Creations continue

Emboldened by my purchase, use, and enjoyment of my new immersion blender, and overwhelmed with piles of summer squash, last week I whipped up this garlic zucchini soup. I made one addition that had a bit more of an effect than I had anticipated - celery. I don't think of celery of having much of a flavor, but that is like thinking a boring politician will remain boring, and will not make stupid, harmful voting choices. Not that celery is stupid or harmful. Just that it doesn't figure into my life very often, and so I forget it has some bite.

As a result, my soup was zucchini-y, garlicky, and significantly celery-y. But good! But I would have liked more of the first two, less of the third. I would not discourage you from using it, just from using 4 stalks. But what the hell else do you do with a poor wilting bunch of celery? And don't say I should put peanut butter and raisins on it.

Also in the vein of when-experimentation-isn't-the-answer: last night we had several people over for football watching. I served:

• a homebrewed pale ale on ice (out of our keg, biotches!)
• homemade salsa (can you tell I'm obsessed with this blender?)
• pizza with homemade dough and sauce (obviously I need to learn how to make cheese to complete the picture)
• Smitten Kitchen's blueberry cake (it's called Blueberry Boy Bait, but that's embarrassing to me)

Mike and I broke the gauge on the keg's CO2 regulator the first time we tried to move it, and so we accidentally overcarbonated our beer to a comical extent. In order to serve it, I had to decant the foam into pitchers and let it settle down. Which it did after a few minutes, during which I spoke soothing words to it, and it was delicious.

Another lesson learned: when your cat tangles himself in your blender cord (in this case I was using it with the whisk attachment, so handy) and pulls a bowl of cake batter off the counter, attempting to estimate how much is on the floor and adjust the flour amounts to match is not likely to be effective. It is, however, preferable to my first instinct, which was to somehow retrieve the batter from the floor and put it back into the mixing bowl. I'm not above that, but the cat was already having his way with the batter.

I figured I lost a half cup of butter/sugar/egg mixture, and I used my mediocre maths to correspondingly decrease the amount of flour I added. The cake came out just fine (I mean, it's blueberry cake) but not very cake-y; more, um, fudgy-brownie-y. Consistency-wise, I mean. I also added way too many blueberries because Mike and I panicked when the lady at the farmer's market told us it was the last week for blueberries and we bought a quart or something. But too many blueberries is never a bad thing, and I would do it again, dammit!

Oh, and also I promise that the next post will have fewer made-up adjectives.