Autumn makes me want to cook.\u00a0 It’s my favorite season, even though it now coincides with the most awful event of my life, and those things combined are making me want to spend hours and hours cooking up comfort food for the masses.\u00a0 And I do mean for the masses.\u00a0 My happiest cooking experience of the last few months was making ropa vieja for a gaming group, and the minute more gamers come to the house, I’m cooking for them TOO.<\/p>\n
And, since I haven’t posted here for a month, I get to talk about all the food at once.<\/p>\n
1. Ropa vieja in a crockpot.\u00a0 It’s not hard.<\/p>\n
It’s flank steak, and peppers, and tomatoes and aromatics, a few spices, some vinegar, and a whole lot of time.\u00a0 I let it cook on high for about six hours.\u00a0 I’d post a definitive recipe, but I cooked it like I usually cook new things:\u00a0 look up about five different recipes, check the pantry, check the fridge, figure out a few adjustments when we invariably don’t have something, and make.\u00a0 Here’s one recipe<\/a>, and another<\/a>, and another<\/a>.\u00a0 I used sherry vinegar instead of red wine vinegar\/Worchestershire, and a ton of red peppers because I loathe green ones.<\/p>\n Were I to make it again, I’d serve it over rice, but we put it in tortillas for the gaming group, and they ate a LOT.\u00a0 Success!<\/p>\n 2. Roasted vegetable soup.\u00a0 Also not hard.<\/p>\n I had a ton of root vegetables sitting around:\u00a0 acorn squash, delicata squash, sweet potatoes, carrots.\u00a0 Plus some red peppers.\u00a0 And I find most mashed starchy things way too heavy and bleh, and I love the roasted vegetables served in the Whole Foods salad bar (nom nom nom), so I channeled my inner Barefoot Contessa and roasted up the whole pile.\u00a0 Two realllly laden pans of chopped up vegetables, some oil, some salt, some pepper.\u00a0 Really high heat, 20 minutes.\u00a0 Two trips to the smoke alarm to take out the battery.<\/p>\n I took the whole mass of roasted stuff out, pureed it in the blender with a bunch of good boxed chicken stock, and shoved it in a bowl in the fridge for two days while we instead went out for crabcakes.\u00a0 Then!\u00a0 I heated it up with more stock, a crapton of garlic, some thyme.\u00a0 Simple, really, and by far the best soup I’ve ever made.<\/p>\n When I served it, I topped it with diced Canadian turkey bacon and a bit of fresh spinach sauteed with onion and garlic.\u00a0 Seriously.\u00a0 This was good food.\u00a0 Rave reviews.<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0 Chorizo bread pudding.\u00a0 Eh.<\/p>\n