another inspired recipe

sometimes you’ve just got to have soup. don’t care that it’s summer and fifty thousand degrees outside. you don’t feel like cooking and you’ve got all those black beans and some potatoes, and oh–just enough leftover seitan to make a nice chowery soup. so there you go.

Cook up some onions & garlic (as usual) in olive oil. Save half of them for the home fries you’re about to make, and put the other half into your crockpot.  Chop up some raw new potatoes for the soup, and threw them into the crockpot. Chop or slice your seitan until it’s the size you want it, and dump it in. Chop up the rest of the new potatoes, and throw them into the skillet with the onions & garlic. Sprinkle liberally with seasoned salt & fresh ground black pepper.  Pour almost the whole bottle of that gross gourmet tomatoeless-veggie juice that tasted like spinach. Pour in the 2 or 3 cups of black beans you cooked a week ago that have been in the freezer only you took them out that morning to thaw. Look in your freezer and see what else you have to add–try a bag of frozen corn with some black beans and other stuff.  If you’ve got some carrots, scrub & chop & throw some of them in but you don’t have to. Add a couple of veggie bouillon cubes, turn the crock pot onto the low setting, and go to bed.  Oh, but first you have to turn the home fries a time or two, when the bottoms get all nice and browned, and then onions turn into these sweetly hot blackened bits that melt in your mouth.  Put most of the home fries in a glass jar to take to work tomorrow with your lunch, and eat a few because you deserve it and they’re really good.

When you wake up in the morning turn off the crockpot. Let the mixture sit for a while. When you get home from work, take a spoonful and realize that it’s really good. Add a generous couple of pinches of cumin, even more generous pinches of chili powder, and a good fat pinch of roasted red pepper flakes. Mix it all up, taste it, decide that it is a superlative effort, and put it in the fridge to chill overnight. Don’t forgot to put enough into your plastic bowls so you can take it to lunch tomorrow for yourself and EllaDee.  And be glad Joe’s not home to tell you how incredible the soup is and how you absolutely must write down this recipe, because you’ll feel guilty because you never make a soup the same way twice. Every soup I make is incredible, but it’s always different.

Also, although this is not a recipe, unless you want one for split pea soup which I kind of don’t want right now especially after seeing this movie, but The Exorcist stands head and shoulders above the horror & thriller movies. It has a plot that is allowed to develop. Bad things happen to the characters. Scary things happen. It’s still the scariest movie I’e ever seen. Just don’t watch it at 7:30 when you need to be at work by 7:25 the next morning because you were 5 minutes late the morning before and forgot to stay 5 minutes late to make up your time. Because you kind of won’t want to go to sleep after seeing the movie. But then you’ll put on a spritz of your Urban Decay Hard Rock Candy perfume, and it smells good, and your dog will cuddle up and be cute, and you’ll probably be ready to go to bed. But you’re putting Prince Caspian on just in case you stay awake longer than you want to.