The More the Merrier

I’ve long thought of January as a great month for a party. The whole holiday thing is over, and toward the end of the month, people get that glazed look in their eyes that says they’ve watched too much television and are really starting to tire of their family members for conversation. For most of the country, it’s too cold and snowy to go for a nice walk outside, so tempers get short, the kids get on your nerves, and pretty soon you just want to throw something at someone. I remember going to the grocery store just to get out of the house.

For many years, my husband and I gave a soup party in January, inviting more friends that we could really handle, but that didn’t seem to matter to those who showed up. The level of desperation among our guests was clear – even in snow or ice, they came for the party. One year, we actually had some guests who snowshoed over, and another couple who made runs in their SUV to pick up stranded neighbors.

For me, the best thing about the cold was that I could use our garage as an auxiliary refrigerator. The menu for the party contained three soups, and as I finished one soup after another in the days before the party, I just stored them next to the cars.

That m.o. doesn’t work in Austin, where the temperature is more likely to be 70 than it is to be 17. I know, I shouldn’t complain, but the change in climate pretty much obviates the need for a party to bring folks in from the cold.

Nevertheless, the month fairly screams “Soup!” to me, and now it turns out that someone has decided to make it official: January is Soup Month. So let us celebrate with my best recipe for chili.

I especially like this recipe because it has so many ingredients. I love the lively mix of the spices, the extra depth of flavor from the beer and coffee.

Oops -- use only one can of the tomatoes.

I found the original version on Epicurious, where it had more than 70 reviews, and more than 90% would make it again. Today, the review count is over 100. Over the years, I’ve tweaked it in line with some of the reviewers’ suggestions; a few changes are mine alone. It was always a winner at the soup parties; make it ahead, as it tastes as good – maybe better – the second day.

Kitchen Goddess note: My former neighbor in NJ will tell you that beans DO NOT go into a good chili. Phooey. The KG likes beans, and thinks they are a real plus in this recipe. If you, like my NJ neighbor, are a purist about beans, leave them out.

Best Pork Chili with Beans
Inspired by a recipe from Gourmet Magazine, January 2000

Yield: Serves 6-8.

½ pound sliced bacon, cut in 1-inch pieces
4 pounds boneless pork shoulder, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 tablespoons vegetable/canola oil
1 large onion, chopped
4 large garlic cloves, minced
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon Aleppo pepper
2 tablespoons brown sugar
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 cups beef broth
1 cup brewed coffee
12 ounces flavorful beer (I used Negro Modelo)
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes with purée
2 15-ounce cans red kidney beans, rinsed and drained

Garnishes -- more is always better.

Garnishes (use as many or as few as you like): toasted salted pumpkin seeds, grated cheddar cheese, chopped fresh cilantro (leaves and stems), diced avocado, lime wedges, sour cream, crumbled bacon, and tortilla chips.

Cook bacon in a large heavy pot over moderate heat until crisp. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the bacon to paper towels to drain, and pour off all but 2 tablespoons of fat from the pot. Crumble bacon and reserve for topping.

Using paper towels, pat pork dry and season with salt and pepper. Add the vegetable oil to the bacon fat in the pot and heat at medium high until hot but not smoking. Brown pork in batches (you'll need 5-6 batches) and, with a slotted spoon, transfer browned pork to a bowl. Kitchen Goddess note: Do not crowd the pork in the oil; if you do, it will simply steam and not brown. The pieces should not touch each other in the bottom of the pot.

Be sure to get the pork nice and brown.

Reduce the heat to medium and add the onion to the pot. Sauté 5-6 minutes over moderate heat, stirring frequently, until softened. Add garlic, oregano, chili powder, cumin, Aleppo pepper, brown sugar, and cayenne, and continue stirring 1 minute. Return the pork to the pot with any juices that have accumulated on the plate and add broth, coffee, beer, and tomatoes with purée.

Simmer the chili, uncovered, for about 2 hours, until the pork is very tender. Stir occasionally. Remove the pot from heat and let cool slightly. Using paper towels, blot up as much fat as possible from the surface of the chili. Stir in beans and bring to a simmer. Serve with crumbled bacon and other garnishes.

Almost Weekly Foodie Faves: A Friday Blogette – A Kitchen Scale

My Soehnle 65055 Digital Kitchen Scale

You’d think that someone who was trained as a mathematician, and is as crazily careful about measurements as I am when dealing with a new and untried recipe would have been using a kitchen scale since the age of 3. But you would be wrong.

I first got into the concept of weighing on one of my forays into the world of Weight Watchers. Yes, folks, I believe the WW people should at this point have a building named after me. Despite my efforts – notice I didn’t say best efforts, which would be a lie, as I’m sure my best efforts would have been more successful – I am still in that category of renewing the pledge to lose weight every January. In any case, my most successful efforts have always involved the kitchen scale.

These days, I’ve learned to love my scale. Even more helpful than when dieting, the scale makes many recipes soooo much easier to manage. How do you feel when you read a recipe that asks for a small onion, chopped? You put “1 small onion” on your shopping list, but even if I told you you’ll need about ½ cup, it would be easier in the shopping if you knew you needed a 4-ounce onion, wouldn’t it?

And if you knew that the last time you made that scrumptious vegetable soup, you used 6 ounces of zucchini, it would be easier to replicate the wonderfulness.

This is to say nothing of the fact that most recipes for breads rely on precise weights of ingredients for success.

So get thee to a kitchen store (or at various places on the web) and add a nice digital scale to your roster of equipment. The fine folks at Cook’s Illustrated have conducted a bit of research and recommend either the OXO Good Grips Stainless Steel Food Scale or the Soehnle 65055 Model Digital Kitchen Scale. The OXO can handle up to 11 pounds, while the Soehnle has a 9-pound capacity.

The OXO Good Grips Stainless Steel Food Scale

But according to my research, the OXO costs just under $50 almost everywhere, whereas the Soehnle is only $25-30 (best I found was for $26 at Old Will Knott Scales on the web). So that’s the scale I own. It’s a little bulky for storing, but it doesn’t run through the batteries like the last scale I had, which was a Salter.

The best thing about working with a scale is that you can weigh one ingredient, then without emptying the bowl, you can zero out the scale and weigh the next ingredient, and so on. When you’re done, the ingredients are already together in the right quantities in the same bowl. Pretty slick.

And FYI, here’s how to think of those onions:

Small onion = 4 ounces, or about ½ cup chopped
Medium onion = 8 ounces, or about 1 cup chopped
Large onion = 12 ounces, or about 1½ cups chopped

In Defense of Dessert

It's the season of the diet. But I love desserts. Yes, the Kitchen Goddess has a well-known sweet tooth. You know that moment at the end of a restaurant meal, that point when the waiter shows up, clasps his hands as if in prayer, and says, “Can I interest you in any dessert?” When that happens, and we are out to dinner with another couple or a group, I find increasingly that everyone turns and looks expectantly at me for the answer. What am I, the mom?

No, I think it’s that they rely on me to say, “Maybe we’ll have one [or two, depending on the number of people at the table] to share.” So they all get that  “little something” they like that punctuates the end of the meal and I get the blame for ordering it.

Between the diets and the crappy economy, many people these days think of dessert as the one part of the meal they can skip. But it turns out that dessert is a good thing for a number of reasons. First, as a tradition, dessert is offered in most cultures to signify the end of the meal and as a gesture of goodness. Second, after a meal that’s primarily salty and savory, the sweetness of dessert elevates one’s mood and completes the taste sensations one associates with a well-rounded meal. And finally, many traditional dessert ingredients are actually quite good for you. Dark chocolate is known to lower blood pressure; fruits have lots of vitamins and fiber; yogurt fortifies your immune system and helps with digestion; and nuts like almonds and walnuts contain omega-3 fatty acids that help lower cholesterol.

I think dessert has basically gotten a bad rap. The problem is that most restaurants serve Brobdingnagian proportions, and we’re all such Clean Plate Club members that it doesn’t occur to us to eat some, not all, of what shows up.

So when I serve dessert at my house, or when I take dessert for something like a New Year’s Eve dinner or just a neighborhood gathering to watch the Super Bowl playoffs, I try to offer a range – from the uber-sweet of a chocolate cake to a small nosh that can still satisfy that craving for “a little something” at the end of a meal. And that’s where candied grapefruit peel fits in perfectly.

It’s grapefruit season, especially here in Texas, and I love grapefruit, especially Texas red grapefruit. (N.B., red grapefruit is apparently especially good at reducing cholesterol.) When I buy grapefruit, nothing is wasted. I remove the peel (carefully), cut away the membranes, and eat those lovely sections of fruit with a sprinkling of sugar and either cinnamon or candied ginger. Then I make candied grapefruit peel, which I find absolutely addictive. My friends say, “What is this?” as they gobble it down. It takes a bit of a process, but you will not be sorry. Trust the Kitchen Goddess.

Candied Grapefruit Peel
Adapted from Gourmet magazine, December 2000

2 large grapefruits (I prefer the red varieties)
1 cup sugar
vegetable oil (or unflavored cooking spray, such as PAM)
superfine granulated sugar (also called caster sugar) for rolling the candied strips

Special equipment: a large baking rack that fits into (or on top of) a shallow baking pan.

With a paring knife, cut lengthwise slits in the peel to quarter it. Carefully separate the peel from the fruit. With a chef's knife, working at an angle on each piece of peel, cut strips ¼-inch to ⅓-inch wide. Trim away ragged bits of the white pith (just for looks), but don’t bother trying to remove all the white.

Put the strips into a large (3-quart) saucepan filled about two-thirds with cold water. Bring to a boil over medium heat, and continue to boil for another minute. Drain the strips and repeat the boiling process 4 more times. This process will drive you crazy but it removes the bitterness from the peel.

Add the cup of sugar to ½ cup of cold water in a large heavy skillet, and bring it to a boil, stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add the grapefruit strips to the skillet and simmer, stirring, until the strips have absorbed most of the syrup. This will take 10-15 minutes.

While the strips are cooking in the syrup, get that large baking rack in the shallow baking pan, and spray the rack with PAM or brush with vegetable oil. Once the grapefruit strips have absorbed the syrup, remove them one by one and lay them out on the oiled rack. You may want to keep the heat under the skillet on low so the syrup doesn’t harden while you’re arranging the strips on the rack.

Let the candied strips dry, uncovered, at least 8 hours or overnight. Once they are only slightly sticky, roll them (a few pieces at a time) in the superfine sugar, shaking off any excess. Let dry completely on wax paper or baker’s parchment. Dried peel keeps well in an airtight container at room temperature for at least a week.

Kitchen Goddess note: I sometimes find that the peel in the container will become moist and slightly sticky – after all, the strips aren’t completely dry. If that happens, just roll the strips in another round of superfine sugar and let them dry a bit more at room temperature.

Amusing Yourself on a Long Winter’s Day

Brrrr!! Winter has suddenly descended on Austin. Yes, even here in sunny Texas, we get winter, though we are such wusses that we now think temperatures in the 40s are a hardship. It works out pretty well for kitchen geeks, as it’s a great time to make stews and soups and such without the guilt of missing a great afternoon in the outdoors. Also, January is the month for “cedar fever” [read = pollen attack/sinus overload] here, which for me is another great excuse to stay inside.

So while my husband and friends watched the two football games on Sunday, I tested out a recipe. I love having a whole afternoon when I’m just alone in the kitchen to play. I fired up my little kitchen TV, tuned it to “Law & Order SVU,” and started cooking. After watching Elliot and Olivia and the gang faithfully for many years, I got tired of that franchise at some point, so the re-runs from the most recent seasons are actually fresh for me. What a treat.

This time, I wanted to test out a version of coq au vin that claimed to be easier and simpler than Julia’s. Now, I’ve made Julia’s coq au vin, which is totally divine, and I’ll grant you that it is a long process. Not hard – just long. And if you have some looming deadline like guests arriving, well then, it can be a little nerve-wracking. So a shorter, easier version of a completely yummy dish would be nice.

This recipe – adapted from the Cook’s Illustrated (CI) magazine’s preparation – definitely has fewer steps than Julia’s. But that’s like saying that climbing Kilimanjaro takes fewer steps than Everest – it’s still not for sissies. The CI folks say theirs takes only 90 minutes, versus 2½ hours for “conventional” recipes.

I have a teeny bone to pick with that claim, because of that 90 minutes, 60 of it is pure cooking time, with no allowances for, oh, moving the chicken from the plate to the pan then back to the plate, then back to the pan, melting the butter, getting the pan to the appropriate heat level, ... you know what I mean. And then of course there's the prep time, which if you are not Gordon or Giada or Emeril is at least another half hour, and that’s with no time to field a question from a family member or answer the phone or even pour a glass of wine. So this “modern” version still took me almost 3 hours, though I must confess to occasionally getting distracted by the television. If you pay less attention to the TV and are better organized – and most of you are – and you get your mise en place, um, en place so to speak, you might whittle it down to 2 hours. I expect that’s the best you can do. Much will also depend on how free of fat globs your boneless, skinless thighs are. (Hmmm..That would be the chicken thighs.) The chicken from my Texas grocer isn’t nearly as well trimmed as the stuff from my New Jersey grocer.

In any case, my hubby and friends and I loved this dish. Julia serves coq au vin with boiled potatoes, but I served it on top of inch-wide egg noodles. One of my guests suggested that next time, I should have some crusty French bread to sop up the sauce, as he hated the idea of leaving even a spoonful. I agreed. The sauce smells deeply of the wine and herbs, thick and velvety without being heavy or fatty, and the chicken is moist and tender. So it’s well worth the time, and not hard.

I served it with an excellent salad of romaine lettuce, shaved fennel, shaved radishes, and cubes of pear, with an herbed vinaigrette. You could also try roasted or steamed asparagus.

Kitchen Goddess note: I got my thick-cut bacon from Whole Foods, where I can buy just the 4 ounces, which may cost more per ounce but you don’t end up with 12 extra ounces of bacon in the fridge. In any case, it wasn’t as fatty as I needed. I had barely more than 1 tablespoon for sautéing the chicken, so I cooked the first half in the bacon fat that was there, and added 1½  tablespoons of olive oil to the pan before cooking the second half of the chicken. You really need 1½ tablespoons per batch with that much chicken – especially if you’re as careful as I am about trimming the chicken fat.

For the wine, I used a pinot noir. It occupies a nice mid-point on the spectrum between a cabernet (too heavy) and a Beaujolais (too light). As to quality/price, you don’t have to spend a lot, but remember: if you wouldn’t drink it, don’t put it in your food.

Coq au Vin
Adapted from Cook’s Illustrated magazine.

1 bottle (750 ml) medium-bodied red wine (CI suggests a fruity pinot noir or a granache)
2 cups good chicken stock
10 sprigs fresh flat-leaf parsley plus 2 tablespoons freshly minced flat-leaf parsley
2 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
4 ounces thick-cut bacon, cut into ¼-inch pieces
olive oil (in case your bacon doesn’t render enough fat)
2½ pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs
Salt and freshly ground pepper
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
30 frozen pearl onions (about 1 cup), thawed and patted dry
8 ounces Crimini mushrooms, wiped clean, stems trimmed, cut in half if small, in quarters if large
2 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 tablespoons flour

Pat the chicken pieces dry using paper towels, trim the fat, and cut them in half crosswise. Lightly salt and pepper both sides.

In a large saucepan over medium-high heat, stir together all but 1 tablespoon of the red wine (reserve for later use), chicken stock, parsley sprigs, thyme, and bay leaf. Bring the mix to a low boil and cook 20-25 minutes, until the liquid is reduced to 3 cups. Strain out the herbs and set aside the wine-stock mixture.

While the wine-stock-herbs are reducing, cook the bacon in a large (4.5-quart) Dutch oven over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until browned, 7-8 minutes. Transfer the bacon to a paper towel-lined plate, reserving 3 tablespoons bacon fat in a small bowl, and discard remaining fat. If you don’t have 3 tablespoons rendered from the bacon, add olive oil to fill in.

Return Dutch oven to medium-high heat. Add 1½ tablespoons bacon fat and heat until just smoking. Add half the chicken, in a single layer, and cook until lightly browned, about 2 minutes per side. Transfer cooked chicken to a plate. Add remaining 1½ tablespoons bacon fat to the pan, heat until just smoking, and sauté remaining chicken. Transfer cooked chicken to a plate.

Melt 3 tablespoons butter in the now-empty Dutch oven over medium-high heat. When foaming subsides, add pearl onions and mushrooms and cook, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned, 5 to 8 minutes. Reduce heat to medium, add garlic and cook 30 seconds. Add tomato paste and flour and cook, stirring frequently, until well-combined, about 1 minute.

Pour in the reduced wine-stock mixture, scraping the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon to loosen the browned bits. (This technique, of incorporating the fond – the browned bits – into the sauce, is called deglazing.) Add ¼ teaspoon pepper, the cooked chicken (with any accumulated juices) and the bacon. Increase the heat to high and bring the stew to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover the pot, and simmer until chicken is tender, about 25 minutes, stirring once halfway through the cooking time.

Use a slotted spoon to transfer the chicken, mushrooms, and onions to a large bowl; cover the bowl with aluminum foil to keep warm. Increase heat under the sauce to medium-high and simmer about 5 minutes, until it is thick and glossy. Remove from heat, stir in the remaining 2 tablespoons butter and reserved 1 tablespoon wine. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Return the chicken, mushrooms, and onions to the pot and stir well. Top with minced parsley and serve immediately.

Serves 5-6.

Finger Food for Football Fans

January is a month of football parties. And even though I grew up in Texas, I’ve never been much of a fan. So I’m often, um, less than punctual to parties where the main idea is to watch football. Which means I’m more often asked to provide dessert than appetizers.

This week, it was the BCS. A contest between a team I know almost nothing about (Notre Dame) and one that as a loyal Vanderbilt fan, I’ve always rooted against (Alabama). I’m not sure Vandy has ever beat the Crimson Tide.

But I do love dessert. Moreover, I’ve been eager to try a recipe I came across recently in a book my cousin gave me on Greek food. I like eating Greek food, but much of it involves either eggplant, which I don’t like, or phyllo dough, which is tricky, so I’m not much on learning to cook Greek food. But this recipe looked so simple, it was almost irrestible.

Once I had the ingredients, the recipe took me less than half an hour, start to finish. Really. You make the entire thing in the food processor – except for the baking, of course. And the baking is only 10-12 minutes. The results were delicious, and so easy I made a second batch just to play with the timing. I also think I’ll play with the flavoring the next time I make them – adding lemon zest or orange zest and switching to a piece of candied ginger or dried date on top. Let me know if you try a variation that works.

Kitchen Goddess note to dieters and gluten-free friends: These cookies are fat-free, and the recipe makes about 3 dozen cookies, which means less than a teaspoon of sugar per cookie. Not a bad way to start the new year.

Greek Almond Cookies (Amygdalotá)
Adapted from Around a Greek Table, by Katerina Katsarka Whitley.

Makes 3 dozen cookies.

1½ rounded cups blanched almonds (slivered or whole – makes no difference)
½ cup sugar
3 large egg whites
topping: approximately 36 whole blanched almonds (enough for one per cookie)

Preheat the oven to 400º. Line a large baking pan with baking parchment or use a non-stick mat (e.g., Silpat).

In the bowl of a food processor, process the 1½ cups of almonds for 20-30 seconds, or until they are ground to a fine consistency. Add the sugar and the egg whites and pulse another 30 seconds or so, until the ingredients are well mixed.

Using two teaspoons (one as a pusher), place the dough in spoonfuls about the size of a 50-cent piece onto the parchment. Press a whole almond into the center of each.

Bake 10-12 minutes. The original recipe calls for baking 10 minutes, which will produce cookies with a warm white color and lightly tan on the bottom. I cooked my second batch for 12 minutes, and got closer to a light gold glow on top, which I preferred, and about the same on the bottom. The taste was the same both times: barely crisp on the outside, chewy and sweet on the inside. Transfer the cookies to a rack for cooling.

Kitchen Goddess note: These cookies are like meringues in that they are sensitive to moisture in the environment. I made them the night before, but wanted to crisp them up a bit before taking them to the party. I put them back into the pans – on the parchment paper – and stuck them into a 250º oven for 15 minutes, which turned out perfectly.

And Now We Diet...

In many ways, I’m really sad to see the holidays go. I love the decorated trees and the twinkly lights, and the stars everywhere and the twinkly lights, and the ornaments and the tinsel and...did I mention the twinkly lights? It’s all so festive. Which is one reason I leave our front door wreath and the twinkly lights up through January. In New Jersey, it was a habit that saved me from a bad case of the winter blues; but even in Texas, where the weather is considerably more tolerable, January is climate-wise a fairly grim month, so I need those twinkly lights.

But I won’t be sorry to see the end to the gifts of cookies and fudge (really excellent fudge, by the way) and the family dinners (though I dearly love my family) – all of which include dessert – and the munchie-laden parties. I’ve felt almost overwhelmed in the challenge to keep from piling on the pounds. This year, I discovered a way to fight that’s not only pain-free but delicious: vegetable soup.

I was in New Jersey on my own, getting the condo Christmas-worthy before my hubby and son would arrive. On a trip to stock the fridge with breakfast items and whatever else came to mind, I noticed the produce aisle fairly exploded with gorgeous veggies. A deep voice inside my head intoned, “ve-ge-table soup.”

So much for the eggs and milk and cereal. As if in a trance, I threw in carrots and celery and a fat onion and a handful of any other lovely green and yellow items I liked, including an avocado (you must trust me here). Add some small red potatoes for bulk, some good quality chicken broth, and I headed home. It had been a long day, and I was starving by the time I got into the kitchen, where I realized it was 10pm. No wonder I was hungry! But veggies take so little time to cook that I was serving myself in less than an hour.

I subsisted on that soup for the next two days. Ok, I ordered Thai for dinner, but I had the soup for lunches. Then I made more once my darling husband arrived, and I actually managed to gain nary a pound until I got back to Texas where the aforementioned cookies and fudge awaited. Ah, well.

Kitchen Goddess note #1: The addition of an avocado may seem a bit wacky to you, but the KG has been experimenting with a nice tortilla soup recipe here in Texas – not yet ready for prime time – and chunks of avocado do wonders for it. In a moment of what-the hell, I tossed it into the veggie soup, and liked it. Not mandatory, but you should live a little dangerously in the new year and give it a try. It brings a hint of something mysterious, and thickens the broth in a way that’s quite nice.

Kitchen Goddess note #2: This is a very flexible recipe. The quantities listed are general guidelines, not dictates. (While the Kitchen Goddess has been known to get dictatorial on occasion, this is not one of them.) You can add or subtract vegetables according to your preferences. I sometimes add a package of frozen spinach instead of the green beans, and might include a couple of parsnips, or collard greens (instead of spinach). The cooking time for fresh green beans is about twice that of the frozen ones. Parsnips shouldn’t overcook, so would go into the soup at about the same time as the corn and zucchini and turnips. And spinach needs to simmer only 5 minutes, so it would go after the corn.

I’ve called for ½-inch dice with most of the vegetables because I think it looks nicer that way; if you like larger chunks, you may have to adjust the cooking times.

New Year’s Vegetable Soup
Serves 6.

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, diced (about 1 cup)
1 cup celery, in ½-inch dice (I like to slice some of it instead of dicing, to get that pretty shape of sliced celery)
1 cup carrots, in ½-inch dice
2 medium cloves garlic, chopped fine (about 2 teaspoons)
6 cups good quality chicken broth
12 ounces new potatoes, unpeeled, in ½-inch dice
1 teaspoon plus ½ teaspoon dried dill
1 teaspoon plus ½ teaspoon dried thyme leaves
5 ounces fresh green beans, cut into 2-inch pieces, or 5 ounces frozen cut green beans (½ of a 10-oz package)
5 ounces frozen corn  (½ of a 10-oz package)
1 medium zucchini, quartered lengthwise and sliced ¼-inch thick (about 1 cup)
1 medium turnip, in ½-inch dice
1 large avocado, in ½-inch dice

In a large, heavy soup pot (I use a Le Creuset 5½-quart French oven), heat olive oil over medium heat and sauté onion 5 minutes. Add celery and carrots, and sauté another 5 minutes. Add garlic and sauté another 30 seconds.

Add the broth, the potatoes, 1 teaspoon each of the dill and thyme, and bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer. Simmer the soup 10 minutes or until potatoes are barely tender.

If you are using fresh green beans, add only the beans and continue to simmer for 5 minutes before adding the corn; if you’re using frozen green beans, add the beans and the corn simultaneously. Once the soup is returned to a simmer, add the zucchini and the turnip, and continue to simmer 5 minutes. Add the avocado and ½ teaspoon each of the dill and thyme and simmer another 5 minutes.

And a healthy, happy 2013 to you all!