So I started med school this past week. The week before that was one long week of orientation, which was a long day of sitting in lecture and getting to know what the next year or two would be like, and then in the evenings there were a lot of social events, so I didn't cook much, if at all, since breakfast and lunch were provided, and I just had dinner at the places where the events were taking place.
But after orientation was over and we were on our own, I had to start cooking for myself. Now supermarkets are not catered to the bachelor; the stuff they sell, even the fresh produce, isn't packaged for one meal deals. I hate letting things go to waste, so I would dump the whole bunch of kale (or what I thought was kale) into the pot of canned tomatoes, and I had lunch and dinner for a week (well, mostly dinner, since a lot of student groups provided pizza for lunch as a way to entice us first-years).
Fast-forward to just now, when all week I thought I had a bunch of collard greens from last week left that I needed to use. I go to the supermarket to get ingredients for this "southern-style collard greens" recipe I found on the Food Network website, and I come back home and start prepping the onions, chili flakes, and garlic. I open the fridge, and I find kale. Apparently I used up the collard greens last week in that tomato stew. It's a little perplexing how I didn't notice that it was not kale I used up, since I used to have kale all the time back home, especially the kale salad from Whole Foods.
Anyway, I roll with it and replace the collard greens in the recipe with the kale. Kale stems are a little tougher (a lot of recipes call for kale stems to be discarded), so I thought I'd add the whole box of vegetable stock instead of just three cups so that the kale stems would have more liquid to simmer in. Hey, I've already gone away from the recipe, considering I had the wrong main ingredient, so why not? I add tomatoes and some lemon juice as well, and somehow I end up with a weird hybrid of American hot-and-sour soup--the kale, sauteed onions, and leftover quinoa I used as a base to ladle the soup over, makes it American. The tomatoes in the vegetable broth also reminds me of a light soup my mom makes from time to time, so I unintentionally end up with a touch of home as well.
I'd take a picture, but it doesn't look as pretty with the bowl already half-eaten. Maybe tomorrow when I spoon a new bowl.
