Spring Greens

the world is in the midst of its re-greening!  I love walking through the yard each day to see what new plants are up and reminding myself which ones are nicely munchy and which are best for just looking at.  One of my recent favorite spring greens is curly or yellow dock.

Calming Breakfast Soup

Oh, the joy of a winter garden!  It frosted pretty well last night but such happenings serve only to sweeten most of what remains in the garden.  There are daikon radishes, and turnips and in the greenhouse there are collard greens and kale at various stages of growth.  With this in mind this morning, and having read last night in  Masanobu Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution" that daikon radishes have calming qualities, I decided we would start out our day calmly.  So I made a simple egg drop miso soup with fresh grated daikon added raw to the warm bowl of soup.

Going Through the Fall on a Soup With No Name

I love autumn.  I love the smell of the leaves and the look of the landscape when the sun is shining in below a thick layer of dark gray clouds.  I love the crispness in the air and the lighting of the first fires in the wood cookstove.  And I love soup.  I'm making soup almost every day right now.  Sometimes, I like to follow a recipe.  I'll make a special curried soup or what-have-you, but right now, with so much work going on around here, I'm just making it up as I go along.

First was a soup with rye berries and freshly shelled beans from the garden.  I threw in turnips and carrots from the garden as well. And some sauteed garlic and onions for good measure.  The next night it was tomato noodle soup with a lot of the final pickings from the waning tomato patch.  Tonight potato soup with curled dock (very nutritious greens that grow with no help from me at all).

Life just doesn't get much better.