culinary kookiness

[arethinn]

gremliness mentioned a ways back that she had started to cook many experimental dishes since she moved out of her parents' house. Today I decided to take a cue from this, and hied me to the grocery store to buy a bunch of random whatever-looked-good and make some kind of stew or soup out of it. What I ended up with was a kind of cooked-vegetables-with-broth thing (stews have thicker sauces, and soups have more liquid) that was actually pretty good.

It consisted of a medium onion and 2 cloves of garlic cooked in a tablespoon of olive oil, then joined by 1/4 cup of pearled barley, a small turnip, a small beet, a medium size parsnip, 5 red radishes, a medium carrot, 1/4 cup chopped fresh basil, some fresh oregano, thyme, sage, and rosemary, some ground pepper and paprika, and a can of chicken broth (so not quite vegan - I could have used vegetable stock, but I don't usually like its flavour).This simmered for fifteen or twenty minutes, then I added a cut up crown of broccoli and about half a bell pepper. After five more minutes or so, in went about a cup of red cabbage and about 2 cups of kale, and I took it off the heat a few minutes later (doesn't take much to cook cabbage and kale).

The broth turned out to be quite a dark pinkish red because of the beets and cabbage, so that was interesting. Thought for next time - maybe add some of that red Thai chili paste that has been languishing in the fridge and rarely gets used.

On the sort-of-downside, though, this is far more fibre than I am used to eating in a single sitting (my highly scientific nutritional analysis indicates that in the serving I ate - about a third of the pot - there were over 11 grams of fibre), and my intestines seem to be... unnerved by this. Ah well.