A Real Everlasting Meal

Laurie loaned me a book, An Everlasting Meal. The author, Tamar Adler, who cooks at La Panisse in Berkeley, cooks by using what was left from recent meals and adding new ingredients. She doesn’t waste a thing, always building on what is at hand.

I’ve cooked that way for years and I did it again today. I made chicken noodle soup. The soup was based on two baked chicken thighs, left from a couple of days ago. There was some good juice, too, and that was the first thing into the pot. I added chopped carrots, celery, and shallots along with two quarts of water and two teaspoons of chicken base.. After these ingredients had cooked for a while Dennis chopped the chicken meat and we added that with a generous pinch of thyme that I dried last summer.

I have a great advantage in this style of cooking because there’s a wealth of fresh ingredients waiting outside to be harvested. Today, having started a love affair with dandelion greens, I decided that the soup would be improved by the addition of some greens–dandelions.

In the yard I found plenty of young green leaves.

Before coming back inside I stopped by the garden to cut a few sprigs of parsley for an additional green kick to the soup.

Here at the beginning of October many vegetables remain to be harvested. Roma tomatoes, for example, are still producing. A few of them have blossom end rot, but the top parts are still good. The peppers just won’t quit, either.

Dennis, eager to see how the sweet potatoes look, dug a couple of hills today. It looks like a bumper crop.

I think the true everlasting meal is having a garden and the means to preserve some of its produce for the winter months. It is having a cold frame that produces lettuce, spinach, and kale over the cold season. It is having a small flock of chickens, who consume vegetable scraps from the kitchen and garden plants past their prime. The chickens complete the cycle, giving us all the eggs we can eat and producing manure that enriches the soil for next year’s garden that will be planted with seeds we have saved from this year’s mature plants.

Now, that’s an everlasting meal.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer