This is a great recipe we've come up with, named after a dear friend with great taste!

Elisa Bisque

No, do not cook up your next door neighbor, but rather, how about a rather simple bisque to make that will make people want to be living next to you?

Ingredients:

2-3 very ripe tomatoes

Tomato paste

½ cup table wine

1 jar of Marinara sauce  (regular pasta sauce works just fine)

Hot sauce

6 cloves of garlic, minced

1 cup of cream

¼  cup of vanilla ice cream (save this until the end)

Fresh Basil and Rosemary

Sautéed Mushrooms (6 ounces or so)

Two tablespoons of brown sugar

Salt and pepper

Cooking time:  1-2 hours (the longer it sits, the better the end flavour)

 

Bisques can be quite intimidating to the cook, though if you follow some simple rules, they really never fail:

 

1: Low heat.  Do not boil the living hell out of the food.  Take your time, and let it simmer…besides, the home smells better afterwards too !  Think of it as a sort of incense.

2: No Low Fat Milk.  Look, we are making a rich soup here, don’t skimp. Half and Half is as light as you want to go…pure cream is better.

3: Fresh Ingredients.  Yes, you don’t want to use a whole lot of dried up desiccated things in this.  No canned mushrooms if you please.

4: Patience.  Just like Guns and Roses sang…this just needs some time to really simmer and let the flavours meld.

 

OK. Enough of the H.S., let’s get on with it:

Step One: Searing the garlic.  If you just mince up raw garlic and try to make it into a sauce, soup, or a stew, you end up with little pockets of “übergarlic” that will shock your diner’s mouths. Searing the chopped cloves until they are golden brown in olive oil is the way to go. I like to add a little bit of brown sugar at this point, just a pinch.

Step Two:  The tomatoes. Slice them, dice them, jump and down on them if you want, but get those fruits knocked down to size (about ¼”) !  Dump them right into the pot with the now beautifully browned garlic bits, and listen to the sizzle.  I heavily recommend adding fresh basil, or at least re-hydrated basil  now too. 

Step Three: Fluid. The tomatoes have probably started to shrivel a bit, they are drying out, so it is time to re-hydrate them with a good stock, or in my case, a mediocre wine and some water. The pan should be bubbling and steaming by this point. Let the stuff simmer for quite a while, a good fifteen to twenty minutes, this allows the flavours to meld together.  I like to put in some tomato paste as well, just to thicken thing up a bit. Flour in a bisque makes me naseuous.

Step Four:  If you want to add in meat, such as the traditional shellfish, you will want to do it now. Tonight, we are serving vegetarian.  Shellfish cooks quickly, and can become rubbery in texture if you let it sit too long…I would recommend not more than five minutes prior to serving. I guess you could put in cured anchovies, but that would be really disgusting.  This is a good time to add the rosemary, too.

Step Five:  O.K. You have a pot of simmering, not boiling (!) red liquid that smells heavenly. Is it ready yet ?  NO ! We still have to add the cream (or milk for you pansies out there), and it is a very crucial step to making a bisque. This is why we have not boiled the mixture. Boiled cream = gross.

Step Six:  By now, you should have a terra-cotta coloured liquid that needs little else but some sizzle. Pick your favourite hot sauce ( I like Amore or Cholula) and season to taste. Make it hotter than you would normally like it, trust me here.

Step Seven:  Here is where we really deviate from the norm:  the addition of ice cream. I put several healthy scoops of a good quality vanilla ice cream into the seasoned mixture, and stir it up. This completely calms down the spice, and at the same time transforms it into a wonderfully complex soup that you will not believe.

Step Eight:   Salt and pepper as necessary, though I usually use neither. Let the mixture cool down slowly on a low heat setting until it is just warm enough to be palatable.  I like to serve it with a fresh loaf of French bread, we like to dip the bread chunks into the spicy soup, and then finish off the rest with a spoon.

Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Still Life with Owl

 

   Being around Archimedes is sort of like having a permanent four year old that follows you about asking “why?” to everything. 

   Yes, it is endearing at first, and you admire their curiosity for a bit, but after a while it becomes somewhat annoying. “Why is the sky blue?” Go ahead and try explaining refraction or the reason clouds are white to a four year old, I dare you. “Why?”

   I just walked into his mews with a chunk of meat and bone for his evening tyering, and he looked as startled as a child who had just woken up from a nap and found out  that they didn’t know where Brussels was, or why they happened to be out in a field outside of it. That is to say, nonplussed.  It is the same way every time I pick him up, or take him out for a ride in the car.

  He does indeed like to drive about in the car. Actually, he only rides in it, I drive, though he might be more patient with some of the other people moving about on the road than I am. He bobs his head and swivels like a Hula Girl’s hips as we pass other vehicles, occasionally  “HooHoo!-ing” , especially at skateboarders. He seems fascinated with skateboards, and we do own two of them, I suppose I should make a perch for one and see if he likes it ? “Why?”

   Watching me skate is a daunting prospect, I carefully judge the wind conditions, and if the coast seems clear down the block, launch myself off at a safe and sane speed. Sometimes I hit a bit of rock and go ass over teakettle , the longboard gleefully sliding into the distance while I look up at the sky and wonder why it is blue. I am sure Archimedes, observing from up in the studio, gets quite a laugh out of it.

   For some odd reason, he not only is fascinated by skateboards, but also by the military programs on television. I have a tele in the studio so that when I am painting, there is some sort of fluff on besides the awful radio to keep me from falling asleep in the oils. I’ve learned quite a lot about how we are making all sorts of weapons to keep the world at peace, and how a bunch of generals in different battles really managed to screw up. I think he likes the airplanes the best, especially the biplanes of the Great War. This makes me nervous, as he has already attacked a 72^nd scale Backfire bomber model, and is now eying the row of rigged  airplanes. He is quite a strong bird, and it isn’t uncommon for me to wake up at two in the morning, and dart into the studio to make sure he hasn’t untethered himself and made a right mess of the place.

  I always get the same dumfounded look of “who the hell are you?”, and then he stares at my penis, which can be unsettling.  Everyone asks me why I look so tired, and when I explain, I think they are just asking “why?”

Stop Look Listen. And You Will Learn German

Growing up in Minnesota, derived from Danes, of course we were subject to a number of foreign languages. English, French, and German. Swedish didn’t count.

There is no more insulting thing ( I actually did spell it “ting” at first) that you can accuse a Dane of than being Swedish.  Why? Oh hell, I don’t know. Someone back in the early A.D.’s got their panties in a wad and since Sweden looks like a flaccid penis, I guess it some sort of an insult.

Personally, I like Swedes. Especially the women who like to travel to our fair arid state and do “explorative” hikes. Their cheerfulness and ‘happy go lucky’ attitude seems to me to be a great way to gather information about the rest of the globe. Lots and lots.

Anyway, back to the Deutsch. 

Learning German was something that every kid in Minnesota was expected to do in the 70’s. I do not know if that is true now. I had a great teacher, who’s name I can not recall right now,  that was very passionate about the subject.  To this day, I typically talk to my brothers, all four of them, in a sort of slang Germanic…you see, they had the same teacher. We frequently talk, and it usually begins with a horrible stream of gutter Germanic , though my second oldest brother seems to have a very firm grasp on the teachings of  that lady, and will correct you soundly for a mis-spoken phrase.

A good friend of mine came up with a marbled language, that being “sperman”…part Spanish, part german.  I tell you, it works wonders to confuse the hell out of any porter in south America.  We had grown tired on the “no English” ting, and we decided to fight fire with fire. Hell, if they don’t understand us, then we will not understand them either !  Why I didn’t get elected as G Dub’s viceroy is beyond me.

I could have set world affairs back by decades.