Soup with Strange Ingredients like Peanut Butter (maybe $3 for a potful; about 45 minutes)

I forgot to ask Santa for an immersion blender (immersion blender discussion, no less). It was an incredible oversight on my part. I have hopes, though, that with my birthday coming up, he'll make a little flight to Georgia next month and correct things.

But seriously folks. Why do any of us have to write letters? Isn't it sort of pathetic, and -- I don't know -- a little condescending? I mean, shouldn't we expect the jolly old ELF (not quite what Santa has in mind), a supernatural being who can fly and deliver presents all over the world in a single freaking night, to be a little, well, psychic?

Why couldn't he have looked into my mind, or more importantly my cupboard, and noted that I didn't have one and might find one useful?

I don't know. Might be I was on his naughty list. It's possible. Actually, it's likely, even.

In the meantime, I'm making do, and though an immersion blender would be handy for this recipe, if you don't have one, a regular blender or a food processor does fine if you're careful with hot soup.

Specifically, hot sweet potato peanut soup, loosely -- okay, INCREDIBLY loosely -- based on some soup I had years ago at a friend's house. His was loosely African, I think. But as he was a Jesuit priest cum English professor from Wisconsin -- well, it's probably mostly Midwestern.

What you'll need:

A stock pot or large sauce pot

a blender or food processor

oil

small onion, diced tiny (grated is better)

garlic

fresh ginger

cayenne

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp coriander

1/4 tsp cinnamon

pinch of ground cloves

1/4 c crushed tomatoes

1 carrot, peeled and diced

1 lb sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped into 2" pieces (in this version I photographed I baked them first [because I thought I was making something else], but you don't have to)

2 1/2 cup water

1/4 cup heavy cream

1 1/2 TBSP chunky peanut butter (no sugar added is best)

chopped peanuts

cilantro and chopped peanuts for garnish

This is a pretty mild dish. Add more cayenne or chili powder to give it more heat if you like that.

In the stock pot, heat about a TBSP of oil until shimmering. Saute about two cloves of garlic and the onion in this, just for a minute or two.

Add spices and cook one minute longer.

Add tomatoes and sweet potato. Stir and cook for two more minutes.

Add water and turn up heat until liquid simmers. Cook for 20 minutes or until the sweet potatoes fall apart when prodded with a fork.

CAREFULLY blend or process smooth. Return to pot if necessary. Stir in cream and peanut butter over low heat. When you serve it, sprinkle on a little cilantro and some chopped peanuts.

There you go.

Innard's Wisdom; or Dog Gizzardry

Thanksgiving's over, and here you are holding a bunch of crap you pulled out of the chest and neck cavities of your turkey. You might also have a platter full of cartilage or other non-bone turkey refuse. I know I did.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to Lucy Curzon (in this picture, she's all the way to the left) about the organic carrot /cranberry/ etc. dog biscuits she was making. I wanted the scoop -- the recipe, but not really, just the chemistry of it I guess.

"Nothing processed," she said. "And stay away from cornmeal, and of course grapes and raisins."

"But," I said, "what holds it all together? Egg? what?"

"Egg. And peanut butter. Also, use whole wheat flour, but oats are better."

So yeah, egg? That felt sort of Harry Potter-y, sort of Three Weird Sisters-y. I don't know. I don't credit any egg with that kind of power.

[Musical interlude: Oh oh oh! It's magic, you know!/ Never believe it's not so!...]

[Giblets are, in fact, so much more profound than bad 70s Brit-pop. We all know the words, right? But if you type them out, it's really mortifying.]

Anyway, on Friday last week, I found myself with a pan of boiled innards and nothing to do with them. Also, some leftover vegetable soup. Suddenly, I thought: DOG BISCUITS. And thus I began to experiment.

The first thing I did was put the giblets and their boiling water in the food processor with a few spoons of the leftover soup (carrots, peas, potatoes, some other stuff). Then I blended it to the consistency, as Chuck said, of fresh vomit. We commented on how we could still see the chunks of stuff. Ah, nostalgia. College was a blast.

In an enormous white bowl, I dumped in some wheat flour, a lot of oats, and four big spoonfuls of unsweetened peanut butter (with flax, though that's only because that's the peanut butter I have). I rubbed the peanut butter into the grains like I would do for the topping for an apple crisp -- thoroughly, so that the end product looks like oaty sand.

Then I dumped in the macerated giblets, water, and vegetables. Mixed, added oats, added more oats, added all the rest of the flour, moved to regular flour, and finally got a dough I could knead. Which I did, on a floured cupboard. I cut off a piece, about a quarter of the whole loaf, stuck the larger part in foil and froze it, then rolled the smaller part out thin. Cut it into squares with a sharp knife (because oats are hard to cut).

Then I set the squares on an ungreased cookie sheet, and baked them at 325 for about 25 minutes, or until most of them, when pressed, don't give and all of them are a little darker brown. They'll firm up a little as they cool, but you still want them pretty hard, like crackers, when they come out.



My dogs LOVE these. They REALLY LOVE Lucy's biscuits, too.

There you go.