Any idea what the equivalent amount of fresh greens would be? (The "downscale" market down the street has an incredible variety of produce and great prices. Next time you're in Oregon, check out a WinCo . . .)

I wonder if this would freeze up well. I make dishes like this and freeze them in entree-sized batches.

Similarly -- if you like a spice/herb and think it would enhance a steamed veggie -- add it to the steaming water. Rosemary and thyme are really good for this (and they're both very easy to grow in a garden -- they're really weed-like in their tenacity).

I've successfully done recipes like this from only whole milk all the way up to straight heavy cream, so any percentage of butterfat works.

More is tastier.

If using raw, lightly steam to wilt (or stir in a pan, almost dry) and then squeeze out any water.

It's an American thing; you might call it half-cream or coffee cream. It runs at about 10 or 12 % milkfat.

Well, around here, whipping cream runs at 35% or higher, so that wouldn't work. Maybe what you are calling whipping cream is not what I call whipping cream?

I find it easiest to check the percentages; that way, no matter what name something might have, I know I've got the closest match.

Un-freaking-believable.

This sounds like it should be bland, but it totally isn't.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Meanwhile, grate 1 pound mozzarella cheese and cut 3 large sweet or yellow onions into slivers. Heat some olive oil, bacon drippings, or butter in a skillet on Medium. Put the onions into the skillet and leave to get soft, stirring occasionally.

3. Your pasta water is probably boiling by now. Cook 1 pound stubby pasta shapes, such as rigatoni, penne, or conchiglietti, just until al dente. If possible, substitute 4 oz. whole grain pasta for 4 oz. of the regular pasta. Use a variety of types if you like.

4. When the onions are soft, sprinkle with 2 teaspoons each granulated sugar and salt, stir, put the lid on, and leave until golden, about 20 minutes.

5. Drain the pasta, rinse, and dump into a large bowl or back into the cooled pasta pot. Butter a 9 x 13 casserole.

6. When the onions are golden, pour the entire skillet into the bowl of pasta and stir. You can add some dried marjoram at this point if you like.

7. Pour the pasta and onion mixture into the prepared casserole, even it out with a wooden spoon, and sprinkle all of the mozzarella on the top. Don't worry, it will melt down through all of the pasta.

8. Sprinkle generously with grated Parmesan from a shaker and bake until well browned and bubbly.

9. Serve hot. Makes good leftovers.

Collards: Generally, I melt a bit of bacon fat saved from the last fry-up in my big stock pot, then mess the greens around in it until they're wilted. Then I throw in a cup or two of water, put the top on, and let the whole thing go until it's a green mess, but I LIKE that green mess. Plus the pot likker (which has the majority of the vitamins anyway). Leftover collards and pot likker = soup base or soup enhancement.

Any time I need to drain a can of something (tomatoes or corn, most often), I do so into pint containers that I keep in the freezer. Then, when I want to cook rice, I pull out a full one, and don't need to measure it.

This goes for things like the water from cooking pumpkin in, too.

Sorry for the lack of proportions; my cooking tends toward the "what looks and tastes right" school for everything other than baking.

...I told you once, I told you twice
All seasons of the year are nice
For eating chicken soup with rice.

[The filters didn't like your email address. I've adjusted them.—Idumea Arbacoochee, Duty Gnome]

My supermarket sells stock concentrated into jelly form, in six-packs of little one-tbs blobs that dilute to a cup of stock. One could dilute less.

It's quite nice stock, but it is a bit salty.

Then another co-worker turned me on to Green Tomato Soup. It is wonderful. I googled recipes, and being a pinch cook, used them as a guide line. So I don't have actual amounts for what I did. I did it by taste. Some recipes call for ham, others call for bacon. Last night's experiment was with bacon. Here's the process

1) .5 to 1 lb of bacon chopped and browned in a heavy sauce pot or dutch oven.

2) dice 1/4 of a medium sized onion (about .5 cup) or more depending on how well you like onions. Add to pot when the bacon has rendered out enough fat to saute the onions

3) add 1-2 bay leaves

4) medium-small dice 1/4 of the tomatoes (roughly 1-2 cups) and add to the pot after the onions are translucent. Puree the rest of the tomatoes (3-6 cups) in a food processor and add to the pot. Stir thoroughly and let the tomatoes saute a bit to soften.

5) Add water (2-4 cups) and 1-2 chicken flavored bullion cubes (no chicken stock on hand) Stir. Consistency should be thinner than traditional canned tomato soup and thicker than normal broth-based soup.

Bring to a boil and let simmer for about 30 minutes.

I'm going to visit family this weekend. I'm hitting up my siblings for green tomatoes so I can try the ham version next.

Butternut Squash Soup

1 Butternut squash. About this big. (I'm holding my hands this far apart.) Half inch dice.

.25 - 1.0 lb Sweet Italian sausage. Best to use bulk sausage meat or patties. If you can only get links, cut/peel off the skin and squash them into oblong patties about 1/4 inch thick before browning.

1-2 cans white beans - canellini, great northern, or navy (2 cans if less than .5 lb sausage, 1 if more than .5 lbs.)

1 cup chopped onion.

1-2 red peppers. Small dice. (Or a medium jar of roasted red peppers diced small.)

1 quart chicken broth

1 tsp dried sage. Crumble with fingers when you add it.

1-2 bay leaves

1 tsp black pepper (or to taste)

1 Parmesan rind, if you have one. (If you eat good parmesan, you do save the rind in the freezer for a future soup, don't you?)

Brown the sausage in a fry pan. Good and brown. Pretend it's bacon and try to get it close to crispy. (Maillard reaction = more flavor in the soup.) Cool and cut into real small dice. If you buy a pound and only intend to use part of it, the rest freezes nicely for future soup or pizza toppings.

While sausage is browning cut up the rest of the veg.

Use a tablespoon of sausage fat in the soup pot to cook the onions until translucent, then add broth, herbs/spices, sausage, beans, parmesan rind. Simmer this at least 30 minutes, and up to 2 hours. If the parmesan disintegrates completely, that's fine. Otherwise fish it out when you fish out the bay leaves.

Add peppers and butternut squash, bring back up to simmer and cook until squash is tender. About 15 more min. Fish out cheese and bay leaves.

Serve with garlic bread, or just crackers. (Make the crackers more interesting by giving everyone a peeled garlic clove with the tip cut off. Rub clove on cracker then dip in soup. Mmmmmmmmmmm.)

Variations:

Vegan - No sausage & no parmesan (obviously), vegetable broth, both cans of beans, and add 1/4 tsp of ground anise seed.

Using up veg before they go bad - you can grate a carrot or two, or add a couple of sticks of sliced celery. Either or both just add depth to the flavor.

If you can't find sweet italian sausage, breakfast sausage works just as well. Omit the sage, and add 1/4 tsp anise seed (or more).

*All this talk of stock stirred up this question I've pondered while hunting for stock & bouillon in the grocery store.

Which reminds me that I was once enormously amused in a supermarket. I'd gone in there looking for veggie Oxo, but there was none. There was, however, a sign on the shelf where it ought to be, reading "Temporarily out of stock".

I laughed.

I'll have to keep hunting for the Campbell's concentrated chicken broth.

The swankity Ferry Plaza farmers' market has smoked sweet onions, which are great substitutions in a lot of meat-tinted recipes. I think of them as vegetarian bacon bits. I need to look up how to smoke small quantities of veg and try making them myself.

I see both bullion granules and cubes where I'm at along with a "stock paste" that is less salty where I live. I think it's a marketing thing for people who don't want to have to mess with crushing up a cube. (A sister uses crushed bullion cubes to season stir fried cabbage.)

I prefer using "stock paste"/base, but I wasn't cooking in my own kitchen when I made the soup.

Nothing to add; just wanted to repeat it.

Wild salmon "homestyle," with the bones and the skin, eaten straight from the can. The skin is as inoffensive (YMMV) as the skin of a sardine and the bones turn into chewable little savory bits. Save the can broth and use when making soup. Or just drink it!

I live on chickpea and vegetable casserole at the moment. It's cheap and delicious, and I make it up in bulk, so I've only got to assemble the requisite spoons to make it every nine or ten days. The rest of the time, I just take a helping out and nuke it.

I try to keep homemade veggie stock on hand in the freezer, since it's purely foolish to let onion skins, carrot peelings, and celery trimmings go to waste, and I create plenty of all those in the course of cooking, but there are times when No-Chicken Broth makes a difference.

1. Microwave some frozen vegetables according to the directions on the package.

Can't speak to the variation you're seeing, but most groceries around here have (kosher) bullion cubes in the kosher food isle...

Smoke [onions/vegs]: got a fireplace? Failing that: an outdoor grille? Failing that rocks for a firepit ring & deadfall from your neighbors' trees?

J. @48: [canned salmon] bones turn into chewable little savory bits.

Much to my chagrin, I developed a squick about canned salmon bones sometime in my childhood. Which was really annoying, because my mom stopped making the salmon loaf that I always enjoyed (modulo squicky bones).

The only problem I see is that the first recipe I looked at calls for two pounds of potatoes and 1) I don't know how the density of jicamas compares to that of potatoes, and 2) the jicama I've got weighs a bit over a pound and a half with the skin on, and I'm not eating the skin on that thing where I will eat potato skins. I guess I'll have to weigh it again after I peel it.

Re. miso paste, yes, I only recently got a jar and I'm finding it useful. Must try in more recipes.

Of course, that may not have been the Marmite so much as the dry vermouth and the cognac in Julia Child's recipe, bless her.

The only thing is that I don't know how MUCH Marmite makes a given quantity of broth. My method is to add it a tiny blob at a time until it Tastes Right. I'd estimate my tiny blob at around an eighth of a teaspoon. Last night's 2-quarts-of-stock took maybe three blobs? I didn't track it. Marmite is STRONG, so I'd recommend caution.

But it's great. You can even make passable gravy with it.

Tonight the vegetarian housemate had enough scheduling weirdness that I cooked a chicken pot pie with actual chicken in it - however, I still only had (homemade) veggie broth in the house to make the sauce with. I got decent chicken-suggesting flavor by adding a couple of teaspoons of Bell's Seasoning to the roux as I was cooking it!

In my opinion, the dark soy sauce works better for broth-boosting. Use it VERY carefully, or the broth will taste like chinese-restaurant wonton soup broth. A quarter-teaspoon is about right for a gallon of broth.

Or you can always just cheat completely and use MSG (Sazon Goya, or an Asian grocery will often have it.)

I haven't bothered to look for unadulterated MSG, but is it no longer obtainable in regular grocery stores as Ac'cent? That was around when I was a kid.

On another topic: This weekend I made one of my favorite soups.

1/2 pound white beans, cooked
1 big bunch kale
1 pound sausage (I used breakfast sausage)

Chop the kale, put all together, cook until very done. Add salt, cayenne, and vinegar to taste. Eat with bread (and butter, if you aren't allergic to dairy like me.)

No broth or stock--just water. The sausage isn't browned, either--it's a really easy recipe (and frozen kale or collards work fine as the greens). That's one reason I love it.

1/2 pound whale

No no no: you put the soup in the whale, not the whale in the soup.

I'm going to have a whole lot of trouble finding room in the freezer for the rest of that whale.

Yes, that happens to me. I've been eating according to my cravings for some time now*. I've never been pregnant.

My craving phases are pretty straight forward. Red meats and certain kinds of sweets (not always chocolate) the week before my period. Vitamin- and iron rich veggies (spinach, broccoli, tomatoes, etc) the week of and the week after. A few days of starches bridge the gap between that and the start of carnivore week.^

Of my friends, I'm the closest to vegetarian** despite being a hardened carnivore. If one goes by serving sizes as recommended by food labels, I range between one or two serving of vegetative material per meal all the way up to five and six. This excludes breakfasts. That is where I get most of my starches. My other meals are mostly meat and vegetable combinations. Although a quick soup made of crushed and cooked ramen cooked with chopped up vegetables and no meat tastes really good when I'm in the starch phase.

* I actually consume fewer calories this way than doing a balanced meal or following a prescribed diet plan.

^ I sometimes have meals made of nothing but various kinds of proteins - vegetable proteins like beans and tofu included.

**One of my vegetable-avoiding friends actually brings vegetable dishes when we do our Craft Day pot lucks because I'm the better baker. I usually default to veggies dishes for ordinary pot lucks. There have been occasions (other than the Craft Day ones - we coordinate those in advance) when the options are limited to starches, meats, and sweets.

Whale meat again!
Don't know where, don't know when,
But I know we'll eat it all some sunny day;
I'll make a stew
Just like I always do,
But I've got new spices - please don't go away.
With such a bargain, although
It's quite greasy, I know,
You just can't go wrong;
And there's no cause to show
That expression of woe,
It'll keep us all strong.
Whale meat again!
Don't know where, don't know when,
But I know we'll eat it all some sunny day;
I'll make a stew
Just like I always do,
But I've got... why did you have to go away?!

My mother and aunt had big bottles of MSG, leftover from my grandparent's restaurant.

I am not sure if my largest non-stick pop is large enough for the final combination operation, so I'm simmering the greens-in-cream in a large pot. I'll do halfie-halfie and up with two almost full pots.

I think it would have been helpful to note the size of the Campbell's broth cans in question. I used Swanson's; I think the cans were larger. Certainly larger than the standard Campbell's condensed soup cans. So my batch came out a bit soupy. I cooked it longer and the rice eventually soaked up the juice.

I also made four cookie sheets of "Halloween Bark," spurred by the discovery of four packages of that nasty cheap chocolate coating stuff. Melt coating, spread on a lined cookie sheet, festoon with pretzel sticks, candy corn, Reese's Pieces, mini marshmallows. I'm bringing it to work. The corner I ate was very satisfying.