Aug. 1, 2008 at 8:43am

releasing my inner Hippy-chef

(might want to keep hte day job, though...)

Each week I get my Terra Organics box and it's like "Manna from Heaven" meets Christmas.  I never know what I'm going to get, and since some of the items are new to me, I get to experiment with new culinary ideas.  Some of these have fine results, like my chard-stem slices that I ate with my fingers before putting them into cous cous, they were that good.

Others, like  yesterday's soup, could have used...refinement, shall we say.

In the last two weeks I've received green beans, yellow beets, chard, green onions, sweet baby tomatoes, basil (omg, that was the best smelling delivery, EVER) and much more.

I couldn't decide whether I wanted to do some sort of beet salad with chevre, a cous cous salad-salad (cous cous salad above a bed of greens) --the basil tomato cous cous I had a Terra recipe for, or something combining beets, porkchops, cinnamon, and applesauce (don't sneer, I may just have to try this.  It popped into my mind and like a fly buzzing in your bedroom just as you're trying to get to sleep, the idea won't leave...)

Foraging in my freezer, noting that I need, desperately, to do a huge Commissary shopping trip, I discovered lean ground turkey.  It was a dark and rainy afternoon.  I like soup, no, LOVE soup, and it's hard to justify making soup in 80 degrees with sun beating down your back (the sun sets into my kitchen.)

Soup, it would be.

Soup, with...turkey, veggie broth, quinoa, red chard stems, green beans, corn (leftover from lunch) --then I wandered into my herb garden, tried to get thyme (it was flowering, though) so ended up with parsley... threw that in there with green onions at the last minute, adding Johnny's Seasoning Salt for flavor (because when you're going organic and healthy, first thing that should pop to mind: MSG.)  

The flavors were amazing, fresh, bright.  The texture was ... umm... *nice* but there was this squeaky thing happening with the lean ground beef, and then the quinoa had a sort of popping slime (kinda like caviar without the fishy salty taste) thing going on...  But the veggies were nice, and it was super duper healthy, and filling, too.  Actually, I had to eat a bowl in three sittings, because while I can endorse food that goes snap, crackle, pop, and crunch, *squeak* is just kinda'... weird.

In hindsight, had I dolloped some sour cream over the top, the fats might have de-squeaked the turkey, and the texture might have been better... Or, I can wait for the season of Kale and use the quinoa with kale and ground turkey to make meatballs for minestrone soup...

Today: tackling the beets.  Salad with chevre, that I don't yet have?  Or that pork shop thing... Or maybe stuffed star squash with sausage?  (decisions, decisions...)