Soup is Good Food January 31, 2008

After a grueling day in a week that has felt so so so so long, I realized I have neglected my happy little home on the internet.Where to begin?  Well frankly, the more I move about the more good things I hear in the community for this other endeavor I am working on.  

That said, ugh, I wish I had known how busy I was going to get a year ago, I so would have planned better.  But this blog is not about bitching, this blog is about believing…(don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, don’t stop ….)

 

However after twelve hours at the office with other endeavor minutes thrown in, I came home hungry and without much food in the house.  So it was a great relief and irony that I had a chance to sit down and be inspired. 

 

O perhaps it takes me so little to be inspired but when you think about it, what are we going to do about all this rain?  I mean, ugh, it sucks, so why not succumb to it by cozying up to it and making a little soup. 

 

For those of us who find great joy in the kitchen, soup is a great resource to have up your sleeve.  It’s relatively easy especially when you have a top notch blender or adequate food processor at the ready, o I hope you didn’t think I was talking about cracking open a can of the Campbell’s.  I am simply appropriating their tag line. 

 

So if you’re shut in and reading this blog, a few seasonal vegetables and one tasty blue cheese will be about all you need to have filling, decadent but deceptively healthy looking soup.  I must give props to an ex boyfriend who helped create this recipe.  It’s a good thing we are still close friends or cooking would be a bittersweet experience.  I totally digress of course to bring you to:

 

Blue Broccoli Soup

 

2 cups of vegetable stock

 

1 onion chopped

 

1 smaller russet potato (or whichever potato you have around)

 

4 cloves garlic chopped

 

1 head of broccoli chopped

 

1 cup chop blue/Roquefort/stilton cheese

 

*Place chopped vegetables in a pot and bring to a boil, reduce heat until fork slides through potato.

 

*Then pour contents in pot into blender.

 

*Blend thoroughly, stopping to pour in blue cheese.

            -you may wish to pour in garlic powder if you want more of garlic kick!

 

Mmmm, mmm, mmm, pure loveliness as the strong flavors of garlic, bleu cheese and broccoli settle into your mouth. 

Now another variation is to utilize cauliflower instead of broccoli.  And then yet another variation is to make both but pour the cauliflower into a bowl and then place about 1-3 teaspoons of the broccoli soup in the middle of the bowl.  Try this at your next dinner party. Trust me, people will think you’ve got Martha Stewart chained to your stove in the kitchen.  I don’t know why but it just looks fantastic.

 

And that’s where I must claim total props as that was my gift to my ex.  He may have had the adventurous food spirit but I was the one who knew how to package it.  Isn’t that how things are supposed to work out though, even if they end in a way we had not intended?  Everyone gains something positive from one another.  

Now how is that soup?   

 

Happiness in the New Year January 2, 2008

And so here we are in the 2008!Happy New Year!I find the beginnings of the year to be particularly auspicious times even if the change is a human creation.  I’m not one for resolutions by I am one for personal resolve. Last year I made a commitment to write down what I ate and increase my exercise and I lost 30 pounds from January 1 to early April.  That was about ten pounds a month. Add on to that 2 marathons in ‘07, a new building for homeless kids in Oakland’s luxurious Jack London Square and dozens of mentions in the local press about my various efforts and I realized that truly anything is possible if you set an intention to it. The word Intention has been bandied about a bit more in recent years. PBS fixture and self help guru Dr. Wayne Dyer even wrote a book about it and its themes resonate in his work.    I’m a big Dyer fan.Somehow, this Dr./counselor unlike other popular “doctors” on TV doesn’t feel the need to yell at you and tell you how your “screwing up yer darn life” like other refugees from Oprah’s show. He is actually interested in healing and inspiring.I became an even bigger fan when I learned he was abandoned as a child and grew up in orphanages and foster care. Having dedicated my life to working with abandoned youth seeing how he has transformed his life is motivating to me when I see what he uses his life to do. And really, while a change in the calendar can be the motivating force for re-creating what one does with their life, it needn’t be the only thing. You can decide at any point that “this is it” and “this is what I will do now”.So it’s with this spirit that I am looking forward to 2008. For those inclined towards resolutions I’m partial to this list over at the Huffington Post. 

Season of Giving December 26, 2007

The idea behind this blog is to identify inspiration in the world and lift it up.  The world is filled with such drek, tales about what latest crazy thing Britney Spears did or that couple from “the Hills” fight for headline space with mind blowing, lump in the throat creating scenes from Iraq or locally, in Oakland, the homicide rate and its spread across the city from points impoverished. Despite “the awfulness” as I commonly refer to all the negativity that can seem to  overwhelm us, there are so many good things going on.  We often vocalize a desire for “good news” and still yet rush over to the magazine racks to see if “that IT couple” are really faithful/fighting/drinking/adopting/breaking up.We need a space from all that and resource to here about something that will make us go “Really? that’s going on? How awesome, I wonder if I could do that too?” The intention of this blog is to be that resource for such inspiration.And so then why me? Why do I think I can do this? What makes me a seer of all things good and believe all things possible?Ahem,Each day for the last decade or so I have born daily witness to positive self transformation of the really down and out, those really struggling and those who have nothing but themselves. They lift themselves up. They get a little help in the process.They fall down a little bit too.They get back up again.And so not because I am an optimist but a pragmatist who has seen it to be true do I write based on that I know that there is much good in the world, that better days are ahead of us and that there are as many folks out there trying to have  positive impact.It is through this blog, my friends at Novometro and perhaps my friends at the Globe that 2008 will yield me the opportunity to call attention to the good that’s going on around us.In he meantime, you can check out WeeklyPhil.comHang out there until I’m back with something more.