Monkey Monday: vitamin C, English muffins, and soup 9 February 2009 11:50 am
Posted by Tracy in : breakfast,events,geekery,health,school,soup,tea,writing , View CommentsIt’s a tea for health Monday here at the Moon Monkey Bar, Grille, and Cocktail Lounge: I woke up dehydrated, sniffly, and with just a hint of a sore throat, so clearly, it’s time to invoke the placebo effect. Echinacea tea and chewable vitamin C for the win! Which is appropriate, since I’m going to be writing about vitamin C for my food studies nutrition class this term. (Working title of that report: “Apologies to Linus Pauling,” not that I’m intimidated or anything.) More on that in a bit. Also, thoughts on English muffins and my mom’s annual soup party (unrelated). (more…)
Minestrone variations 3 June 2008 9:59 am
Posted by Tracy in : cooking,recipes,soup,sundance,vegan,vegetarian , View CommentsSo some Thursdays ago I posted my my basic minestrone recipe but I cut it short because I felt like I’d been rambling on for far too long. Today I finally present you with the conclusion to my minestrone saga: suggestions for tasty ways to adapt this soup to almost any season or available vegetable-type ingredient. Here goes!
Recipe: Minestrone 22 May 2008 10:05 am
Posted by Tracy in : cooking,recipes,soup,vegan,vegetarian , View CommentsThere’s a minestrone special on at Morning Glory this week, and it’s all right, but I would’ve made it even better. (Sorry, Gail.) Turns out I have a pretty specific idea in my head about minestrone — brothy tomato-vegetable soup with Italian seasonings (by which I mostly mean herbs like basil and oregano), some kind of light-colored bean, and maybe pasta. We’re talking serious Tracy comfort food, the kind I associate so strongly with warm fuzzies that just the idea of it was enough to make me fall in love with this picture of Chiara (ok, the swooning was not hurt by the fact that Chiara is awesome and that picture is really cute, but I digress). Maybe my notion of minestrone is so non-traditional as to be heretical, in which case I’m really sorry, but it’s going to be a while before I can stop using the word, even if it does not mean what I think it means. But I digress. (more…)
In which I am too lazy to even share a picture of my own. 7 May 2008 11:44 pm
Posted by Tracy in : friends,pictures,soup,work , View CommentsBut to be fair, this picture is way better than anything I had planned to write about today, so there:
That’s the fabulous Chiara rocking the world with the power of minestrone… AND AWESOMENESS. You’d better believe that picture is one of my Flickr favorites now, oh yes. And now I must go to bed since I have to be at work in 7 hours. Whee!
(And, just to be perfectly clear, the above picture of Chiara LaRotonda appears without permission, courtesy of the lady’s Flickr photostream. I don’t know who took the picture or I’d give them credit by name, but all rights are still reserved by them and Chiara and oh, how I envy them that soup.)
Recipe: Mushroom Miso Soup 15 April 2008 11:10 am
Posted by Tracy in : cooking,recipes,soup,vegan,vegetarian , View CommentsTrue story: this recipe helped me get a job. I’ll explain in a bit. 
First, I should say that I originally published this recipe on Everything2 back in the day, so it’s an oldie but a goodie. Second, I’m posting it here in newly updated form in honor of the April No Croutons Required challenge (originally described here) from Lisa’s Kitchen and Tinned Tomatoes, which I learned about here at Is My Blog Burning? Finally, the story about that job. It was during my year in Laguna Beach, when I was finishing the very last requirements on my undergraduate degree, and applied for a job tutoring high school kids on the SAT. After turning a practice test inside out, I was invited for a group interview, for which all the candidates were asked to prepare a short instructional lecture of some kind. Mine was this recipe. (You think maybe I was in the wrong line of work and didn’t know it yet? Um…) Anyway, without further ado, here’s: (more…)
