I never make the right amount of soup. Either I make so little that there are no leftovers, or I make so much that my fridge gets filled with mason jar after mason jar of the same damn stuff. I’ll have soup for lunch a couple times, but that hardly makes a dent. Soon, several pints of perfectly good soup have gone bad. Food has been wasted. Tragedy has struck.

But sometimes, like today, when I’m staring down a 5-day old supply of butternut squash soup,  I remember that soup can be an ingredient. Heck, an entire generation of housewives depended on cans of Campbell’s for making sauces and casseroles.

Creamy, puréed soups can be made into surprisingly good soufflés. But I think just about any soup can make awesome couscous. (Well, except maybe a noodle soup. Then you’ve got semolina-on-semolina action. It might be a little weird.)

Ingredients

• 1 pint (16 oz) soup
• 1 to 1 1/3 cups couscous or whole wheat couscous (use less if your soup is thick, more if it’s thin)
• salt, to taste
• pepper, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, parmesan cheese, other tasty bits

1. Heat soup until it starts to boil. If it’s a cream soup, you don’t want it boiling long at all.
2. Kill the heat and add the couscous. Stir it in quickly just to even it out.
3. Cover tightly (the steam is what’s doing a lot of the work here) and leave for 5-10 minutes.
4. Uncover, fluff, and flavor. Unless your soup was overpoweringly salty, you’ll want to at least add more salt.

Eat the couscous as is, use it to make some sort of delicious couscous salad, or do what I do: drizzle on cream and eat it with a spoon.

I know how this looks. But trust me. It’s goddamn delicious.

Take a dark, non-hoppy beer, and top it with thick homemade whipped cream. I bet it’d be even better with a framboise.

J.K. Rowling may have said that she imagined butterbeer to taste “like less-sickly butterscotch,” but as far as I’m concerned this is what Harry chugged in The Three Broomsticks.

Bugs are a big part of my job.

Depending on how well and how long you’ve known me, that sentence might have you guffawing.

I’m not sure how I went from girl-who-freaks-out-when-she-sees-ants to bug-lover. But somehow, every Friday I find myself staring at these big sticky traps, counting the still-wriggling olive fruit flies, soldier beetles, leafhoppers, and other little beasties.

I also maintain a dozen little gardens at three vineyards. These insectaries are full of flowers and a diversity of plants, there to lure in pollinators and provide habitat for beneficial insects like lacewings and ladybugs. I love spending mornings weeding or planting in these spots that are bursting with life of all kinds — not just the plants and bugs, but hummingbirds darting between flowers and blue-bellied lizards doing pushups in the sunny spots.

What goes with fava bean puree?

Omelettes. Manchego cheese. Pita bread.

Also, everything.

To make the yummy green paste that you can spread on just about anything:

Ingredients

• fava beans
• olive oil
• salt

1. Remove beans from pods.
2. Place beans in a pot and add enough water to cover. Bring to a boil.
3. Cook until skins burst open. Drain and cover with cold water to prevent overcooking.
4. Squeeze beans out of skins. They should slip out easily. Do it under cold running water to keep everything from getting too slimy.
5. Purée beans in a food processor. Add oil to reach desired consistency, and enough salt to make it taste great. You can add garlic or herbs too, but it’s easy to overpower the favas’ delicate flavor, so don’t go overboard.
6. Stash it in the fridge, and use it to smear on toast and sandwiches, stir into creamy sauces, fill omelettes or crêpes, make risotto…

My aunt and uncle gave me a bunch of tasty limes from their tree. Despite my best efforts to use them all up, one can only drink so many gin and tonics. Enter sherbet!

I’m happy with how this experiment turned out. The lime and honey flavors are nice and mild, so you can really taste the richness of the cream. It’d be great to serve alongside another delicately flavored dessert.

Ingredients

• juice of 2 limes (about ¼ cup)
• zest of 2 limes, grated or chopped very finely
• 1 tablespoon honey
• ¾ cup sugar
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1¾ cup milk
• teensy pinch of salt

1. Mix that shit up.
2. Throw it in an ice cream churner.
3. Freeze.
4. Devour with pie or sugar cookies.

The garden is slowly taking shape.

The big area for row crops is tilled, and I’ve dug one of the beds (only nine to go). Now that bed is full of turnip, mâche, lettuce, radish, arugula, and basil seeds. Instant gratification crops.

That big patch o’ dirt behind the beds is getting filled in too. I seeded four long rows of calico popcorn on the west side, in hopes that when the plants are big they’ll give the rest of the garden a break from the harsh wind. And the first of the tomatoes are in the ground: sun gold, black cherry, mortgage lifter, pineapple, and Pierce’s pride.

I’m amazed at how much nicer the soil is than when I started last year. It’s soft, it smells good, and I found plenty of fat, juicy earthworms while I was digging the one bed. Last year the ground was as hard as concrete, and it wasn’t until halfway into summer that I started finding good bugs.

My garden to-do list keeps getting longer, but they days are stretching out too. And playing in the dirt is not a bad way to spend one’s free time.

I’m about to get cracking on my second season in the garden. There’s a mix of excitement, anxiety, and utter impatience that my favorite farming mentor once described as “fear of farming.”

Ernie is mowing and tilling my field over the weekend, so there’s nothing I can do for another few days. But as soon as the ground’s ready for planting, there will be SO MUCH to do: first a frenzy of setting up irrigation, translating my graph paper notes and maps into an actual garden plan, and lots of transplanting and seed sowing. Then there will be six months of daily (well, nearly daily) watering, weeding, harvesting, and attempts to keep up with succession planting. How can I not get nervous thinking about it?

At least this year I have a season behind me, and some solid data to draw from. There is still so much I have to learn, but it’s amazing to think back to all that I didn’t know when I started in my garden last year. (A week or so after I planted my first crop of beets — which I spent HOURS direct-seeding — I rejoiced at the bed full of happy little cotyledons springing up. It took me another couple weeks to realize that they were all weeds.) There were a few areas where I had big problems, so this year I’m trying out some new plans. Lots of them.

Tomatoes

Except for the popcorn (ugh), tomatoes were my biggest source of frustration in the garden last year. The harvest was very late, and almost all of the fruit were unusable because of worms, blossom-end rot, sunburn, mold, and critters eating them. There was only one planting, and only three varieties. What should have been the best crop of the summer was a constant annoyance, and though the shitty weather is partially to blame, it was really mostly farmer error. The much-improved game plan for this year includes:

• Wider spacing – Two feet between plants wasn’t nearly enough
• Succession planting – So the millions of tomatoes are spaced out, not coming at me all at once.
• Trellising/caging/pruning/training – Letting the plants sprawl out on the ground let the gophers get at them, caused the fruit to rot, and made harvesting a disgusting chore. I had planned to cage the plants but never got around to it; this year it’s a priority. I’m going to mess around with a few different methods to see which works best.
• Diversity – You should see my list of tomato seeds to buy. There will be at least a dozen heirloom varieties alone.

Windbreaks

The wind comes screaming through the little valley my garden is in, and on a bad day a couple hours in that kind of wind is enough to make you lose your mind. I’m not sure how much it affects the plants — nothing’s been blown over — but a little refuge would do this farmer a whole lot of good. I’m hoping that planting tall and sturdy plants like popcorn and sunchokes on the northwest side of the garden will cut down the windspeed.

Compost tea

Compost tea is such a weird and awesome idea. You take a small amount of good compost, full of nutrients and happy little microbes, and dump it in some water. You use a pump to aerate the water for 24 hours. The idea is that those happy little microbes swim around, feast on the yummy stuff in the compost, and procreate like crazy. When the time’s up, you strain out the solids, and use the resulting tea to give your plants a dose of microbial goodness. It’s not about giving them nutrients; that should already be in the soil. You’re giving them multitudes of healthy bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa that will invigorate the soil biology, making the soil’s nutrients more easily accessible to the plants.

You can spend a lot of money on a fancy compost tea brewer, but supposedly all you need to really need is a bucket and a pump. Water + compost + air = compost tea. So that’s my plan.

Gopher-proof irrigation

Those gorram gophers. Last year they treated my t-tape as their own personal water fountains. They easily chew through the thin plastic, creating leaks in the lines and plenty of headaches for me. And I’m sure giving them a steady water supply didn’t help with my general gophers-eating-my-plants problem either. I’m reluctant to abandon the t-tape (mostly because I still have half a roll left), but for the most part I’ll be switching to thicker drip tube for widely spaced veggies and sprinklers for greens.

Tangy, savory, and just-spicy-enough, stroganoff is a great rainy-day comfort food. Every time I make seitan (there’s a good recipe here if you need it) I end up making stroganoff with the leftovers, and I think tonight’s iteration is the best yet.

Using good, hot paprika makes all the difference.

Ingredients

• ½ lb seitan, sliced into ¼-inch strips
• 1 T hot paprika
• 3 T vegetable oil
• ¼ lb mushrooms, thinly sliced
• 1 C broth
• 2 T sherry vinegar
• 4 oz cream cheese
• 1-3 T heavy cream
• salt, to taste
• ½ lb pasta, cooked

1. Toss the seitan in the paprika, so that each piece is coated.
2. Heat oil in a large skillet. Add seitan and sauté for a few minutes, until the first side is cooked. Flip and cook the other side.
3. Remove seitan from pan and add mushrooms. Cook until tender.
4. Remove mushrooms from pan. Add broth and vinegar, and bring to a simmer.
5. Turn off heat and add cream cheese. Stir to dissolve — it’s going to look weird and curdled for a few minutes, but it will eventually melt into the sauce.
6. Add cooked seitan and mushrooms, and heavy cream to pan. Add salt as needed, and serve over noodles. Top with more heavy cream if desired.

Is it cold and damp out? Are you wiped out? Need a drink? Something to make you feel alive again?

(Or: out of beer, and the only thing in your liquor cabinet is rum?)

It’s time for hot buttered rum. This is how I’ve been making mine since I had a great one at Smuggler’s Cove and threw out my previous recipe.

Ingredients

• ¼ C (also 4 T or 2 oz) rum that you rather like
• ½ t ground mulling spices (mine is a mix of ginger, cinnamon, and cloves)
• 1 t brown sugar
• ½ C boiling water
• up to 1 t butter

1. Combine rum, spices, sugar, and water or juice in a small mug, and stir until spices and sugar have dissolved.
2. Ask yourself how much butter you’re really willing to drink, and cut off a sliver of butter the appropriate size. Float the butter on top of the liquid (as in, just let it sit on top) for theatrical effect, or stir it in as it melts if you prefer to hide your gluttony.
3. Garnish with a wee sprinkle of spices. Throw in a cinnamon stick if you’re feeling festive.

Yesterday wasn’t exactly what most people would call an exciting day, but there were three events that I’m sure will change my life for good. They all happened in The Castro (which will forever be my favorite neighborhood in the city, despite my not being a gay man).

1.
Jamie showed me, and I then purchased, the teeniest circular knitting needles I’ve ever seen. I will never (EVER) have to break out a set of porcupine-like double pointed needles to knit a sweater again. Do you know how many sweaters projects I’ve abandoned just because I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sleeves? Never again.

2.
While Sam and I were looking for a place to eat lunch, we walked by Anchor Oyster Bar. I mentioned that after reading a very persuasive article on vegans eating oysters, I’d thought about trying them. His face lit up and he marched us into the restaurant.

I’ve never had oysters before, and aside from some occasional chicken broth, a small piece of fish, and exactly two bites of turkey, I haven’t eaten any animals since becoming a vegetarian eleven years ago. So oysters are sort of a big deal.

A big delicious deal. I had two of the little guys — the first one was on the house since I was an oyster virgin — and they were completely unlike what I expected. They weren’t rubbery or fishy, just flavorful and oh-so-delicate. Though I don’t think I could have much more than two in a single sitting.

3.
For lunch, I had a vegetarian chili cheeseburger at Harvey’s. It was less of a revelation than the oysters, but not by much.