Chipotle Black Bean Soup

 

This is the best black bean soup recipe I have found.  

I got it from a cooking class that I went to with my good buddy Lynn WD presented by the Harvard Food Literacy Project.  They provided a delicious healthy lunch, talked about the Harvard Food Pyramid and then gave a cooking demo.  They did a really good job.  Notes on the recipe:  The canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce can be found in the latin section of grocery (use what you need and freeze flat the rest in ziplock).  I used homemade vegetable stock, but I'm sure chicken or bouillon would be fine.  I added a whole small can (without juice which I freeze for chili) of whole Muir Glen tomatoes and diced.  Also, I used yellow onions instead red/purple and cooked the soup in 20 minutes in my magnificent friend, Mr. pressure cooker! 

Haunted and exorcised

I was digging through some house pictures and came across the "before" (we fixed our place up) pictures of our place.  They are spooky indeed. 

Here are some "after" pictures:

When it rains, it pours Vegetarian Restaurants

The Pulse Cafe (FKA Vej Naturals) restaurant used to be located right by the Oak Grove T-stop, but has re-located to a much nicer spot in Davis Sq. Their menu sounds yummy and interesting and hope my three best eating out buddies will join me soon in checking them out.

No-Knead Carrot Bread...a charred disaster

Last week, I used up my Harvard BookStore frequent flier miles on Jim Lahey's beautifully photographed bread book My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method and after staying up late pouring through the intriguing recipes I immediately plotted my next no-knead bread adventure: Carrot Bread. Fascinatingly Lahey's recipe calls for carrot juice, currants, walnuts with cumin seeds sprinkled on dough. I should have listened to my instincts when I read 1 Tablespoon of cumin seeds--way too much! And the bread came out all scorched and charred and underdone inside. It must have been the natural sugar from carrot juice that caused the crust to burn like that.
Will try again as I still have half a jar of carrot juice leftover...will adjust the oven to 400, I think and bake with cover for longer time and will add far fewer cumin seeds.