Having just delivered her most recent work for the Spring 2010 Collection show at The Gallery Project, Amy finally had a little time on her hands to cook it down in the kitchen. She’d been craving a potato soup for weeks, but doesn’t care for really thick soups, and devised this tasty li’l guy. It’s got the subtlety of a potato soup, with a hint of sharpness from the celery. And it demands croutons with an iron fist. Obey or perish.

Provençal Potato, Leek and Celery Soup

• Four large-ish potatoes with white flesh–such as russet, red, or purple–peeled, then diced
• One large white onion, diced
• Two or three large celery stalks, diced
• Two leeks, diced
• Safflower, or another high-heat oil to taste (for sauteing)
• Veggie bouillon (I used three cubes of Rapunzel brand, sans salt)
• 8 cups filtered water
• 1/4 cup unsweetened soy milk + more to desired consistency
• 1 tbsp. Earth Balance TM
• 1 tbsp. white all-purpose flour
• 1.5 tsp. herbs de provence
• salt and pepper to taste

Combine onion, leeks, and celery in a large soup pot.  Drizzle with high heat oil, add a dash of salt and a couple of cranks from a pepper mill, and saute on medium-high heat until onions are translucent and all veggies are soft.  Add potato pieces and cover mixture with 8 cups water.  Bring to a boil.  Once boiling, add veggie bouillon cubes.  (Note: in this recipe, I don’t want the veggie stock flavor to dominate, so I use one less cube than normally required for eight cups of water; I use three instead of four).

While soup is simmering, make your roux by melting Earth Balance ™ in a shallow saute pan.  Add flour and whisk in soy milk.  Allow to heat through and thicken, stirring sporadically.  Once thick, add roux to soup by stirring it in slowly.  Add more soy milk to desired creaminess.  I keep my soup on the brothy side, not caring too much for very thick cream soups, but adding more roux and soy creamer would thicken this soup right up.  Add herbs d’provence and more salt and pepper to taste.  Using an immersion blender, blend some of the veggies to thicken the broth, or ladle a portion of the soup into a regular blender, and blend until smooth.  Add back into soup and stir.

Serve with freshly baked croutons (mandatory).

We preceded this with an awesome salad, adapted from a recipe in one of Amy’s mom’s cooking magazines.

Salad Goodness with Oranges and Candied Almonds

Candied almonds:

• 1/4 cup almond slivers
• 1 pat Earth Balance TM
• 2 tsp. sugar
• salt and cayenne to taste

Toast almonds in Earth Balance over medium heat.  When lightly toasted, add sugar, salt and cayenne and stir until coated.  Allow to brown and transfer to a bowl to cool.

Dressing (we tripled these measurements to save some for later in a cruet.  I’m so glad we did- it’s my new favorite dressing!):

• 2 tbsp. red wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp. honey (you can substitute agave)
• 1/2 tsp. Dijon mustard
• splash of orange juice
• salt and pepper to taste
• 3 tbsp. olive oil

Stir all ingredients to a bowl minus the olive oil.  Quickly whisk while drizzling olive oil into the mixture.  Whisk until dressing is emulsified.

Salad:

• romaine lettuce, plus spinach, etc.
• 1/4 cup thinly sliced red onion
• 1 navel orange, peeled and sliced
• candied almonds

Toss all ingredients together, coating evenly with dressing.  Serve with extra dressing, unless you accidentally drank it because you couldn’t help yourself.

Here’s the whole meal:

I suspect that many of you out there are just as voyeuristic as I am when it comes to seeing other people’s spaces.  Even though I can afford none of the glory inside, I love picking up a Dwell magazine just for the photos.  Apartment therapy?  Please and thank you.  And don’t even get me started on The Selby.  So, I thought we should give you a little glimpse into IV headquarters (i.e. our kitchen) while it’s bright and clean(ish).  Also, Mark is cleaning up a mess on my art website right now instead of posting about amazing quesadillas (coming soon!) so I thought I would hop into the blogger’s seat, and since I love all of the aforementioned  peeks into others’ lives, that’s what you get–only this time from ours.

What’s that you say?  No no, contrary to appearances here, our kitchen is not located on the surface of the sun, though our dining room does get pretty toasty during the day, much to the cats’ delight.

The crazy angle of this photo is attributed less to the height-enhancing power from all of the kale in our diet, more to my perch sitting on the counter as I took the photo.  Note the waist-height oven–a first for us, having been used to the more customary oven/stove units prevalent in all of our former abodes.  This makes appliance shopping that much more interesting and complicated as we found out yesterday when looking at all of the choices of ranges: induction electric, electric/induction combos, glass vs. electric coils, gas vs. electric…

So, that’s our kitchen.  She’s quite a champ and has become our favorite room in the house, as occurs with many foodies, I’m sure.  Thanks for taking the tour with me!

In the IV kitchen, we find that we like cooking lots lots more if everything we need is clean, easy to find, and even…dare I say…pretty.  My friend Lauren cooks in such an attractive way.  She puts her veggies in containers as she chops them, cooking-show style.  I told her I observed her doing this and she denies it, but I saw it!  Mark and I have taken to doing the same thing.  A bowl for the compost stuff and a bowl for each veggie.

As you saw in Mark’s post on containers and bulk food, we have a lot of schtuff to keep organized.  We pick up most of our containers for bulk stuff at thrift stores and I found some lovely packaging labels at an office supply store.  We take the empty containers into the local coop and weigh them before filling them with their requisite contents and write the weight on the back of the tag for future reference.  This keeps us from using as many bags and disposable containers.  If the labels get a little mussed, you can tell that particular ingredient is well-loved (can you tell how much we like salt around these parts?).

We have a pantry with a little broom closet adjacent to it.  We didn’t find ourselves using the closet for much, and were running low on pantry space, so Mark put shelves in the broom closet and voila: more room!  We also mounted some handy shelves onto the wall for more storage.

For awhile there, we had a pretty messy spice situation.  They were in bags, different containers, and were generally mis-matchy and unattractive.  We decided to invest in what I dubbed a spice-lution.  We ordered these containers from a store called Raindogs.  Ordering 30 of them was a bit pricey, which is why we think of it as an investment.  After all, spices are one of the most important aspects of cooking, so they need to be kept in quality containers, away from humidity, excess light and other contaminants.

We were lucky to find room for ours on the side of our fridge since they’re magnetic.  We also liked these jars from Etsy, which are customizable and very attractive, but in the end, went with the ones with optional shake and pour openings.

In terms of fresh food, of course we keep most of it in the fridge like anyone else, but we also like to keep a lot of fruits and veggies that prefer room temperatures close at hand.  We have a little set-up for potatoes, onions, garlic, etc. that we quite like.

The herbs that needed to be brought in for the winter in pots are ready to be clipped for soups, stews and other wint’ry goodness in the greenhouse window over our sink.  Among all of their cactus and succulent friends, we have a healthy rosemary bush, lavendar and thyme.  We dried the rest of the herbs, as mentioned in a previous post.  There are also some dinosaurs, fish, and owls in there for good measure.

Okay now!  What have we learned today?  That’s right: get busy and keep it pretty, people!  Break!

Hi ya’ll.  Amy here filling in for Mark with my first post on IV.  He spent the entire evening helping me stretch the canvas for a ten-foot painting, so he deserves a break.  It’s salad time…just in time for your fall crop of lettuce.  Sadly ours got eaten by hoggish vermin.  We’ll take better precautions next year.

Mark and I each take different approaches to preparing a salad.  I tend to put ANYTHING in the fridge on some lettuce and voila!  Mark has a more regimented approach.  We can agree that any good salad has some sort of protein such as nuts, seeds, or beans.  We both also really enjoy a good homemade dressing.  So here we have, for your consideration, two salads- the first is a collaborative effort and the second is one of my weird (but delicious!) creations.

Salad 1: We had this one the other night.  Let’s call it Chloe’s Fall Salad.  I’m giving cred to our friend Chloe for the dressing recipe.

So of course you can put anything you like on this salad.  The apples are what make it a “Fall” salad.  Copycat these moves if you want to replicate the tastiness in the photo.

Salad:

• mixed red leaf  and green leaf lettuce washed and torn into shreds
• shredded carrots (we use a cheese grater for this)
• toasted pine nuts (pop raw pine nuts into a pan on medium heat, stirring constantly until aromatic)
• thinly cut apple slices
• pepper to taste

Chloe’s Dressing:

• 2 tbsp tahini
• 1 tsp pomegranate molasses (you can get this at Whole Foods or Middle Eastern grocers)
• 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• fresh chives, finely chopped
• water to desired viscosity

Mix all ingredients in a blender.  Measurements are approximate.  I just kind-of keep dumping ingredients in until it tastes right, so feel free to doctor to suit your preferences.  Stores for weeks in the fridge (if it lasts that long!)

Salad 2: Amy’s “Everything Goes” Salad (furreal people)

This particular salad contains:

• green leaf lettuce, washed and torn into shreds
• chopped red onion
• cooked corn from the cob (we save ours in the fridge so it’s cold when put on the salad)
• blueberries
• hemp seed
• pepper to taste

Dressing (my take on a Japanese sesame ginger dressing):

• 4 tbsp rice wine vinegar
• 6 tbsp vegetable or olive oil
• 2 tbsp sesame oil
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tsp sake
• 4 tbsp freshly grated ginger (or from a jar)
• 3 tsp vegan sugar
• 10-12 baby carrots (or 2 medium-large carrots)
• 5 tsp tomato sauce
• 1/4 cup chopped onion

Combine all ingredients in a blender starting with liquids and gradually adding solid ingredients and blend until smooth-ish.  Add water if necessary to thin.  Again, measurements are approximate.  We like this dressing to be rather sweet, so feel free to cut the sugar down some.  You can also substitute agave nectar or another sweetener of your choice.  This one saves for weeks too.

Let us hear your favorite salad mix-em-ups and dressings.  The more unexpected, the better!