Some recent cooking

But, first off: the IRS jibberjabber (heh, I just thought of that word again. Word up, Mr. T!) that I had to deal with back in June? I finally got a letter saying that my amended return had been accepted. Yup, just under the wire for the government shutdown!

(The $80 I am technically owed, because it turns out I overpaid? I don't expect to see that ANYTIME soon. I wonder if they'd let me count that off next year's payment, provided I owe something...)

A few weeks back I went to a relatively new local shop - a kitchenwares place called Kopper Kettle. (Yes, I have spoken before of my distaste of the K-for-C changes to make alliteration, but whatever). I was looking for a small mixing bowl to replace the one I broke early one morning when it fell out of the fridge. No luck there. (They seem to have more "fancy" than "purely functional" housewares - they did have bowls but they were the fancy speckly Melamine ones, and I want something glass, so I won't worry about it if I want to put it in the microwave. No, melamine won't melt, but it MIGHT leach stuff into the food. So I prefer glass as much as possible, seeing as it's safely been used as a food container for, I don't know, at least a few hundred years?)

Anyway. They do have a few fancy food items. (But, IMHO, they need more. I wish we had a fancy-foods store here). One thing they had were Cooke Tavern Soup mixes. I noticed on one of the labels it said "No salt or MSG" so I looked more closely. They are partially cooked and freeze dried beans plus veggies and spices - you add your own broth and meat or tofu or fish or whatever.

So I bought a couple to try - Mi Madre Maria's Chicken Tortilla, and a white-bean chili. I made the chicken tortilla one this weekend. What you add is chicken broth, chicken breast (either pre cooked, or what I did was just cut the raw meat into bits and cook it in the broth) and then either diced tomatoes or a can of tomato sauce. Meaning, I could make myself a low-salt soup by using the low-salt versions of all those I had on the shelf.

The soup mix itself is mainly black beans, corn, and green chiles (they give it a little heat, but it's not extremely spicy - and I'm not big on hot and spicy things). Then there were onions and garlic and what looked like probably oregano and parsley.

The soup was really, really good. I froze half of it for later (it makes 2 quarts). But next time I'm downtown I'm going to pick up another packet or two of the mix - the soup only takes a bit over a half-hour to make (that's why I think the beans HAVE to be partially cooked and freeze-dried). I always keep broth and tomatoes on hand, and I can quickly get chicken breast (Green Spray) if I want it....so these soups would mean a nice, quick, nutritious, and good dinner, without a whole lot of fuss.

I served the soup with a little sprinkle of cheese ("Four State Cheddar" from Sargento, which is also a favorite of mine) and a nice dollop of sour cream - both of which add a lot to the soup. It's good on its own but it's spectacular with the sour cream. (It's as good as something you'd get in a semi-fancy restaurant). I did not notice that it was "low salt" - and sometimes I find things made with the very-low-sodium broth I keep on hand do seem a little bland or lacking.

I also found low salt Fritos to eat with it. Sometimes I like to put tortilla strips in a tortilla soup but this time I just had them on the side. (But I didn't even know they made lower salt Fritos. They do - half as much as normal Fritos, so 80 mg per serving, which is safely low enough for me. (Heck, regular Fritos are probably even OK, as long as I didn't eat more than a serving at a time))

But I can definitely recommend their tortilla soup, and I'm going to try some of the other varieties. (I do have to watch out for any that have a lot of carrots or celery in them, and there are some types of soup I just don't care for....but I do like bean soup and that was one thing I was missing with trying to do lower salt, and they have several bean-soup varieties.)