Friday dinner with Handsome Son, before inroads

Last evening was dinner with HS, and the first soup of the season.  Pumpkin with yellow split peas.  And I cooked it with chicken bones, from the freezer, for a couple of hours, removed the bones before serving.

This is really hearty, as they say in the fancy recipes, and with the addition of water from carrot pesto and yogurt whey, was a Good Thing.  The reason for carrot as opposed to any of my herbal pestos, is that it's a good color for this soup.  Appetizing.  Likewise choosing the yellow split peas instead of green.

You know when you make pesto in the blender, there's always some that won't come out, around the blades?  I add back a couple of cups of water, run the blender, which cleans the blades and saves the precious pesto, which after all has your best olive oil in it, and freeze the water.  It's great in soup.  And the yogurt whey is the liquid part from making yogurt cheese, very tangy and good in soup, too.

I have two freezers, the small one on top of the fridge, where I keep bits of sauces and condiments also my grains and pestos and whole herbs, and the chest one where I keep, aside from art materials, ahem, cooked food ready to haul out, and raw chicken and fish. And bread, soup, etc. This slightly loopy way of organizing things makes it easier to find those bits you kept and can't find if they're in a chest freezer, while the food in the big freezer is big enough to see. 

So we had roast chicken breasts, which I'd had a lovely time hitting with a mallet, then rolled in flour, baharat and seasalt, and left for a few hours in the fridge, then put in a 400F oven for about 25 minutes.  With brown jasmine rice, cooked with turmeric, golden raisins and sunflower seeds.  The chicken and rice are both bland on their own, but will take any amount of seasoning, and be interesting.  Plum sauce to go with, in fact plum and ginger, ginger powder added in, with a little bit of sugar, and some lemon juice.  It's tart enough to be really good with this meal.  Nice Italian red wine.

Dessert was the rest of the plum torte, notice a theme here..and a big pot of English breakfast tea.  Son texted this am to say nice evening, tx for food!  and I must say it went over well enough that I have barely enough for one meal to go at.  But I did freeze quite a bit of soup,before HS arrived, leaving plenty for us last night. HS always has at least two bowls of soup, very gratifying for the cook.

I love to have soup in the freezer for when I get home and just don't feel like cooking right now, thanks.  Especially if it's cold and wet. 

Now that plums are in, I must look out for damson plums at the Asian market. They get them at great prices, and I can stock up.   

Next week I'm at an all day herb workshop, about herbal liqueurs or something, so no doubt I'll learn a lot to add to my repertoire of alcohol, which is pretty small.  And it includes a chef prepared lunch involving a lot of the herbs mentioned in the workshops. I will definitely report back on this. Nothing like having a menu created by a real expert.