A dull day turned delicious—Chicken, Chard, Cauliflower, Chipotle Soup

A so-good impromptu super low-carb soup on a dull day turned delicious. That dollop in the middle?

The ever-present chipotle sauce. See below.

How many quart bags of chard did I freeze last year?

These are a year old and still good. Even though I felt sorta stupid not

using the fresh chard from the garden. Bird in hand thing. 

But more importantly, the grew-that-weeded that-picked it-froze it- going-to-eat-it thing.

I woke up feeling blah. My day was looking like the same ole same ole. The barometer was down and the weather blustery. Motivation eluded me. Felt flat. Worthless. What the hell am I doing living? I brewed coffee. Kicked around the house. Thought about doing yoga. Didn't. Thought about going to see elderly mother. Did. Held arthritic hands with her and others at her assisted living home. When I'm there, I think about how far I am from being there myself. Twenty years? Thirty? The thing is, it won't be that long. Twenty or 30 years is a flash, as anyone over 60 recognizes.

The last of 2011's green beans. Bye bye!

I forced myself into the garden. Sky was spitting, wind biting. I fell to my knees in the blueberries, pulling weeds from around berry-heavy bushes. I don't know the names of the weeds. But I killed them. I wasn't apologetic. Take that, you bastard! I wrested them from the soil and tossed them into the grass. I pruned berry limbs that were on the ground. I rearranged the peas along the fence behind the berries. I reattached the prayer flags. I forgot about feeling bad. It was 5 p.m. I thought about dinner.

A few whole chipotle peppers bubbling in chicken broth.

Dried tomatoes. Killer sweet.

On "blah" days, infrequent as they mercifully are, I don't think much about cooking, and writing is in another room, one with the heat off and the shutters closed.  But I was perking up. Dinner! What can I make? What can I write? I'm back!  How the hell does that happen? I suppose it's a matter of will. It's forcing yourself to move when you don't feel like moving and create when you don't feel like creating and just getting your mind off yourself and out of gloom and into thinking this: Wow. I'm alive. I'm healthy. I'm lucky. I love people. A few love me. I love life! I'm going to make a freaking kick-ass dinner! And I did.

On my knees in the garden—and also generally in the moment— I clicked off the pantry inventory, head down, pulling weeds like crazy: 1 pkg. of frozen green beans—the last from 2011; frozen 2011 chard; cooked chicken; frozen homemade chicken broth; dried whole chipotle peppers; dried tomatoes; canned serrano sauce; onions and garlic; raw cauliflower; chiptole sauce; sliced fresh avocado; fresh cilantro. Well, hell. No problem. No problem! I love coming back from blah to blast.

It's not like tonight's was the greatest dinner ever. But it was a super tasty repast pulled from our own dried and frozen sources, mostly, plus our canned pepper creations. And also from my flagging psyche. I don't expect anyone will be able to recreate exactly what we had for dinner, although I wish you could. My message time and again, is to go with what you have and trust your culinary instincts. But this was really good, and if you can approximate, go for it!

Low- carb Chicken, Chard, Cauliflower, Chipotle Soup

Enough for four, served with salad and, if you can indulge a few carbs, served over brown rice. Not for me, but PK can throw down the carbs like crazy, so I cook a cup of rice for him every three or four days. To gain weight, he must eat a large bowl of ice cream daily. Plus lots of rice, potatoes, and pasta as were featured in our family meals in pre-low-carb days.

Ingredients

2 Tbsp olive oil or butter
Quart or so chicken broth, canned, frozen, boxed, whatever
Half a medium/large onion, chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
3 or 4 dried chipotle peppers. (Substitute 3 canned in adobo sauce chipotles if you lack dried.)
Large bunch of fresh chard, rinsed and de-stemmed, or box of frozen spinach (I have never seen frozen chard for sale. Why is that? It is so good.) If using frozen spinach, just dump the frozen lump into the soup.
Handful of dried tomatoes—about 3/4 cup.  Or more. In tomato season, try one large ripe fresh.
1 cup sliced green beans (This addition had entirely to do with what I had in the freezer. You can skip the green beans and instead add spinach, zucchini, another green, whatever you have on hand.)
Half a head of large cauliflower, cut into bite-sized pieces
11/2 -2  cups cubed cooked chicken, more or less
Serrano sauce to taste (if you have it)
Garlic/chili sauce to taste (you can easily buy it! And you must. This is essential.)
Salt and pepper to taste
Fresh cilantro as garnish
1 medium avocado, halved and sliced, served atop the soup
Chipotle sauce as desired (and it is SO desired! The sex queen of the kitchen.)
Grated cheese
Directions
Saute the onions and garlic in oil or butter. Add the chicken broth and the dried tomatoes, and the dried chipotle peppers or the chipotles in adobe sauce. (Try substituting three canned chipotles with a tablespoon of the adobo sauce, and freeze the rest.) Mash them up as they cook. Add the greens—chard, spinach, green beans, thinly sliced zucchini and cauliflower. Cook until cauliflower is tender/crisp. Add the chicken and the pepper sauces to taste. Heat through. Ladle into bowls and top with grated cheese, fresh cilantro and a dollop of chipotle sauce.Adorn with avocado slices.

This dinner is guaranteed to turn blah into bliss, especially if you're the one to cook it!

Chipotle Sauce

2-3 cubes frozen chipotle cubes - or 2-3 canned chipotles in adobo sauce, minced
2/3 c mayo (more or less)
2/3 c sour cream (more or less)
2/3 c plain yogurt
2  tsp. lemon or lime juice.
2 tsp serrano sauce or garlic/chili sauce (to taste, as always)
Mix and serve over, or on the side, with grilled meats, fish, veggies, eggs, or atop soups or stews.

Hell, have it on your cereal, if you still eat cereal.

Time and Farm Implements

There's PK tooling along our country road en route to our adjacent rental property, where it's time to mow the spring-tall grass.  He couldn't be happier.

PK is central to my life (spouse), and tractor (s) have been semi-central to his. Not that I haven't played into his life, or that our two incredible sons have slipped by unnoticed. But owning and operating a tractor has been part of his MO for the decades we've inhabited our 3.5 acres in southern Oregon. We've been on the same land since 1974, the year he bought the Massey Ferguson. 

A couple weeks ago, PK purchased a brand-spanking new tractor, a Mahindra. This after an entire winter a couple years ago rebuilding the classic Massey Ferguson and months of agonizing about spending the big bucks for a new tractor after the classic developed insurmountable, at least for our budget and his patience, problems.

Paul on the Massey Ferguson, spraying sulphur in a long-ago spring.

He bought the Massey Ferguson used, very used, and he went straight to work mowing apple orchard grass, hauling a spray rig to kill coddling moth, nipping fungus in the bud, and moving the harvested fruit. He also had a demanding full-time day job, of course. I remember many winter and spring days when, after working eight hours, he'd spend another three or four hours pruning apple trees. He used the tractor to haul the brush and to spray for various reasons. How did I not know this behavior was unusual? Extraordinary? I guess I thought it was normal for a guy to work that hard.

In those days, we had 300 fruit trees. Now we have about 30. Our garden, however, has assumed a large, some might say ominous, presence.

I didn't recognize the Massey Ferguson as a sign of life passing-too-damn quickly until I took photos to help sell it.  But as the shiny new unit was delivered and the Massey Ferguson ingloriously left the premises, I took a dive into the past.

Young Paul and toddler Quinn loading apples onto our old (and long gone) flatbed truck.
This was probably 1979 or 1980.

We were young—in our 20s—when the Massey Ferguson came to live with us. Guess what? It is better to be young than to have a young tractor. PK longed to be farmer then, but he needed to make a living. He really did. Now, as a retiree and with the help of the Mahindra, he can be a gentleman farmer and not have to worry about money or beating himself up using a failing farm implement. But the time for him to really be a farmer has passed. Is that what he wanted? Would I have liked being a rancher's or farmer's wife? It's too late. We'll never know.

We've arrived, somehow, where all those forks in the road have led, finally, to reality central. We are now where we were headed in the 1970s—and it is exactly where we physically landed decades ago.

If you are in your 20s or early 30s, beware. Every choice you make will reverberate in ways that you can't imagine. Even in your dreams. Because it isn't real to you that years will mysteriously become decades, and a singular event will occur and you'll know that a turning point is at hand, even though . you may only recognize this later. Too much later to change the course. Thinking Why didn't I do this or that? is pretty much useless.

Suddenly, you are there and a new tractor is in the driveway and your husband is so damn happy mowing the spring grass and front-end loading compost and planning to dive into the neighbor's horse manure that he can hardly stand it. You are both in your sixties. It is unbelievable. And what you are doing now is not building a life, but beginning to turn it into compost to pass along to the next generation. Life is good. You got lucky.

Does anybody want the land-based life that we have built? It isn't half bad, and there's still plenty of time to let the compost work. The new tractor? It will be here long, long after we're gone.

Low-carb Pizza Crust - Seriously!

Not much left after two pizza-starved beings dug into this one. 

I've missed pizza since ditching it because of carb-heavy crusts. Even my own super-thin, delicious and crispy whole-wheat crusts were not acceptable. Wheat is wheat—a carb bomb no matter what. Scraping the toppings off pizzas does not do the trick as far as the overall pizza experience goes. Gotta have something beneath the pepperoni and cheese.

So I was excited when my friend from long ago, Grace McGran (Diane Cratty when I knew her in the 1970s) resurfaced in my life, and among many other gifts, has supplied a recipe for a low-carb pizza crust.

Believe it or not, this is a zucchini-based pizza  crust, and it is delicious.

Grace was a pastry chef for 40 years!! and had ballooned to an unacceptable weight before she read a book that changed her life that corresponded, more or less, with the end of her happy career fashioning breads, pie crusts and decadent desserts. She's put her extensive chef/baking experience into creating low-carb substitutes for stuff like pizza crust and zucchini bread. Whenever I try out one of her recipes, I will share the results. In the meantime, if you don't want to wait for me, go directly to Grace!

She's amazing. She has, however,  a caveat about her blog: it's posted on a weight-loss/wellness community called sparkpeople, which mostly focuses on the pervasive low-fat, whole-grain myth of healthy nutrition. (Without joining, you may not be able to access. Membership is free.)
To be clear, both Grace and I embrace, with good reason, the low-carb lifestyle. This dietary path does not include bread or most grains, but does include butter, coconut oil, olive oil, nuts and other fats that seem to encourage weight loss and/or weight maintenance.

Here's Grace's recipe with a few photos and my pizza toppings. The crust is the important thing. I'm so happy to have it! And who would have thought that the lowly zucchini could have risen to the challenge. Thank you, Grace!

My pizza loaded up with pesto, peppers, onions, uncured salami, and serrano sauce.

Just out of the oven, with cheese, cooling on Grace's crust recipe.  Can't wait. 

Zucchini Low-carb Pizza Crust

Zucchini - 3 cups, grated (buying this out of season was worth it)
2 eggs
Extra virgin olive oil, 2 Tbsp
Almond flour or almond meal, 4 Tbsp
Flax seed meal (ground flax) 4 Tbsp
Coconut flour, 4 Tbsp
Chickpea flour, 4Tbsp
Pinenuts, 4 Tbsp (I used sunflower seeds as pinenuts are now $19 a pound!)
Parmesan cheese, finely grated, 4 Tbsp
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1.5 tsp sea salt

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F
Shred the zucchini, then put into a bowl. Sprinkle with 1 tsp salt and toss with a fork. After 10 minutes or more, transfer to a colander to let drain for a few minutes. Then squeeze by hand until liquid is gone. Grace uses a ricer for this operation.
In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, using a fork or whisk. In another bowl, combine the eggs and olive oil and stir until well combined. Now mix all ingredients together. You should have a fairly stiff dough.
Prepare a 14-inch pizza pan by covering it with a round of parchment paper. (I didn't have parchment paper but slathered my pan with solid coconut oil, which worked fine. No sticking!) Using your hands, pat the dough evenly over the pizza pan. It will be 1/4 inch thick. Try to even it out so there are no thin areas to burn.Place in the 400 degree pre-heated oven for 20 minutes, then remove to add your toppings.
My pizza toppings:
Basil pesto, enough to cover the partially baked pizza crust
Serrano sauce, a thin smear to cover the pesto (a good marinara sauce would be fine, but not quite as kicky)
Overlapped pieces of uncured Applegate brand salami, or other uncured meat topping
Chopped red onions to taste
Marinated artichoke hearts, four or five, chopped
Sliced sweet peppers, liberally applied

Return baked crust with toppings to the oven for 15 or 20 minutes, depending upon how thickly you've layered. Remove from the oven and top with whatever cheeses you're using (I used Parmesan and mozzarella) Turn off the oven and return the pizza to the oven for five minutes to melt the cheese.

About the unusual flours. When Grace sent her recipe, I was dismayed. Coconut flour? Garbanzo bean flour? Almond flour or meal? But have no fear. The gluten-free craze has hit the hinterlands as well as metro areas, and I was able to easily locate all carb-free flours in Oregon's rural Rogue Valley.

Going Local on the Road

The low ceilings of Ye Olde Castle and Antique Emporium in Burns, OR,  drip with antique toys, and every wall, nook, and cranny is festooned with items of charm and/or weirdness. Delightful!

It's sooo easy to slide into a Red Lion or a Hyatt or a Motel 6 or whatever motel/hotel clone appears on your travel route. You know what to expect. It'll be clean. You'll have WiFi and probably a big-screen TV. There'll be a predictable "free" breakfast that, if you're lucky, will include a bit of protein to share your styrofoam plate with massive carbs. Ditto the road food. You know what's goin' down at Apple Cellar, Shari's, and if you're in a desperate hurry, MacDonald's. The chains are easy hits along the main thoroughfares, but the local gems are hidden.

Not anymore.  Got a smartphone? That's all it takes. That and a mindset that prefers adventure over all-the-same on the road. Delicious regionalism exists, despite a huge effort at national homogenization and Big Brand blanketing. The little hide-aways and pockets of eccentrics wishing to sell their wares and offer you a bed and a hot shower exist everywhere. All you have to do is want to find them and recognize that the journey can be as fun as the destination. 

On a recent trip to western Wyoming, the skiing diehards, to their credit, decided that we'd have nothing but local food and lodging on our return trip to Southern Oregon. Four of them in one vehicle, equipped with smart phones in search mode, checked out the Yelp! and tripadvisor picks along the way to select our culinary and slumber sites. It was good. Very good.

Consider Ye Olde Castle in Burns, OR, which we've passed maybe 20 times over the years without even considering stopping. It looks like a wreck, a dive, lost in the 1950s without a facelift. It looked so unpromising, as did all the other cafes the Diehards rejected as they searched Burns for breakfast, with PK and I bumping over curbs and through alleys as we followed. The Diehards even touched down in the Apple Cellar parking lot, but after 10 seconds, roared off, back to Ye Olde Castle.

Here it is, in all its un-glory,  on Hwy. 20, the main drag through Burns.

The wooden walkway was frayed and creaky, paint flaked from the walls, and I thought, Ok, here we go! Me of little faith. But the place captured me. A round table near the entry was populated with old guys in bib overalls, a sure sign of local approval. Then there were the toys and bicycles and antiques and paintings converging into the aisles. This decor would never pass muster in a chain restaurant.

Items are artlessly displayed but were collected with love. And dust.

Here's Roxanne, the dishwasher, cook and waitress. She's worked here for 30 years and now
lives in quarters above the restaurant. She told us about the resident ghosts and
the phantom crying baby.  Would she be happy working at Denny's? No way.

Ye Olde Castle's breakfast was OK. Typical fare that you would expect at a chain,  except that one in our party scored a six-egg omelette, and I was thrilled with an Atkins' breakfast of eggs, bacon/sausage and low-carb toast. It wasn't the food that scored the reviews and pledges to return, however, it was the bicycle room dividers and the copper-plated prints en route to the restroom and on and on. Ye Olde Castle is not yet reviewed on Yelp! or tripadvisor. Just go there if passing through Burns.

Burns yielded other discoveries:

The Silver Spur Motel, $42 per night with "cowboy hospitality,"  was clean and featured some cool old timey Western decor and knotty pine walls. If you pulled the curtain back in the bathroom, you could see the "backside" of Burns just one street off the main drag: dilapidated houses, scruffy lots, and junky vehicles. The economy has been particularly hard on rural Oregon. 

But the best thing about the Silver Spur was it's walking-distance proximity to a great surprise gourmet restaurant, Rhojos. My five-star review on tripadvisor:

Wow! Great food and service, reasonable prices. Surprising gourmet quality in rural Oregon. Everything fresh and carefully created. Loved it!

If you're ever passing through Burns, Oregon, don't miss it! Chef Michel Johnson is a culinary wizard working on a four-burner electric stove in a non-gourmet-looking kitchen in full view.  It's all part of the restaurant's charm and local flavor.

Back in Wyoming, we ventured down from the Grand Targhee ski resort into the Teton Valley for dinner at the Knotty Pine Supper Club. The Knotty Pine, as its name suggests, is an old-fashioned restaurant with a dark wooden interior and rich smoky aromas. It also turns out to be a popular venue for traveling big-name bands—Galactic played there in March.  After one meal, it's easy to see why the place draws a crowd. It specializes in house-cured meats and seasonal offerings that include buffalo and elk sausage pasta with garlic, tomatoes, red wine and herbs; and kurobuta pork chops stuffed with chevre and bacon over sweet pea risotto. PK and I shared an excellent warm cabbage salad flavored with pancetta, pecans, garlic, and gorgonzola, a dish that warrants trying to duplicate at home.

My delicious dinner at the Knotty Pine Supper Club in Victor, Idaho. Half a side of house-cured hickory-smoked BBQ ribs, a few veggies, and the biggest serving of the best onion rings ever.
Photo was taken AFTER numerous onion rings were swiped by my companions.

Next up, lunch in Pocatello, Idaho. A Yelp! search yielded the Butterburr, which was not that convenient to the freeway, but then, we weren't in a hurry. Were we? This place is a mom and pop restaurant that serves enormous portions. For a carb-avoider, it wasn't a great choice. I got a Cobb salad that was, to be generous, dismal. But others were pleased with homemade noodle soups, burgers, and scones accompanied by whipped butter with powdered sugar. This is the type of restaurant that contributes mightily to the infamous girth of about two-thirds of the USA population. Yet it gets great Yelp! and tripadvisor reviews and beats the chains. 


I've been back home long enough to enjoy my two local favorites in Rogue River, OR:
The Station and Paisano's Italian Kitchen. There's no place like home. 

Friends for Life? It Takes Time. And Effort.

L to R, the Wimer Women: Linda, Nona, Annie, Jeanne, ,JoAnne, Margaret, Michele, Betty 

I enjoyed a spirit-renewing weekend recently with eight "old" girlfriends. By "old" I mean women with whom I've been friends since when PK and I, in our twenties, landed in Southern Oregon. I met the first of them early on when we were both substitute teachers and carelessly disguised hippies in a conservative logging community. We recognized a kindred spirit when we saw her!

During the next five-or-so years, the others drifted into our shared geography—coming from California, mostly.  We all lived near Wimer, just a dot on the map eight miles east of I-5. It was in the 1970s, and is now, a loosely organized community of old-time farming and ranching families and newcomers on their five-acres of Southern Oregon paradise. Most of us lived on small acreages in the boonies, five to 15 miles from the nearest town. We had gardens, and chickens, ducks, pigs, horses, cattle, and goats were not uncommon. Neither were outhouses, propane stoves, wood heat, and long, rutted dirt driveways. PK and I lived closer to Rogue River in a burnt out trailer. The trailer is gone, but we haven't budged from the land.

Most of us built homes and live now exactly where we landed, or not far away. Many of us still heat with wood and get our water from wells. We share, or have shared, country life in a beautiful part of the world never more than a half hour from wilderness. That says something about how and why we connected. We love digging in the dirt, walking in the woods, hunting herbs, wildflowers and mushrooms, rafting rivers, and gazing at the night sky from a wilderness camp—or our own backyards. We ain't city people.

So much happened over the next nearly 40 years. Nothing unusual, really. We had children—some gave joy; others pain equal with pleasure. Some husbands philandered. One treasured child died. (Still makes my heart skip and stomach plummet.) Divorce and disease took their tolls. A dear friend died.

We partied, celebrated and grieved as families. As "just women," we did wilderness hiking trips and impromptu walks on Super Bowl Sundays. Later, it was wild and scenic whitewater rafting on the Rogue River. We shared so much, including some of our best years as young adults.

Then we drifted apart. The demands of jobs, kids, husbands, and other obligations created distance, even though all but a few of us still live in the same telephone prefix. We made other friends connected to work, church, whatever. We grew in different directions. We got too busy. Two of us moved away. (One could not make it to the gathering.) The other was the catalyst for this remarkable weekend of gut-level reconnection.

Her name is JoAnne, and she knows how to make friends and keep them. Keep us.

JoAnne on the Rogue River trail.

She moved out of this area in 1982—30 years ago! First it was Alaska, then Seattle, now Port Townsend, WA. Most people who relocate make new friends, get a new life, and leave the past behind. Not JoAnne.

Periodically throughout the years, she's made the effort to DRIVE here from wherever to reconnect. Each time she has skipped from friend to friend to spend an afternoon or a night or just meet for a chat over coffee or wine. We've had group dinners and a hike or two.  She repeatedly made the effort. It was not small.

Hiking the Rogue River trail with the Wimer Women.

It's taken me awhile to recognize what she's done, and this past weekend, I appreciated her more than I can express. She contacted me months ago saying she wanted to visit in April and this time, she would love to spend a weekend with everybody all at once rather than piecemeal. Could I help put something together? She listed the people she wanted to include. I hadn't seen some of these women since the last time JoAnne visited, and although I had mixed feelings about a whole weekend,  I booked a vacation rental on the river not far from Grants Pass.

We hiked (on the only nice day in two weeks!) to Whiskey Creek
on the Rogue River trail.

JoAnne's vision for our time together didn't end with us arriving at the same place at the same time and just letting the chips fall. She asked that we all do a "check in" to report our individual  emotional, spiritual, and practical status. Without going into detail that might violate extravagant and wonderfully shocking secrets, the weekend was a peak experience and a lesson in the joy of long-standing yet still-developing friendships.

Nona and Margaret enjoy the Limpy Creek Botanical Area not far
from our weekend retreat.

Without a high-paid facilitator or an agenda, we explored our shared and individual territories with humor, insight, compassion, and love. This took HOURS. Hours that flew like the years that have disappeared since we all met so many years ago. Our  vacation rental lacked media. We weren't distracted by computers, phones, TV, radio or music. We were unplugged from the outside world but connected on deep levels of shared memories, common values. We drew strength from the well of the past—and the power of the future.

See the blue phone? That represents Cat, the woman who couldn't make it.
She did a "check-in" from Northeastern Oregon.

The point is that without someone initiating this remarkable weekend, it wouldn't have happened. Those of us who still live just miles from one another would have continued on our mostly separate paths in ever-widening circles away from the centering value of our friendships.

Keeping friendship alive takes effort. Thank you, JoAnne. And for so many beloved friends from long-ago and the more recent past, expect to hear from me soon. I've been reminded of how much you mean to me.