to prove the point.

When I get home, I realize I’ve checked out three baking books.

One of the books is from Seattle’s Macrina Bakery, which I’ve never been to but whose breads I can buy at the local upscale supermarket; mercifully, the Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook has a chapter of lunch items, one of which sounds perfect: Tuscan Tomato & Fennel Soup with White Beans. I don’t actually care much for tomato soup, or tomatoes in general, but somehow I managed to produce quite a few Roma tomatoes in my garden this year, and grilled cheese with a bowl of soup sounds like the perfect way to use them.

For some reason, I got the idea that this would be a very tomato-y soup, thick and red. There aren’t any pictures in the book to guide me, and the recipe calls for 10 Roma tomatoes, but I have a sneaking feeling that I didn’t use the correct amount of tomatoes – my garden tomatoes are smaller than the ones I typically see at the supermarket. The soup was a mellow broth full of vegetables and filling beans, savory and flavorful. I wouldn’t change a thing, except maybe to measure and write down the volume of tomatoes I actually used (my best guess: about half).

If the end result is delicious and satisfying, then it hardly matters if the recipe was exactly followed – I loved it and so did The Child, who helped herself to seconds and pronounced it The Best Soup You Ever Made.

Tomato Fennel Soup

 

Macrina Bakery's Tomato and Fennel Soup with White Beans
 
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Ingredients
  • 1 cup dried white beans
  • 2 bay leaves
  • ¼ cup olive oil
  • 1 medium yellow onion, diced
  • 2 medium fennel bulbs, diced
  • 1 tbsp ground fennel seed
  • 2 tbsp chopped fresh thyme (or 2 tsp dried)
  • 10 Roma tomatoes
  • 6 to 8 cups vegetable stock
Instructions
  1. Soak beans in water overnight.
  2. Drain beans and place in a medium saucepan with two bay leaves. Cover with water and cook over medium heat until slightly tender, about 20 minutes. Reserve 1 cup of the cooking liquid. Drain beans and set aside.
  3. Boil water in a large pot. Core tomatoes and score bottoms with an x. Plunge tomatoes into the boiling water for about 30 seconds, then remove tomatoes and plunge into a bowl of ice water. Peel skins from tomatoes, then seed them and cut into pieces.
  4. Combine olive oil, onion, and fennel in a large pot. Cover pot and cook for about 15 minutes over medium heat to sweat the vegetables, stirring occasionally. When the onions are translucent, add garlic, fennel seed, and thyme. Cook one more minute, until garlic is fragrant.
  5. Add tomatoes and cook 20-30 minutes over medium heat, until tomatoes are falling apart. Add reserved bean liquid and 6 cups of the stock, bring to a boil, and simmer another 20 minutes over medium heat to bring the flavors together. Add more stock as needed.
  6. Add the beans, heat through, and season to taste with salt and pepper.
Notes
I used approximately half the amount of tomatoes called for, which resulted in a nice, brothy soup. I inadvertently used whole fennel seed rather than ground, which I don't recommend unless you like little chewy seeds in your soup. the original recipe calls for garnishing the soup with fresh fennel fronds and aioli, either of which would be nice, but aren't necessary.
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Carrot-Zucchini Bread with Candied Ginger

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The one downside to removing the wall unit is that the amount of shelf space available to house my cookbooks was reduced dramatically, but this turns out to be less of a hindrance and more of a blessing. Sorting through the cookbooks, I find myself wondering why I still own one that I have never used, from a restaurant I ate soup in once, 17 years ago, only because it happened to be across the street from my office.

Since the only thing I really remember about the soup is that I thought it was overpriced, even by New York City standards, I am wondering why I bought the book in the first place.

It turns out I have a lot of cookbooks like this, which I put into piles in another room, and, eventually, discarded.

Even though it will be some time before I figure out the remaining details of hanging pictures and placing knick-knacks, the family room is now a cozy place, pleasant to sit in on a weekend morning, drinking coffee and waiting for baked goods to emerge from the oven.

I made this bread right around that time, trying to find a way to make zucchini bread that was a cut above the usual. I found the recipe on the Sur La Table website, but it can also be found in one of their cookbooks, Eating Local; it is probably the best zucchini bread I’ve ever tasted, light and moist, with the carrots adding nice color and sweetness and candied ginger bits adding zest and a bit of texture. Better yet, it makes two loaves, so you can eat one now and freeze some for later. Or, give it to your neighbors, who will probably appreciate it more than some more of your extra zucchini.

Not that I have this problem – I made this bread with the only zucchini I managed to grow this summer. In two years, I’ve managed to produce two zucchinis.

The Child loved this bread, as did her friends, much to my surprise, and the first loaf disappeared on a late-summer trip to the water park with her friends. The second loaf never made it in to the freezer; it was waiting for us when we got home, sunburned and hungry.

 

Carrot-Zucchini Bread with Candied Ginger

Carrot-Zucchini Bread with Candied Ginger
 
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Ingredients
  • Nonstick cooking spray, for preparing the pan
  • 3 cups sifted unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 1½ tsp ground ginger
  • 1½ tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • ¼ tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp kosher or sea salt
  • ½ cup minced candied ginger
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1 cup canola oil
  • 1¾ cups sugar
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 cup grated carrots
  • 1 cup grated zucchini
Instructions
  1. Preheat the oven to 325°F. Coat two 8½ by 4½ by 2¾-inch loaf pans with oil or nonstick cooking spray.
  2. Sift together the sifted flour, ginger, cinnamon, baking soda, and baking powder into a medium bowl. Stir in the salt and candied ginger.
  3. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs until light and foamy. Add the canola oil, sugar, and vanilla, whisking vigorously until the sugar dissolves. Whisk in the carrots and zucchini.
  4. Add the dry ingredients to the egg mixture all at once and stir with a wooden spoon just until blended. Divide the batter evenly between the 2 prepared pans.
  5. Bake until the breads are well risen and firm to the touch, and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 1 hour. Let cool in the pans on a rack for 10 minutes, then invert and finish cooling right side up on the rack.
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Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuanese Chopped Celery with Beef

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After I made Big Sur Bakery’s Baked Beans, I had a problem: I had bought a whole head of celery, and used one stalk, leaving me with, well, a lot of celery. I know, I could put peanut butter on it, or even peanut butter and raisins, and try to pass it off as a healthy snack, but since the advent of the vegetable crisper – the thing that forces us to look at all that unused celery and feel guilty for not eating it when we know we should – has anyone, ever, been fooled into actually wanting to eat one?

Fortunately, I ran across a blog post some time ago on The Wednesday Chef, in which she mentioned a recipe that solves  the what-to-do-with-the-rest-of-the-celery dilemma, and even more fortunately, I remembered the post and was able to find it after I got tired of feeling Celery Guilt every time I opened the crisper.

It took a while to find a couple of the ingredients on the list (the vinegar and the chili paste) – there were items that seemed to fit the bill at my local grocery, but since the blog post said that these two specialty items were, in fact, quite cheap, I passed on my store’s $12 vinegar and $8 chili paste, and made a special trip to our local Asian market, where I found both items for $3, and, feeling proud of my culinary bargain-hunting prowess, tossed in a package of Matcha Kit-Kats for The Child (which she loved) and then went to the liquor store next door and stocked up on Belgian beer for me (which I loved).

Not only does this recipe use up leftover celery, it used up exactly what remained of my celery head, minus the one stalk I bought it for (for use in the beans). If that weren’t enough, the recipe is startlingly easy to make – startling because each time I’ve tried to make actual Chinese food at home, it either doesn’t taste as good as restaurant Chinese, or it involves complex preparations or obscure ingredients or both, and I generally end the meal wishing I’d simply gone with takeout.

Though the recipe begins with two seemingly involved steps – blanching and de-stringing celery – blanching takes all of 30 seconds, and I learned a handy trick for de-stringing celery: simply run a vegetable peeler on the outside of the stalk. You might have known that one already, but I picked it up from The Kitchen Chick’s post about this recipe. Everything else is pretty straightforward: dice the celery, cook the ground beef, and toss everything else in. Have the rice cooked (or nearly so) when you start the beef, because it all cooks up very quickly.

I’m not sure I need to say it, but just in case you were in doubt: I adored this recipe. It’s quick and simple to prepare, tasty, serves two precisely. The flavors are pure, very authentic Chinese, with a nice spice that you can adjust to your taste.

Did I mention The Child loved it? To my amazement, she did, even though I followed the recipe precisely and it was fairly spicy as a result. The spiciness didn’t bother her at all: She declared it was a nice spicy, not a burning spicy.

The recipe is originally from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice, which is on hold for me at the library as I sit here typing. I used the directions from The Kitchen Chick’s blog post.

 

Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuanese Chopped Celery with Beef

 

Sichuanese Chopped Celery with Beef
 
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Serves: 2
Ingredients
  • 11 oz celery
  • 3 tbsp neutral cooking oil
  • 4 oz ground beef
  • 1½ tbsp Sichuan chili bean paste
  • 1½ tbsp finely chopped ginger
  • light soy sauce to taste
  • 1 tsp Chinkiang vinegar (brown rice vinegar)
Instructions
  1. Boil a pot of water for blanching the celery.
  2. De-string the celery by running a vegetable peeler along the outer side. Dice celery into ⅜ pieces. Blanch celery in boiling water for about 30 seconds; drain.
  3. Heat oil in a large pan or seasoned wok over high flame. Add ground meat and stir-fry until cooked. Break up pieces as needed.
  4. Add chili bean paste and stir-fry a bit more until fragrant and the oil is red. Add ginger and stir-fry for a few seconds. Add celery.
  5. Stir-fry until celery is hot but still crunchy. As you cook, season with a bit of soy sauce to taste. Stir in vinegar.
  6. Serve with rice.
Notes
This dish cooks quickly, so don't begin stir-frying until your rice has finished cooking.
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