something's cooking!

The title of this post is an inside joke with myself (the best kind?), but I might as well let you in on it.  When I had just graduated college and was living in Bay Ridge, I worked as a child wrangler for the PBS show 'The Electric Company'.  Our catering company (or "crafty" if you are "in the biz" and "call it that") was called "Something's Cooking!" This is really just a cute name, but for some reason, I was especially tickled by it.  We'd arrive to beautiful and scenic Newark, NJ on any given weekday morning - no later than 6:30 am - via a fifteen passenger van that picked us up in Manhattan - no later than 5:30 am.  I'd spill out of the van with the rest of the group (which was comprised of TV stars and child TV stars......... and me) where we were greeted by a big, friendly, always-there truck called "Something's Cooking!" Dependable, delicious, and so humorously titled.  I know it's not really that funny but something about it just made me laugh.

So anyway, I tend to pepper my speech with references to "Something's Cooking!" mostly by declaring it in a faux high-pitched, overly enthusiastic voice.  Usually when something is cooking.  Usually.

The back story had nothing to do with what I really wanted to write about.  Apologies!  Now onto the meat of the story.

Hah, hah.  I guess I'm into food puns that aren't really puns today.  I'm not even cooking something meaty - I'm cooking vegetarian split pea soup.

In any case, what I really wanted to say was that I've been cooking a lot since we moved to Vermont.  This is for several reasons:

1.  I really enjoy cooking.
2.  I want to get healthy.
3.  We ate so much takeout food in Brooklyn that I hardly (read: really) miss Pad Thai.
4.  Cooking feels creative to me and it's a good way to keep my mind going while taking a break from writing.
5.  I don't really have a choice -- there are no (seriously no) delivery options near us and we're not about to drive 20 minutes to get a pizza every single night.

Since I have a lot of time on my  hands now and I do see cooking as creative, I often make up recipes.  Sometimes this works out... other times... it doesn't.  We recently had a particularly sad meal of vegetarian meatballs -- my dismal attempt at recreating the same dish from Rice in NYC.  

All in all, I've made a few winners, but the trouble is that by and large I neglect to write down what I did or even that I made certain things.  So, today, I decided to make vegetarian split pea soup.  I browsed a few recipes - liked certain aspects of some and not others - and decided to make my own.

This time, I wrote it all down!

It's actually cooking right now ("Something's cooking!"), so I have no idea if it will be good or not.  If it is good, I'll post the recipe in a separate post later tonight or tomorrow.  Mainly I wanted to report that I've been cooking up a storm and I'm going to start writing stuff down.  Maybe I'll make a cookbook called "I Moved To The Woods and Had A Lot of Time on My Hands So I Cooked This Stuff" but I'll probably just share some of the winners here and keep the rest to cook again on rainy days.

.lsm