Finally! There will be some soup on Bread & Soup! Maybe, someday, there will be bread too. But for now, just soup. Each CSA shipment for the last two weeks has included a couple pounds of fine-looking carrots. I knew I had no hope of eating them all unless I did something to them in bulk. Conveniently, last week’s CSA newsletter included a recipe for carrot soup that didn’t include any exotic ingredients that would require me to make a trip to the grocery store. It turned out pretty good, both warm on the day I made it and cold several days later. So, if you too have more carrots than you know what to do with, here you go. I modified the recipe slightly, based on what I had on hand and my experiences making it.

• 4 T butter
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1 lb carrots, finely chopped
• 1 ½ t coriander
• 4 c broth (vegetable or chicken)
• Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a soup pot, add the chopped onion, and saute until the onion is softened; about 5 minutes. Add the carrot and coriander, and pour in enough broth to make the mixture kind of soupy (about 1 cup). Cook until the carrots are soft; about 30 minutes. Take off the heat and let cool, then puree the mixture and return to the pot. Add the remainder of the broth and salt and pepper to taste.

That’s it! If you’ve chop the onion and carrot in the food processor too, it’s dead simple. You’ll spend more time peeling the carrots than on any other step.

Lately I’ve been reading a history of Chicago, _Chicago: Crossroads of American Enterprise_1. It’s a popular history, published in 1944, and it follows the style and approach that you’d expect of a book of that vintage. The prose tends towards a purplish hue at times, and “man” is used as a synonym for “people.” But it’s giving me a good overview of the city’s past, filling in some blanks, and it recently provided a passage which seemed particularly appropriate to today. These two paragraphs come as the author reflects over the final departure of the local Indian tribes from the Chicago area after the defeat of Black Hawk:

We Americans are a freedom-loving people. We’ll fight and die for freedom lest we lose it. We’ve proved that in the past. We’re proving it again. But loving freedom when it is your freedom that’s at stake is pretty common with people all over the world. We may say that some men have got a way of thinking that makes them more independent, more aware of individuality, than others, and, along with some other democratic nations who believe in the individual, we can lay claim to that. We don’t like the regimentation and the mass-thinking–or lack of thinking–that some people fall for, and I don’t believe we could be made to like it, no, not even in that thousand years that Hitler once was talking of. And, as history sets out the record, we haven’t done too badly, lined up with the rest of the world. We’ve respected freedom sometimes even when it wasn’t our freedom that was at stake, as in the case of the Phillipines. But where the Indians were concerned–

All right, that was a long while back, and people had a different way of looking at it then, and recently our government has gone way, way ahead in doing right by the Indians alive today. Still, let it be written down that freedom, not ours, but somebody else’s, suffered in this country. It’s worth writing down. it should be written down all over the world in every country where some other people’s freedom suffered–and that would mean a lot of writing down. But maybe it would help to keep it clear to us what freedom-loving ought to mean. Freedom-respecting might be a better phrase. We’ll need to be remembering that in the long, long years to come, getting along with the rest of the world.

The word “freedom” gets tossed around a lot these days, mostly to describe something that the US brings to other people. We do this because, after all, this is a free country, the leader of the free world, so who would know more about freedom than we do? But freedom often gets expanded for one group at the expense of another, as was the case for the Indians, and since the publication of this book, the US has had a tendency to pursue our own freedoms a little too diligently. It’s a long road, especially for a country like ours, to go from freedom-loving to freedom-respecting, and we’re not there yet.

1No longer in print, but, interestingly, available in a scanned and OCR’d version online at the Internet Archive.

So I finally fulfilled a delayed plan and flew out to the east coast to visit friends and sightsee. Stops were made in NYC and Boston, and I gave Amtrak’s express train between the two a test (verdict: fast). It was good, as always, to spend some time in cities other than Chicago, noting the differences. I tend to develop a chip on my shoulder about the places where I live, so I try not to pass too much judgment, but it was a good feeling to come back. I was getting sick of crappy modern architecture, and missed my Intelligentsia.

Speaking of Boston, I recently discovered an awesome new blog, The Big Picture, hosted by the Boston Globe, which covers exceptional journalistic photographs. Be sure to check out the Martian Skies post for moving images of dust devils on the surface of Mars.

One of the most unusual devices in the digital camera world right now is the Casio EX-F1. It’s kind of a weird hybrid: a six megapixel still camera that also shoots high-definition video. Neither of those qualities are exactly spectacular (or all that impressive, really) but they’re just the setup.

In addition to its normal video modes, the camera also has three high-speed modes that take it beyond the run-of-the-mill consumer videocam: It’ll do reduced-resolution video at 300, 600, and 1,200 frames per second. Needless to say, the EX-F1 is going to revolutionize YouTube:

Find many videos in the same vein by searching YouTube for ”EX-F1.”

Commentator (and Chicagoan) Dennis O’Toole had a spot-on piece on All Things Considered tonight. He managed to bring together the global hops shortage, Obama, PBR, and a knock on hipsters all in one brief piece. Give it a listen.

In related beer news, Larry Bell (of Bell’s Brewery) is growing some of his own ingredients now, to deal with the aforementioned shortage, and there’s probably going to be more of that. There will need to be if America’s craft brewing industry is going to keep growing at 12% annually. Other brewers are branching out (hedging their bets?) and going in to the hard liquor business. It’s a busy time to be brewer!

So a week or two ago a friend issued a challenge to me: Take some pictures every day, and post one online. He’d do it too, and the two of us would get to enjoy each other’s work, as well as get a little picture-taking practice. I roped in a couple more people who I thought would be interested and so did he, and so now there are seven of us.

Some days coming up with an interesting subject is a challenge, but usually once I get my camera in my hand and start walking around a scene will present itself. I’ve been posting my photos to a Flickr photoset. I’m also flexing my tiny HTML, CSS, and PHP muscles to create a site to see all the pictures taken by the participants on a given day. It’ll be at http://www.breadandsoup.net/dailyphoto/ once it’s done. (There’s something up there now, but it’s not finished.)

Update It’s live.

From the You Learn Something New Every Day dept: The ultimate sources–the headwaters, if you will–of two of Chicago’s biggest players in the good-things-to-drink market are located on the same block. Intelligentsia’s roasting plant and Goose Island’s main brewery are both on the 1800 block of Fulton Street.

to jump on an internet meme. The 2008 FGG Symposium is coming up, and in its honor I make the following offering:

(Thanks to Jeremy Vore for the raw material.)

Um, excuse me? Mother Nature? Gods of the Weather? Today is March 27th. March 27th. As in, almost April. There’s no excuse for this:

The daffodils would also like to register their objections:

I was in Google Earth today, working on the track for my 2002 road trip, and I came across an accidental sketch:

See in Google Earth