Eating on Jitneys

The longer I don’t write something the harder it is to start. So many holiday meals have passed since the last entry but obviously I was busy. It was the holiday season. Duh. So to start things off, I thought it most appropriate to document for you the most memorable, and possibly most tasty meal of all: Stone Soup.

Two of my brothers and my sister came over the weekend before Christmas for a dinner party. Many themes for this dinner party were discussed, from 19th century prisoners’ diets to imaginary foods. Eventually, and I’m not sure how but it happened, we settled on Stone Soup. Imaginary, meager, cheap, and fun.

We went to the store and picked out the meagerest ingredients possible. Don’t you kind of love when you go to the grocery store and you look into your basket to find that you are buying eggs, milk, bread, and butter? Now imagine looking down and finding this in your basket (cabbage, turnip, jimaca, a single large carrot, beet, and something simply labeled “root”):

I suppose I can ruin the secret of Stone Soup. Keep in mind that it can be whatever you want it to be (like so many great things). At first, I imagined Stone Soup to be water and stones, boiled for hours. But more and more roots vegetables were chopped and some onion was sauteed (along with the rocks and single shell) and from this, unbelieveably awesome tastes were created. I am not shitting you when I say that this was the tastiest soup of the year.

Ingredients

Stones
1 head cabbage
1 jimaca root
1 other various root
1 turnip
1 beet
1 very large carrot
1/2 onion
1 clove garlic for each stone
water
pinch of salt and pepper

First of all, you need to boil some water with some stones. They should boil together for…at least a couple of hours. The longer the better. I mean, you do need that amazing stone taste. I would assume?

While this is boiling, have a drink. Or a snack! It will take a while. Whenever you are ready, start chopping and slicing vegetables. If you want to get crazy, use cookie cutters on the roots. We did.

We decided to wanted a slightly stronger taste to the soup. I know, save the lectures….it’s Stone Soup. It should have little to no taste. We went through this. However, since this was our actual dinner, we decided to sautee some onion and garlic. It really is best if you take the stones out of the boiling water and sautee them with the onions. If you are really starving, add some garlic like we did.


That’s…pretty much it.
Here was the feast:

We also made Wassil and Cabbage Water (tastes how it sounds, yet surprisingly good):

Here we are enjoying the fruits of our labor:

After dinner, Lindsay provided Invisible Pie (it was so good) and she told the best story ever:

Next up:
tales of me and FVD’s trip to Detroit/Pittsburgh, and my first week of pastry school!

**Special Thanks to Gaper’s Block Drive Thru for mentioning this old blog today.

Even though I drink a lot of coffee, I was not aware of the Cold-Brewed dreams-come-true in store for me until Ellen mentioned an article she read in the New York Times. I did a quick search online and realized that Cold-Brewed coffee is one of the easiest beverages to make ever. One article explained that the bitter taste in coffee is a result of heating it. That taste doesn’t exist if you don’t heat it. So here’s what you do to make the most delicious cold coffee of your sweet little life. It helps to start with good coffee:

-grind some coffee. however much you want to use. i have a tablespoon scoop and i think i used about 8 scoops for 1 mason jar of brew.
-put it in a mason jar. add water to the top.
-leave it out at room temperature for 24 hours.
-if you have a french press this will be so easy. just pour the coffee and water into the press and press it down.
-otherwise you’ll have to strain out the grounds. you could use coffee filters or cheese cloth.

That’s all. It’s SO GOOD! And only takes about 24 hours and 5 seconds.