Sunday cooking blogging

There's very little to like about winter in New Jersey, and this year there's even less to like. So far winter in New Jersey has consisted this season of gray, gray, snow, gray, freezing rain, gray, gray, wintry mix, gray, gray, peep of sunshine, more snow, more freezing rain, gray. I'm not one for Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I'm starting to feel that if I have to wake up to one more fucking gray sky I'm going to just pack it in and go to bed until opening day of the baseball season.

Of course this is not an option, nor do I even really want that as a state of affairs, because I thankfully have this thing called a job. It's even a job that I like (although if you're a programmer at the company that makes the system I work on, and you're reading this, can't you PLEASE put out a version where we can write our own damn edits instead of this point and click stuff? I know you wanted to set it up so non-programmers could write edits, but some of us who cut our teeth on C want to "roll our own", as it were). So this winter has put me into this weird fugue state of wanting to prostrate myself before the Goddess and thank Her for allowing me to be laid off at just the right time to luck into this new job where they do stuff like set up viewing rooms to watch the inauguration even though I'm sure they would have preferred that the election go the other way, and where it is assumed that I am competent and have a brain in my head instead of the way it used to be, where I was the Designated Department Shithead who hadn't had a real development project for the last two years and hoping She forgives me for those mornings when I get out of bed and say, "Fuck! Pitch dark AGAIN???"

But one thing I do enjoy doing on a cold day like today, where it'll be a miracle if it gets out of the teens, is to cook something hot and savory that will fill up the house with the smell of Great Stuff Cooking. And what better to cook, when we just had chili a week ago, than a nice pot of soup. And who better to consult on a morning when the first thing I saw when I turned on the computer and went to Buzzflash was "Time to Steamroll the Obstructionist Law-Breaking Republicans in the Senate: 'Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have asked Eric Holder to make a commitment, before he is even confirmed, that he will not prosecute any Bush Administration officials for their involvement in acts of torture during the last administration.'" but The Angry Chef, a.k.a. -- yes, you guessed it -- the B@B patron saint of comedy, Marc Maron.

This is a soup that has five of the mainstays of life in it: onions, garlic, beans, pasta, and pig -- the latter in the form of pancetta, an Italian bacon that had me say to Mr. Brilliant last night as we scrambled around the A&P looking for all the ingredients, "This fucking soup had better be worth paying twelve bucks for bacon" This kind of expression of seething resentment put me in exactly the right frame of mind to cook a creation of the angry chef, so after I finish this post, I'm going to start chopping. Because after all, how bad can anything be if it has bacon in it, even if you get fancy and call it pancetta? Even chocolate.

I'm glad for the video instructions for making this soup, which you can find in sequence here, here, and here, because it means I don't have to spend time artistically arranging ingredients the way I did for the Traditional Thanksgiving Pastitso Dinner. I am making a few changes, though, because in the vain search through the A&P for red onions (I ended up buying a big Spanish onion instead, figuring that with the one red onion I have in the house, it should turn out OK) I forgot to get the cabbage, which is OK because Mr. Brilliant isn't overly fond of cabbage. So if the soup needs more STUFF in it, I'll toss in another can of canellini beans or more pasta or some frozen spinach. Or all three.

Stay tuned. It's not soup yet.