Last night I made Curried Tomato Soup with Hard-Boiled Eggs from Mark Bittman's The Food Matters Cookbook.

Curried Tomato Soup with Hard-Boiled Eggs

1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper [the recipe calls for 1 tablespoon minced fresh hot chile, but I have had a strict no-chile policy ever since I got some juice under my fingernail a few years ago and was in agony for days later.  Perhaps I should just invest in some latex gloves.]
2 tablepoons curry powder [turns out I just had one left; I made up the rest with an ad hoc mixture of coriander, turmeric, cumin, and nutmeg]
1 tsp cumin
pinch of sugar
2 potatoes, peeled and chopped
2 carrots, chopped
3 cups stock [I used chicken stock]
1 cup coconut milk [I used one can]
3 cups chopped tomatoes [I used one can of whole peeled tomatoes]
1 cauliflower, roughly chopped
4 hard-boiled eggs, roughly chopped
1/4 parsley, chopped [it called for cilantro, but parsley is what I had]

Put the oil in a large pot over medium-high heat.  When hot, add onion, garlic, ginger, and pepper.  Cook until soft, 3 to 5 minutes.  Stir in the curry powder, cumin, and sugar.  Cook and stir another minute or two more.

Add the potatoes and carrots.  Cook for a minute or two, then add the stock, coconut milk, and tomatoes with their liquid.  Bring to a boil, then lower the heat so the mixture bubbles gently.  Cook until the potatoes and carrots are fairly soft, 15 and 20 minutes.

Add the cauliflower and adjust the heat so that the mixture bubbles gently.  Cook until all the vegetables are very tender, about 15 minutes more.  Serve garnished with the hard-boiled eggs and parsley.


Hard-Boiled Eggs (from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything)

Place eggs into a saucepan with a tight-fitting lid.  Cover with water.  Bring to a boil.  Turn off the heat, cover the pot, and allow eggs to sit in hot water  for nine minutes.  After nine minutes, remove eggs to a bowl of icewater.

Monday night I made a variation on the stir-fried sweet potatoes that I've made a number of times since Mark Bittman wrote it up in The Minimalist in September (you must remember, Mark Bittman has high standards, so "a better-than-average little meal" for him is probably a much-better-than-average meal for me).

But I had the leftover sage that I had gotten from Whole Foods for the White Beans, Tuscan Style, so instead of grapeseed oil, garlic, and ginger (I usually leave the scallions out anyway, because I rarely have them on hand, and I'm not a huge fan), I melted two tablespoons of butter and then added the sage, and sauteed (fried?) until the sage leaves started to wilt, and then added the shredded sweet potatoes (six little ones plus one big one: I like enough for both supper and leftovers for lunch the next day) and proceeded as usual.

As it turns out, Mark Bittman had previously published a stir-fried sweet potatoes with brown butter and sage recipe, which I didn't follow (no garlic), but it was nice to get some validation on the flavor combinations.


Last night I got home late-ish (after rehearsal, I had to briefly return to lab to take something out of the autoclave (I suppose I could have left it overnight and saved myself fifteen minutes, but that seemed inconsiderate)), and it turned out there was a condo association meeting.  The power was going on and off (which did make for a harrowing experience crossing Conway on the way home: the streetlights were out), and as I was going upstairs to drop off my stuff before coming back down for the condo meeting, I thought about making a quick dinner of scrambled eggs and toast to take down with me, but then the power went out again and I was stoveless.  I thus went down to the meeting without any supper (Morgan was working on his candidacy talk for today, so we needed a representative), but after an hour and half, when he was done with his talk, Morgan came down and brought me a scrambled egg sandwich, on toast.  It was perfect.