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May 2020

damn delicious

Damn Delicious: Roberto Soup

May 19, 2020

Hi, hello, from me and my new favorite soup: Roberto (New Yorker). I can’t retrace my internet breadcrumbs to remember where I came across this soup from Helen Rosner, who is the New Yorker’s Roving Food Correspondent, which sounds like a dream job if I ever heard of one, but this soup is now firmly entrenched in my life. I’ve made it several times and each time I do, I exclaim over and over how damn good it is.

Made with the most simple and humble of ingredients, it just has a special soup alchemy that does me in. Like any good soup, it gets better with time. I’m a major fan.

As you know, I typically link to the original recipe source for my damn delicious posts but today I’m going to share my version of the recipe with a few little tweaks. Here’s why: her original recipe is beautifully written but it’s a pain in the ass for me to follow every time I cook it because she uses a LOT of language to describe the cooking process. It’s helpful, especially for the first time cooking it, but not for when you want to get in, get out and eat dinner. So, mostly for my own laziness, I want the recipe saved in my own archives.

Enjoy!

Ingredients:

  • Glug of olive oil
  • 1 medium-sized onion, diced
  • 2 tablespoons pre-minced garlic or about 3 cloves fresh garlic
  • 1 pound of hot italian turkey sausage, removed from casings
  • 1 28 ounce jar of whole peeled tomatoes (san marzano if you can)
  • 1 quart of chicken bone broth/stock
  • 1 can of beans, drained. Any type! I like white beans, but anything is good
  • 1 bunch kale, chopped or a few handfuls of any sturdy green (collards, chard, spinach)
  • 1 cup grated parmesan cheese
  • lemon or lime slices for garnish
  • salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

  1. Heat olive oil glug in soup pot over medium heat. Add onions and and cook until fragrant. Add garlic. Season with a bit of salt and pepper.
  2. After about one minute of garlic cooking, add sausage to pot. Allow to cook until nice and browned and broken down.
  3. Once sausage is browned, add tomatoes, beans and broth. Bring to simmer. Use a potato masher or the back of your spoon to break down the tomatoes into bite-sized pieces.
  4. Prior to serving, stir in parmesan cheese. It will flavor, but won’t make the soup ‘cheesy’. Season with additional salt and pepper to taste.
  5. Ladle soup into bowls and garnish with a squeeze of lemon or lime.

Do you have any delicious soup recipes as your go-to? This one is my all-time fav!

adventure

Scenes from Quarantine

May 11, 2020

I’ve been taking little snaps whenever I think about it lately, intending to post them here for posterity as a little time capsule of what life was like for us during this crazy time. I want to remember the way it felt to slow down and savor life amidst the tumult of the world.

So many dog cuddles. I love this one because our dog Jax literally cannot get close enough to his dad’s face lately. He’s like velcro.

I’ve also gotten my fair share of cuddles, especially in my quiet morning time.

Our dog Jax had TPLO surgery in February, so I appreciated being home with him during his recovery and seeing his zest for life (and SO MUCH PLAYING) come back.

I hate wearing a face mask. It’s so tough to breathe in those things! I look forward to the day I can go in public without a mask on. Here I was in line at one of a few trips to the Home Depot. I had to restrain myself from going there too often. Being home all the time had me itching to do home improvement and beautification projects.

Here was the line at Home Depot (and basically every other store in the world). What a trip to wait in line to enter a store. Takes me back to my clubbing days in my early twenties. To be honest, it was nice to not have such a crowded shopping experience, especially at Costco!

I’ll never forget my newfound juicing habit I picked up during quarantine! I sincerely hope I keep this one going for the rest of my life… It’s a pain the ass to juice, but the juice is worth the squeeze if you know what I mean!

Looking at houses during quarantine was a total trip. I love this man of mine who is willing to put on a hankie and upend our lives and move in the middle of this.

Getting the house led me to stare at this photo of my new kitchen for hours, dreaming of how I’m going to organize it and all the new recipes I’m going to try and how I’m going to use our new space to create deeper connections with friends and family when we can finally be together again.

It also led to me preemptively missing the big ass tree we have in our current backyard. I joke that someone planted their old Christmas tree back there a million years ago and it just kept growing and growing. It’s huge! I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent staring at it while looking at the moon at night.

What else?

This romantic date night dining al fresco on the back patio with Keith. The weather was perfect – one of the first days that felt like Summer and the food was delicious. And then a huge city rat skittered by running toward our trash cans and I was so mortified that Keith literally thought I had seen a robbery. That was the one and only time we dined outside.

Oh, and I’m sure I’ll never fucking forget (excuse my french, but I need it for emphasis) the truly endless number of Zoom calls I participated in for work during quarantine. I hate video conferencing SO MUCH. I actually took this photo because my skin looks amazing thanks to my new skin regimen (more on that coming soon!), but it preserves my dorky headset for posterity.

Oh, here’s a fun one: the pure joy I felt inside when I found yeast. I made one loaf of homemade bread and then abandoned my bread baking career for now. Truthfully, I’m just too saturated with sourdough content online right now to feign an interest.

Keith and I have almost watched the entire 16 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy during quarantine! Why we picked this show, I have no idea, but I will always associate Grey’s with this time in our lives. This episode was a major highlight because one of my best friends was a guest star on the episode. That’s him dressed as a woman! Great episode!

And, I’ll end on this note…

One Sunday Keith and I drove up to the Berkeley Hills to watch the sunset over the Bay. I fell in love with my city again that day. It felt like pure ecstasy to be out of the house. The couple in the Chevy Blazer parked in front of us must’ve felt great too because they started getting it on in the backseat of their car! The car was a rockin’ and no one better come knockin’. Keith and I died of laughter. We finished our outing by getting takeout Top Dog, one of our most favorite pastimes that is quintessentially Bay Area. Standing there on the street waiting for them to grill up our dinner, life almost felt normal.

Do you have scenes from quarantine? Feel free to share a link to your blog in the comments. I’d love to see!

home

Welcome to my life, my new little plant babies

May 6, 2020

Last weekend, I was sitting outside on my patio participating in a zoom call, as we do these days. I kept looking underneath our little porch at quite the collection of empty planters abandoned under there. It was like a graveyard for dead plants of the past.

I may have stalled out on my home improvement list when I realized that we were going to move sometime soon, but I wanted to do something. Just because I didn’t want to improve our current home didn’t mean that I couldn’t find some new plant babies to add to our life and hopefully edify our future home.

I pulled the planters out. Jax inspected.

After a quick spray with the hose to clean out the likely million spiders living in the planters, I was off to Home Depot to buy some plant babies. Nearly a hundred bucks later, I was home and getting my plant on.

The combination of sunshine, quality time with my dogs and the feeling of actually getting my hands dirty and doing something of real life value felt SO good.

The next day, we found our new home! I had no idea it was going to happen like that because I saw the posting on craigslist in the morning and we visited the property at 2pm the same day. We applied on Monday and signed the lease on Wednesday in the fastest and easiest rental transaction in the history of the Bay Area.

I bought these plant babies with the full faith we were going to find a new home. I was finally ready and brave enough to make a change. I just didn’t know the change was going to happen the very next day. Isn’t it crazy that life works that way? You don’t even know when you wake up in the morning that your life is going to shift so dramatically so quickly, but once you decide it’s like it’s already done.

Are you doing home improvement projects these days? Are you a plant lady? I love them so much, but I confess that Keith is the person in our home who keeps our plants alive. I buy them, he cares for them. 🙂