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soupapalooza!

the stories
the kitchen
the market
the proof (party pics!)
the food porn
the recipes
the about
the drop me a line part
the resources
the full list
jewelry alchemy
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the latest break in programming brought to you by Guerrilla Atelier

Not that you asked or anything, but you may have noticed a slight blip in the normal schedule of revealing my neuroses and recipe offerings. Well, I have been working. As in a j-o-b, as much as I've been avoiding that three letter word for at least a decade or more. 

I suppose it's not really a job because I'm helping out an old friend who opened a beautiful luxury goods emporium in downtown LA and I have fun every single day. But technically, it's a place of business and I go there for many, many many hours a week and it has greatly cut into the time I devote to grousing. Maybe everyone actually wins in this situation...

Sooooo, I'm getting back on track with the cooking and I have a serious backlog of delicious things I've made over the last couple of months. I'm hoping that if I construct some serious system of rewards and punishments I'll be back on the regular as fast as you can say, "Baby needs new shoes and will get a pair if she gets her shit together". Things to look forward to: huevos sort-of rancheros with chorizo, the perfect Caesar salad (I don't lie), salad lyonnaise, breakfast bacon fregola and some food porn from a beautiful Sunday supper at Magical Merlin's hideaway.

Until then, here are some preview pictures of the latest kitchen triumphs and disappointments, or as I like to call them, my children. I hope you check back for their companion recipes in the coming days and weeks. Until then... 

Soup on! 

 

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PostedJune 25, 2013
Authormelissa mcclure
Categoriesbreakfast, quick pics!, salad
Tagsquick pics!, chorizo, eggcellent, eggscellent, pasta, mushroom, mexican, Magical Kim Merlin, hail caesar salad, salad, huevos sort of rancheros, salad lyonnaise
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arugula, roasted portabella and aged gouda salad with port vinaigrette: you can lead a lemming to the cliff but you can't make her jump

I love crazy people. Love love love them. Across all areas of my life-- be it romantic, interpersonal, professional, you name it-- there are at least one or two crazy people in each part that inspire me daily. Please understand that I mean crazy in the best possible way, that I say the word with great reverence, because lemmings like me can only exist because they have pied piper counterparts that lead them to the edges of cliffs.

There. I've said it. I'm a lemming.

I live to be lead. To be inspired. I need my muses because I find it hard to feel things deep within myself without some sort of outside stimuli. That's not to say that I'm not crazy, too, oh no. But I'm situationally crazy, not endemically crazy, and there's a huge, gaping hole of a difference. 

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PostedOctober 6, 2012
Authormelissa mcclure
Categoriessalad, vegetarian
Tagssalad, mushroom, recipe, you put the fun in fungi, gouda, arugula, lemming, soupapalooza!, Menil Collection, so easy my kid could do it, crazy=cool, on the edge, Rothko, sides
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cabbage and guanciale salad: cucina povera. who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?

It is HOT today. Maybe not Houston hot, but for the first time in my adventure in Umbria I understand what some seasoned Italian travelers meant when they said it might be a little “uncomfortable” at the end of August in landlocked central Italy. 

I feel like Italians have an almost pride in their pain the same way they do their regional pastas, so I wasn’t about to believe their doom and gloom scenario, either. After three weeks of mild, lovely weather with a few rain showers in between, I was convinced they were all just prone to this exaggeration in the same way they’ll pooh-pooh any shape of pasta other than the ones they were weaned on. I had no evidence to believe them when they said this loveliness was just a fluke and that soon I would roast under the Umbrian sun.

Roast we did today. Like beets at 450 degrees under tinfoil. 

We were too steamy or “Panica-LAZY”, as Bossy proudly said, to make a third trip (a full fifty yards!) back into town to pick up arugula and vegetables for a lunch time salad. Our only other option: the sad tatters in our fridge, which seemed at the time like we were completely giving up, but turned out to be one of my favorite meals of my trip so far.

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PostedAugust 21, 2010
Authormelissa mcclure
Categoriessalad, positively piggy
Tagssalad, viva italia!, recipe, guanciale, cucina povera, panica-lazy, positively piggy, august adventure, umbrian adventure, soupapalooza!, cabbage, vintage gelato spoons, lunch, your arugula is only 50 yards away
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roasted beet, cabrales, dried cherry and toasted walnut arugula salad: rock out, whatever

A bird pooped on my head and down my shirt this last Sunday, which only further bolsters my long brewing animosity towards nature. I’m not a happy camper, quite literally, and I’ve never understood why sleeping outside of four walls and a roof is any more magical than driving out to a location well beyond the lights of the city to marvel at the stars and then returning to a place with a hot shower and clean sheets. I don’t need or have any desire to wake up, dirty, with a creaky back and caffeine withdrawal, only to hike back to my overheated car, no thank you.

Two of my fellow ‘paloozians had milestone birthdays within two days of each other this week, and though I will not repeat that scary number (scary at least to single girls with pet children), it rhymes with worty, which no one wants to be except Madonna who, in a fit of good Kabbalah luck was “enlightened” at worty. 

Anyway, in an impromptu celebration of these two women, a few of our rag tag crew drove up north of Santa Barbara to a very beautiful state park and went glamping. No, that was not a typo; we went “glamorous camping”, which I would argue, is as much an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp. What exactly is glamping you ask? Glamping basically consists of a few steps. One: drive to a very nice campground in your Prius  (for the record and as I stated earlier, the environment and I are not exactly facebook friends, so obviously the Prius belongs to someone else-- I prefer my cars to get less than 14 MPG) which will be weighted down with three ice chests full of such necessities as carrot cake, israeli couscous salad, artisanal goat cheese, truffle sausage and fig jam. Next, pay the nice lady in the log cabin the cost of a very nice piece of furniture for two nights, spend the next hour unpacking the car and then apply bug spray before settling in to your posh camp house, which is really just a re-branded mobile home made to look like a log cabin. And finally, after all this, order your BBQ kit consisting of hamburger, fixins, tools and ingredients to make s’mores, to be delivered directly to your fire pit for dinner. 

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PostedJuly 21, 2010
Authormelissa mcclure
Categoriessalad, vegetarian
Tagssalad, glamping, dried cherry, recipe, roasted beets, worty instead of 40, walnut, the great pothole of 39, blue cheese, beets, cabrales, not a friend of mother earth, Leggsy McGhee, a bird pooped on my head, Innercity Velvet, Maria-Hold-the-Eggs, Jihad Jenni
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aged cheddar and belgian ale: taking the soup of shame after feeling like Pig Pen (or the kid who smelled in first grade) because of the rat in my engine compartment

I have dreaded writing this post. So much so that I have waited until Thursday to actually use my fingers to strike the keys and compose a thought. All week long I’ve been thinking about cute little anecdotes to relay just how much my life is like this wacky, sexy little 30 minute dramedy on the WB (I still think I’m closer to 20 than to 40, by the way, and I definitely don’t think I’m cool cool or edgy enough for HBO since I’m not a vampire, a writer/shoe whore or a part of an all-male celebrity pack of roving, explosive testosterone). Sure I’ve suffered some dating disappointments and some career drama, but through sheer pluck and charm I am managing to have enlightening adventures and overcome it all in the neat, time allotted package. And at the end of this little episode, there is some kind of cute clarity or epiphany and then there is what is always needed to carry anyone to the next foray-- hope. The truth is a whole hell of a lot murkier than this. A lot less hopeful. The truth is, well, kind of antithetical to the life I’ve formulated for myself in my head. You know the one. The one where I’m just a late bloomer and I’m really adorable and really successful in my own slightly neurotic yet sweet way, and that people will certainly discover this about me very soon... the truth is not so simple or cute or formatted to fit your television.

I’ve kind of been living in the place where I want to have hope for my future like I did when I was graduating from college-- when any and everything was possible and laid at my feet, and even if a bad thing happened it would be a well earned lesson and a humorous story for future cocktail parties-- but I’m going to have to admit to myself, sooner or later, that I am living in a real, not made for TV world. A world where my OB/ GYN reduced me to tears during my last pelvic exam by telling me that I am-- shock of all shocks-- 38 years old and if I want to pass on my genes I should consider freezing my eggs for a mere 15 grand (for a college grad I am shockingly unaware of my lack of reproductive immortality and with the fact that money is necessary in the whole exchange for goods and services thing). And maybe I should be a little more honest about thinking that everyone gets a happy ending and that mine is just around the bend; maybe I should just recognize that my business just might fail, that I just might have to really downsize and that great love might not be on the horizon. It is so not a sexy or happy thought, but it is my truth; maybe the more I acknowledge and make friends with this reality the less shitty I’ll feel...

And back in reality... I was on my way to a BBQ at the house of the Girl Whose Name Sounds Better Pronounced as an Indian Food Dish when my car decided to basically blow up for the second time since March. I feel really lucky that I have a car, luckier that it chooses to function 99% of the time, and luckiest that it’s paid for. What I feel less good about is the crap English (even though it’s really a Ford) engineering and the fact that it is eight years old and skirts dangerously close to the whole explode at any time thing. 

So I take the car in to the service center without an appointment, which already outs me as a manner-less ne’er do well, and I plop myself down on the couch in the lobby while I wait for a rental car. My service advisor lets me know that he’s going to go look for “overt” signs of trouble in the engine before I take off and I warn him that my car is, quite possibly, the dirtiest car in southern California, no judging please, I do take care of my possessions, really, not that he needs or cares to know any of this information. He comes back a few minutes later with a somewhat disdainful look on his face and his hands uncomfortably clenched (I can see through his pleated khakis) in his pockets.

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PostedJune 16, 2010
Authormelissa mcclure
Categoriessoup, positively piggy
Tagscheddar, ale, soup, recipe, soup with a side of ennui, soupapalooza!, freeze your eggs but not those eggs, pig pen, car sick, market greens, salad, radish, red velvet, red velvet ice cream sandwich, ice cream, cheesecake ice cream, white trash wheat thin nachos, jalapeño, bacon is best, piggy piggy piggy, positively piggy
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goldsmith, sometime costume designer and badass cat owner. 

goldsmith, sometime costume designer and badass cat owner. 

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a weekly attempt to eat well and to savor life. or to see how much food I can get on my clothes.

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