Effort

Sometimes the best way to get out of a rut is to try. Revolutionary thought, no? I've been feeling pretty uninspired the last few days as far as cooking goes. Nothing seems to come out tasting as good as I expect it to and nothing seems particularly appetizing. Oh sure I've been cooking. I've eaten plenty of pasta with red and white sauces, I've made quesadillas, more gnocchi, chilli, Dutch chocolate almond biscotti (my own recipe; still needs tweaking), I've had pancakes, fried rice, eggs, and more granola than you can shake a stick at. And when you get down to it, all I've really wanted to eat is granola... neither the set-it-and-forget-it ease of baking nor the (in my mind more exciting) fiddlyness of stove top cooking has been exciting for me, and I just feel hungry and vaguely grumpy as I just give up and decide not to eat anything.

So today I'm trying.

Combining my need for active participation in the cooking process with my recent apathy towards actually exerting effort in said process, soup is the perfect solution to getting me out of my culinary doldrums. About two weeks ago I bought a whole small roaster chicken (cheaper than buying an equivalent amount of pre-butchered meat) and saved the carcass in the freezer after carving it just for this reason. In it went into this pot, plus a quartered onion, a few cloves of smashed garlic, plus all the leftover veggies and such I had languishing in the fridge: a big carrot, a couple radishes and their greens, a handful of spinach, a few tablespoons of crushed tomato left in the bottom of an opened can. From the freezer too came a handful of ice burnt sugar snap peas, a couple surviving florets of cauliflower, and a few frosty baby carrots. I even slipped a shred of crumbling kombu into the broth because, what the heck, the more the merrier.

There are any number of things you can do with home-made broth, too, using it to flavor lots of different dishes in place of water. But as my boyfriend was recalling not so long before I bought the chicken in the first place, a simple chicken-and-rice soup is never a bad option. I made a pot of it over the summer, and I've got a big bag of brown rice I can't wait to use in this batch. Add some shredded chicken, some small or diced or leafy veggies, and a scoop of rice to broth and you've got yourself something wonderfully filling and simple! If I were as pro as my mom, I would be making noodles from scratch... but I'm trying hard enough as it is here! Rice, maybe dumplings, are probably going to be my grains here. Maybe I'll feel fancy and cube some tofu some afternoon and eat some very faux miso. No matter what, because of all the leftovers in the broth it's bound to be good for me!

And after five ugly hours of simmering...

...what else hits the spot so well?