Squash Chipotle Chowder

Another winter pantry soup I created several years ago when we had a surplus of squash. This is thick and hearty but not too filling and packed with vegetables. The squash and corn give it a sweetness balanced by the lime and the heat of the chipotle. And the basic recipe can easily be converted from a southwest flavor profile to a Thai or Indian curry profile (see variations below). The recipe is vegetarian but it can easily be vegan.

Recipe:
1 Cup chopped carrots
1 Cup chopped leek or 1/2 cup chopped onion
1 Cup chopped potatoes
2 Dried Chipotles peppers

Place vegetables in a soup pot and cover with water and simmer until very tender. Remove from heat and add 3 cups cooked butternut squash (or other sweet winter squash). Let cool until safe to handle, then process in a food processer until smooth, then return to the soup pot. Stir in 1/2 chicken flavored broth powder (or real chicken broth if you prefer). Soup will be very thick at this point. Add 2 cups of milk or (or water if preferred). Add 2 cups of frozen sweet corn. Heat on low until soup is hot.

To season add:
1 tsp. coriander powder
1 tsp cumin powder
dash or two of tamari
Taste soup to determine if it is as spicy hot as you want it. If not add chipotle powder, a quarter teaspoon at time until desired heat is achieved. Stir in the juice of half a lime and cook 5 minutes more.

Variations anyone?
Of course I always have variations. This is really good with grated cheddar cheese melted in the soup. Add to the pot or if some of the diners want to avoid dairy, individuals can spinkle some cheese in the bottom of each bowl and cover with the hot soup.

Currify your soup by replacing the corinader with curry powder. You can also replace the milk with coconut milk instead of water. If using a hot curry, you may want to omit the chipotles.

Serve with whole wheat or pumpernickle bread. Also good with corn chips or corn tortillas.




Ingredient Notes:
Winter squash is easy to grow and store, as are onions, potatoes and carrots which serve as the base of the soup. Eating with the seasons, even in winter is not only possible, but provides an opportunity for creative new combinations of available ingredients.

Squash can be used as a vegetable, in desserts and sauces and makes a richly colored, flavorful soup base. Squash is also very high in Vitamins A and C, contains no fat and contains a variety of minerals.

An Aromatherapy Garden

Those of us with gardening addictions are spending our hours surrounded by seed catalogs dreaming and planning the perfect gardens we expect to have when the snows melt and the ground warms. Many blessings come with gardening; I want to talk about just one of these here - aromatherapy.
We often think of the benefits of aromatherapy coming from a bottle, but those small essential oil bottles are packed with intense aromas that originate in nature – actually a garden in a bottle. The contents of many of those bottles belong to such plant exotics as dusky frankincense, smoky vetiver, sensuous patchouli and mystical sandalwood, but others come from plants that grow well in most any garden – like peppermint, lemon balm and basil.
Try it! Sit in the middle of a garden when the sun is warming and the breezes gentle, eyes closed, nose wide-open and your thoughts gently surrounding the aromas you smell. Take a deep breath and another and relax into the moment. The aroma of fresh growing plants, rich soil, compost and fragrant herbs and flowers all combine to create a feeling - perhaps peaceful, calming, euphoric, grounding or invigorating.
You can make a special aromatherapy garden, an aromatherapy bed or just sprinkle aromatherapy plants where appropriate in an existing garden. The important point is to know your aromatherapy plants and their benefits and to enjoy and share those benefits whenever you need or want them.
Aromatherapy plants do well in an organic garden. Often times their essential oils function as insect repellants to minimize insect damage to themselves and nearby plants. Most are not very fussy and are quite happy in a variety of soils and location. And there is some evidence to show that essential oil bearing plants produce more oil which means a stronger scent when they are stressed and less oil when that are over-fertilized. While any fragant plant that you enjoy create can aromatherapy benefit, certain plants are well known, either because of experiential observations and/or research to invoke certain responses in people.

Ten plants to try:
1. Basil has a fresh, clean, anise-like scnet and comes in many sizes, colors and aromas. I like to plant a hedge of basil alongside my tomatoes - they are good companion plants in the garden as well as the kitchen. Basil helps me to stay alert, to clear the mind and to focus. It is also helps open up the sinuses and relieve headaches.

2.Chamomile flowers have a fruity, fresh, herbaceous aroma. It is deeply relaxing and makes a good before bed tea. Be care with this one though as it reseeds prolifically and quickly becomes a

weed.

3. Clary sage is a bi-annual which sends up a showy flower stalk the second year with blue and pink flowers. Its' sharp, musky, sweet scent promotes emotional balance and relaxation

.

4. Geranium - the smelly leaf as opposed to the showy flower kind - has a sweet, rosy, herbaceous-minty aroma that I love. This is one to take inside to overwinter but it does quite well in pots or in the ground and will grow quite large. Geranium is relaxing and balancing and it help sooth the tensions of PMS and stress.

5. Lavender is well-known and appreciated for its lavender flower spikes and aroma. It does not over-winter for me and isn't happy in the greenhouse. Still, it is the most popular essential oil in the world and for those that can grow it and like, it is a must. Lavender is relaxing and helps alleviate stress. It is often used to promote restful sleep, to treat tension headaches and is excellent in healing and alleviating the pain of burns, stings and wounds.

6. Lemon balm is easy plant to grow and it has lovely lemony scented leaves. Often called melissa oil in aromatherapy ( the essential oil is very expensive) it is prized for its ability as an antidepressant and calming effect on the nervous system.

7. Marjoram is a low growing plant that is a tender perennial in my area but it overwinters beautifully in a cold greenhouse. Its sweet, spicy aroma helps to strengthen the nervous system and is deeply relaxing.

8. Peppermint (and other mints) are easy to grow but their spreading habits can make them invasive. Peppermint has a fresh, strong minty aroma that is very cooling and helps alleviate cold symptoms such as sinus congestion. It also is stimulating and helps me stay awake on a long drive.

9. Rosemary is a favorite of mine - a small woody shrub- that I have to overwinter in the greenhouse. It does well the rest of the year in a pot or in the ground. The fresh, herbaceous cent of rosemary is invigorating - helps clear the mind and increase concentrations.

10. Thyme, a low growing perennial, has a crisp, clean, herbal scent. It is well known for its antiseptic properties and was used in hospitals before the advent of modern antiseptics. The aroma stimulated the mind and tonifies the nerves. Inhaling it with any type of sinus or lung congestion or infections is beneficial.

Fog Frost

Yesterday was foggy again. Conditions were just right for the formation of hoar frost, what I prefer to call, fog frost. The cyrstals formed were beautiful and in many cases, very artsy.


Car mirror framed


The entrance to WindSong Farm (our place). Like entering a fairy land.

A peach tree twig.

Flower stalk of a hydrangea.

Another hydrangea flower

Hayrake

Close-up of hayrake tines.

Spokes of hayrake.

Maple twig

Bittersweet vines on the garden shed.

Frosty-headed peach twig



Gate across the bridge, leaving WishSong Farm

Winter Immunity Soup - food as medicine

I woke up with the lymph nodes in my neck swollen - a sure sign that my body was dealing with an overload of toxins and that I was about to get sick. I had some congestion and was coughing up stuff and my tonsils were also inflamed a little. I did not have any echinacea on hand, if I did I would have starting taking it every couple of hours. So for my "cure" I turned to chicken soup.

I read a study some years ago about how the home remedy of chicken soup had helped to reduce the length of time for a cold. My own experience with hot soup (not traditional chicken soup of which I am not a fan) occurred 5 or 6 years ago . We were in the city doing some shopping and I started getting that - I'm coming down with something feeling. My throat got scratchy, I felt like I was getting a fever and my head was achy. We had planned to have supper on the way out of town - I just wanted to go home and go to bed - but Dave really wanted to get something to eat - especially as he knew I would not be up to cooking when we got home. We stopped a a Thai restaurant. The only thing on the menu that looked good to me was the soup but it was a big portion that served two. Dave said he would eat some soup and also ordered a meal. When the soup came, it was hot and brothy with bits of onion, mushrooms, chinese cabbage, lemongrass, cilantro, ginger, chili peppers and baby corns and probably some other stuff in it. It was so hot and also very hot - both temperature and pungency. It was served in a tureen with a candle underneath so it stayed very warm through the meal and it was seasoned just a hair over as hot as I could stand it. If I was careful and did not cough, I was fine but if I coughed it started to burn and I kept coughing till I could cool down my throat. I ate most of the soup - sometimes there are foods that just feel like they are exact match for whatever ails me and this was one. We went home, I went to bed and as you probably guessed, the next morning I was perfectly fine. Now when I get that coming down with something feeling - I think hot Thai soup.

I started by cooking a chicken till it was very done and then took it out of the broth water. When I make this soup, I usually go vegetarian but since I had a chicken in the freezer, I decided to combine Thai soup and chicken noodle soup. I added lots of onion, celery, carrots, lots of shitake mushrooms (I buy them dried by the pound from Frontier that way I have them on hand for soup, stews, sauces and gravies), 4 astragalus sticks (also by the pound from Frontier), hot Thai chilies (from the garden), bay leaves and a can of chopped baby corns. I simmered this soup until all was soft and then added noodles, cooking until almost tender. Then a teaspoon or two of powdered ginger, a teaspoon of basil, and after tasting some more cayenne. I also added some miso and a little tamari for flavor and finished with the juice of half of a lemon. I made this soup using ingredients to make it taste good (no matter how healthy it is if it doesn't taste good, we won't eat enough of it) but also choosing ingredients specifically for their health benefit.

Ingredients and their reason for being in my soup:

• celery, carrots, corns for color, texture and flavor and they are good for you veggies
• astragalus is a major Chinese tonic herb, it is strengthening and warming, strengthens chi expecially surface chi, tonifies the blood and the lungs, it has a woody, sweet flavor and is a nice addition to healing soups (remove the sticks from the soup before serving)
• shitakes - besides adding wonderful flavor and nutrients, shitakes contain lentian an immune stimulant and they are anti-viral (to use dried mushrooms I rinse them to get rid of any adhering dirt than soak in hot water until soft enough to chop, I also add the soaking water to the soup except for any debris at the bottom of the bowl)
• onions - we love onions so we use a lot of them and they are said to provide a variety of health benefits but in this case they have long been used to treat colds and flu
• chilies - again with a lot of health benefits but in this case the anti-inflammatory, warming and congestion relieving benefits are the reason for using as many as you can stand
• ginger - warming, anti-oxidant, anti-microbial properties and acts as a diaphoretic - helping the body to sweat out toxins, and of course it is tasty
• basil - primarily for flavor but it also has anti-bacterial properties
• miso - add rich flavor but miso also contrains trace minerals (including zinc which helps prevent colds) and when I eat, I feel better
• lemon - primarily to get lemony flavor but lemons are also good for sore throats among other benefits

It can be a fun challenge to concoct soups with health benefits while striving to give them an appealing flavor and appearance. TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) uses a lot of tonic soups and researching it, one can find lots of ideas.

P.S. I added a can of lite coconut milk to the leftover soup to create another version of it and as I write this I am sipping the hot, spice but now a little creamy broth and I think I like the leftover version even better.

Winter Eating with Homemade Potato Soups

I never thought about eating with the seasons I just was only realized it later. Growing up on a small family farm without much money, we had a large garden and we ate from it year around. In the winter we enjoyed the bounty lining our basement shelves – a rainbow of food I loved to look at - the reds of canned tomatoes, grape juice and beets, the golds of carrots, corn and spiced apples and greens of peas, pickles and green beans. We had what we called “the cave” which was a kind of root cellar that opened off the basement where we keep potatoes and onions. And we had freezers filled with home processed chicken, pork and beef. I didn’t see any of this as unusual or special it just was how we and our neighbors did it.
When I married and didn’t have any money, we just continued to do a lot of what we both were raised to do – grow our own food. I didn’t even like gardening – it was a necessity, not a pleasure.
I did grow to appreciate it and eventually to love it. But I didn’t realize how special it was until maybe 20 years ago when were visitors was oohing and ahhing over my weedy rows of vegetables and my full pantry. I started to pay attention then and I realized I was continuing a lifestyle that was fading all around me – even on Iowa farms where every farm family used to have a big kitchen garden – gardening as a major source of one’s food was no longer common. Replacing it was a growing belief that you ate whatever was in the grocery store and that tomatoes and cucumbers in your winter salad was normal. I remember going out to dinner with a bunch of herbalist friends while at a winter meeting in California at an upscale restaurant. Each of our meals was served with a four inch chunk of corn on the cob. While my friends raved over, what to them was a special treat, I took one small skeptical nibble and tossed it down onto my plate. I don’t know where and when that corn was grown but it was, in the opinion of an Iowa girl raised on fresh from the garden sweet corn – inedible.

There is a resurgence of fresh foods and eating locally but still too many people don’t have an idea what it means to eat with the season. There is nothing like eating from a garden – all year round – to bring that home. For a really well told story of one family’s journey to eat locally for a whole year, read Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”. http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/
Eating from the garden means putting together meals with what available – substituting and combining vegetables to use up what it plentiful. Last year was a bountiful year for potatoes – behind bountiful actually. So we are eating lots of potatoes this winter. Potatoes are a winter vegetable – not because you dig them in the winter – but because they store well through the winter as do other root vegetables like carrots, turnips, onions, garlic and beets. Other vegetables that can carry one through a winter include squash and cabbage and hardy winter greens like kale depending on where you live.
We make potato soup in the winter using lots of potatoes and onions from the root cellar. It is tasty, warming and filling and we vary the basic recipe so we have different soup. This is a typical recipe for us – without actual measures of ingredients – but it is not important to be precise.

Here is the basic soup – we never eat it this way though, we always add vegetable or cheese or something – the versions we like are listed below.

• Scrub potatoes and cut off any bad spots or green skin, we prefer leaving peels on. How many depends on how much soup you want to make and the size of the potatoes. Let’s say 3 or 4 large ones for two servings. Cut into one to two inch chunks, place in soup kettle and add water, just to cover the potatoes. Bring to a boil and then simmer.

• Add chopped onion to the soup – at least one, more for larger batches and if you really like onion (which we do). Continue to cook until vegetables are tender.

• Process vegetables with the cooking water in a food processor (or mash in the kettle) until smooth or semi-chunky depending on your preference.

• Return to kettle and turn heat to low. Add milk to thin to desired consistency and salt and pepper to taste or as desired.

Variations:

• We usually add either a frozen package of broccoli or of asparagus along with the onions to the soup and use the food processor to blend till almost smooth. This will give a pale green tasty soup that is more nutritious than the plain soup. Fresh celery could be used as well.

• Grandma Helen liked dill weed in her potato soup and so do I. I usually add a teaspoon of dill to the soup (more for a large batch) when the blended soup goes back into the kettle regardless of which vegetables I use.

• Cheddar cheese is a favorite addition to the soup and can be added along with the milk or it can be served grated at the table and the hot soup ladled over cheese added to the bottom of the soup bowl. Or instead of cheese, try adding sour cream to the bowl.

• Another variation from Grandma Helen is what she called - souring the soup - adding apple cider vinegar to individual bowls at the table. This is surprisingly good and derives from either my German or Czech heritage or both.

• We don’t eat bacon but we do like vegetarian Ba‘Cuns sprinkled on our soup (unless we are using vinegar). To keep them from getting soggy, we sprinkle on a few and then add more as we work our way through the bowl.

Would love to hear more ideas for variations on basic potato soup. We still have a lot of potatoes in the root cellar and with temperatures below zero every night, a bowl of soup fresh from the garden is just the thing!

Wood Stove Nostalgia

I miss my wood cookstove. When we first moved (1982) to the house we built on our 40 acre homestead, the only stove we had was an old cookstove we had purchased at a farm auction.

Growing up, our family had a wood cookstove in the basement and sometimes Mom would fire it up to cook breakfast on it on chilly mornings. She also used it to burn basement trash and to singe the fuzz from freshly plucked chickens. So a wood stove was not new to me, but cooking on it was. There are tricks to learn in order to not permanently weld food to the bottom of a saucepan and to get a loaf of bread baked properly. There is no setting a burner temperature or maintaining an even temp in the oven - the fire requires constant attention to keep it in the range of a usable temp (cakes were not even worth considering). But as I got better at it, I really appreciated the fact that I could have move pots around all over the stove top to heat them up quickly, keep them gently simmering or just keep their contents warm. And that I could manage that small firebox using assorting kinds and sizes of wood to create the level and type of heat I wanted.

My stove also had a water tank on the side which I kept full of water so that when the stove was running we could draw out warm or even hot water. At the time I did not have running water in the house so keeping the tank full by hauling in buckets from the outside pump meant having a supply of water close at hand – even when the stove was not running. In the winter, it was the primary source of water for washing dishes.

One of my favorite ways to cook on the wood stove was stir-frying. I would remove one of the lids and settle the wok right in the opening over a hot fire. Veggies cooked perfectly in that fire heated wok I also learned to make my first salves on the woodstove. The back of the stove is the perfect place to extract herbs into oils to use as the base for a salve. (I use a small crockpot now – it is not the same.) Comfrey oil was the first one I made with the help of a wild woman I worked with named Rebecca. And I lespecially loved the warming ovens over the stove. I could warm up bread for supper, keep dishes warm and they were wonderful places to place dough for rising.

Cooking a Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner for a pile of relatives was challenging, but to
them it was almost miraculous. And sledding parties were the best when a pot of soup, hot cider or hot chocolate was available everytime we took a break to come in and warm up. Not to mention hanging scarves, mittens and even clothes on or around the stove for warming and drying them and everyone's boots would be lined up along the warm back of the stove.

For years all I had was the cook stove, a two burner hot plate and a toaster oven (later replaced with a convection version). I used the cookstove a lot in the fall and spring when heating it up was just enough to keep us warm without using the regular woodstove. And in the winter when it was really cold, we sometimes needed both running to keep the house warm. Over time though, it was easier to use the hot plate and save the time of starting up the stove and when we put the basement in and replaced our wood burner with a furnace, the cook stove gradually stopped being used except as a place to pile things.

Finally after nearly 25 years, we bought a regular stove and we took out the cook stove. I only agreed as long as husband Dave promised to build me a summer kitchen so I could set it back up and at least use it for canning, preserving, drying and other such homesteading activities. My poor stove still sits in the garden shed, awaiting a resurrection that I fear will never come. But on these cold January days, keeping a slow fire going all day with a kettle of hot water resting at the back ready to make a cup of tea and perhaps a stew bubbling thickly for supper scenting the air – I really miss my wood stove.

When I went to snap these few pictures on this near zero day I wanted to clean her up a bit first but it was just too cold. So she looks kind of sad and dirty. Note the warming ovens on the top and the water resorvoir on the side. The iron pots were retired with the stove.

New Year's - A Radical Resolution?

Many of us make New Year's resolutions - too many, too unrealistic, too little committment, too late, too complicated.

Merriam Webster's definition of resolution: the act or process of resolving: as a : the act of analyzing a complex notion into simpler ones

Utilizing that particular definition I offer this simple, but powerful resolution: "Stop reading the ingredients labels on foods."

Why would anyone stop reading labels if they were committed to eating more healthy, more sustainable or avoiding particular pet nasties ( e.g. BHA, artifical colors, corn syrup solids etc.) and surely we must all have some sort of committment to doing a better job of selecting what we eat. However, reading labels to check the ingredients in and of itself is an act of complicity with a food system that is unhealthy, unsustainable and subversive of our best interests. If we feel the need to read through a list of ingredients, then quite simply we are purchasing the wrong foods - or more accurately - imitation foods. If we can't pick up a package and know without reading through a long list of ingredients whether this is something we should put in our bellies and the bellies of our families - then we are picking up the wrong packages.

Here are some tips on how to stop reading labels:

1. Purchase more foods without an ingredients list - these are pure foods, made of somethings grown and not processed - things like fruits, vegetables, whole grains and beans. These are the true pantry staples. This quote, from a transplant cardiologist says it all ‘”you can’t imagine what I see on the insides of people these days wrecked by eating food products instead of food.”’
2. When buying combination foods, get things you could make yourself. If you can't find mac n cheese that is made of simple ingredients you could keep in your kitchen (and you won't be able to), then don't buy it. If you want Mac n Cheese, make it yourself using primary ingredients. Primary ingredients can also be staples in your pantry and include things like flour, cheese, pasta, yogurt, corn meal, baking yeast, vinegar - ingredients you could make yourself it you wanted to or had to. These are the original "convenience" foods.
3. Purchase more of the foods where you know the original source - from a neighbor's garden, a farmer's market, a local co-op. It must less likely that they will have non-food ingredients.
4. Purchasing more organic is good too, but note that as organic seeks to become more mainstream, more non-food ingredients are being allowed so that junk type foods can be made and sold as organic.

So when we pick up a box, a jar, a can or package at the store - we now stop and look at, think about what we are holding in our hands and without looking at the ingredients - imagine what they should be and ask ourselves, is this a real food - really!

P.S. After posting this I came across an article about Michael Pollan's new book, "Food Rules: An Eater's Manual". From the review, it seems to be a detailed list of rules which can help everyone eat healthier and more sustainably. Here is one of my favorite from the book:

Rule #19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t!