here in the dark
freezer pot pie, power outages, and a soup party
This has been our first November in this apartment. As such it’s only now that I’m realising how good we had it at our old place in one very specific way: we never once suffered an unplanned power outage. I don’t know if we were just lucky, or if our proximity to the train yards and the grain silos meant that our grid was more protected, or what, but the lights never did more than flicker even during the worst storms. Anyway, we had several windstorms recently, one of which knocked the power out from almost the moment we finished eating dinner until after we’d gone to bed. It was less than 4°C outside, so we packed up our leftovers and put them on the balcony rather than open the fridge and let the cold out (always a big worry for me in an outage is having to waste food). It felt pretty cozy actually with the fireplace on most of the evening, even though I could only read my book by tilting it in one particular position.
I was working in the office the next day, and knowing Jeff would be working over dinner, instead of going home I took myself out to dinner at the Magnet. I got the miso-squash hummus plate, which comes with mixed pickles, olives, and fry bread, and of course they always have excellent beers on tap. While I was reading my book the woman next to me commented on it, and ended up inviting me to the talk she was going to at the library. I actually did go, and it was great! I love the library. And then it meant I’d spent enough time downtown so as to align with Jeff finishing work, and met up with him to drive home. Another power outage happened that night while we were asleep, so it was thankfully short, but did mean we had to reset all the clocks we’d just finished resetting the day before.
And a third happened a couple of days later while both Jeff and I were trying to work from home. We’d resigned ourselves to taking the bus over to Jeff’s mom’s place to charge up our electronics and so Jeff could sign out of work, but the streetlights came back on while we were waiting for the bus. (The car, of course, was trapped in the parkade.) It was early enough that we might still have had time to make dinner, but we were both fed up by that point and decided to go out. We drove all the way to Ambleside to go to our new favourite Indian restaurant on the North Shore since Vaades on 3rd closed down: Swad Indian Kitchen. I’ve loved everything we’ve tried when we’ve gotten takeout from them in the past (I particularly recommend the vegetable taka tak and the palak kofta) and visiting the restaurant itself was very nice. Eating in meant we could get papri chaat, which is amazing and doesn’t tend to travel well.
Amanda’s birthday was last week, and she hosted a lovely, cozy get-together at her place, where she requested guests bring a soup to share, or something to eat with soup, which is a wonderful idea for late November. I wanted to make pickle soup, something I’ve been curious about for awhile but held back on making because Jeff is a dill pickle hater. I try not to judge him for this. After all, it’s important to have balance in any relationship, which is sometimes achieved when I take the pickle off his burger and he takes the sliced onion off mine. But it does mean that if I was going to make this soup, I needed an excuse for other people to eat it, or else be resigned to eating it all myself.
And, because I still had all the ingredients for the soup I’d planned to make for dinner the night before when we ended up going out instead, I decided to just make two soups. So I spent the afternoon making a big mess of the kitchen, and we left for the party with a bottle of wine and several litres of soup.
The other soup was a Persian vegetable barley, a recipe from the Milk Street: Tuesday Nights cookbook. It’s known as ashe-jo in Farsi, and as with many things, there are a variety of ways to make and garnish it. This one was a mix of grated carrots and chopped leeks with turmeric to flavour and colour the soup. I also added a serrano pepper, because I have a bunch of them right now. The recipe calls for quick-cooking barley, which has been flattened somewhat like rolled oats so that it cooks in only a few minutes, but I used pearl barley, which still doesn’t take too long and has a nice texture. Lemon and sour cream get added at the end, and some dill, parsley, and dried cranberries are nice for serving. Everyone agreed that this held the essence of a canned vegetable barley soup— that is, nostalgic and comforting— with better flavours.
A picture of the pickle soup while I was cooking it had people sliding into my DMs like I’d been posting nudes: evidently, I wasn’t the only one who found the idea of such a soup strange but compelling. Obviously I’d be putting it in the newsletter. I used this recipe without much change, only adding a little flour to thicken the broth because many of the other recipes I’d looked at did that, using slightly less pickle brine (closer to 1 cup), and also adding some dill directly to the soup. The vegetables were slightly different in some of the recipes, too: many didn’t use leek, and celery root would actually be more seasonal than fresh celery (my grocery store was out of the former, so the choice was made for me). However, it does seem necessary to use the Polish-style pickles, which have a less vinegary brine than the dill pickles most of us get in the jar. I didn’t have to add much salt to this soup, because the pickle brine is already so salty.
Spiritually, this felt reminiscent of a borscht, in that it’s full of hearty winter veg and is very satisfying to eat. Flavour-wise, it’s a bit like the meeting point between a vegetable soup and a potato salad. I don’t know if I’m really selling it here, but I personally loved it, and it was so well-liked by the other guests that I only came home with a single bowl’s worth of leftovers from what had originally been a lot of soup. Jeff respectfully tried a few bites before setting his bowl down and ignoring it, so when I make this again I guess I’ll need to make a smaller batch— assuming I’m not bringing it to another soup party.
All the other soups were wonderful, too. I joked that Amanda had tricked us all into having a cookoff, because everyone had made such interesting things. Laryssa’s Burmese samosa soup would likely never have been made for a cookoff, because who’d want to make soup and samosas and falafel from scratch, but it was delightful to crumble store-bought ones into the soup and contrast the spicy broth with cool crispy cabbage and cilantro. Mendel’s potato-mushroom soup was made with foraged mushrooms— should we have expected expect less? And Amanda’s crispy rosemary beans and harissa sesame oil took a creamy carrot white bean soup to the next level.
There was also a homemade sourdough that was absolutely perfect, a pear frangipane tart, and Amanda’s birthday cake: a black forest cake from Vogue bakery, which is fully vegan and which most of us had never heard of before, even though the place has been around for years. The cake was, to put it mildly, fucking outstanding. I don’t know how it was vegan when it tasted so very like the grocery store black forest cakes of my memories, but I certainly know where I’ll be getting a fancy cake the next time I want one without having to make it.
Americans, if you’re looking for something to make with your leftovers this weekend aside from the usual sandwiches and soup, here’s a curried pot pie I usually throw together using whatever’s left a few days after thanksgiving. I didn’t get around to it at the time this year, but then last week when the fridge was looking particularly empty, I realised I could make it using almost 100% freezer items. Leftover turkey pieces, some frozen mixed vegetables, and a sheet of frozen puff pastry so I wouldn’t have to make pie dough after working all day. The curry mixture should cool slightly before you lay the crust out over it, which means you have the perfect window for rolling out the pastry, which means this is almost as easy to put together as a soup. But it looks a lot more impressive coming out of the oven crispy-browned and bubbling than most soups probably would.
We’ve finally gotten back to making pizza at home after being away and having a couple of busy weeks. However, when we went to make it the first time, we realised as we were about to make it that we couldn’t open a can of tomatoes for sauce because the can opener had broken the night before (I’d borrowed one from a neighbour in order to eat my bachelor dinner of a tuna sandwich). So we made one with pesto sauce, and one cacio e pepe, which is made by letting ice melt on the pizza crust as it bakes, and then when it comes out of the oven, sprinkling pecorino into the water to make a sauce. Then grind lots of pepper over everything and add a little more cheese. Super quick and tasty.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so any donations are greatly appreciated. Next Thursday is my birthday, so I’ll be celebrating instead of writing, but I’ll report back the following week with details! Finally, here’s some advice appropriate for any of us above the 49th parallel this time of year.