Advice: When looking at recipes online use your noggin. If you do not use your noggin in the beginning, you will be forced to part way through when you go to stir your soup and suddenly realize OMG, NOT THIS AGAIN!
Do you know how many times I have made recipes not knowing if the rice I put in should be cooked or dry? It’s something that just hasn’t sunk in my thick skull. (ahem… fault #1).
So, it was supposed to be onion, rice and turnip soup. A light broth, sparsely populated with little turnip and onion floaties. But, like the ignoramus that I am, I put in 1.5 cups dry rice (wrong decision), and viola – savory rice pudding! But, alas, this story ends well, so follow this process to get what turned out to be two pretty damn good things, although neither have any traces of turnips, which is the primary ingredient I started with.
On we go….saute your onion and turnips in garlic, then put the rice, 7 cups chicken stock, onions and turnips in a pot. Cook for about 30 minutes until you go running into the kitchen, see that the soup has turned into slop.
Divide up your slop. I put about 2/3 of it into a tupperware and set aside. This will become fritters later.
Mash up the remaining 1/3 of your slop and return to pot. Add milk and more chicken stock until it looks like soup again. Open your fridge and start adding whatever you can find -if you follow the recipe that would be pork, spinach, and seasonings (thyme, basil, salt, pepper). Simmer for about 20 minutes until everything is hot.
Done with soup! Don’t cook it too much longer, rice is like an untamable beast and turns to a thicker glue the longer it cooks.
Then try and figure out what to do with the 2/3 rice slop. mmm… fritters…..
Analysis: The soup is good. Adding the thyme was genius because it makes it have that “clam chowder” taste. In fact, I should have added clams. However, I had pork. Seriously, I’d give it a 6 out of 10, if pork chowder is what you’re after. If I ever made something similar again, I would add potatoes and celery to this. Also maybe a bay leaf. Oh, and if I were going to make it again, I’d use cream or corn starch as a thickening agent instead of tons of rice. “That’s pretty good” says Dust. Jonah and I had it for lunch and found it marvelous.
and, despite it's appearance, it really is good.
Fritters: The rice/onion/turnip slop lacked one core ingredient that I thought would make proper fritters: CHEESE! Now, fritters usually have egg in them- to bind. But, coming out, the slop is already a bit too thin, so I thought I should not add egg. Mistake? Huge! Use an egg. I threw two in the rest of my mixture after throwing one round away. And I also diced up some jalepeno. So you mix it up, cover it in panko, and put it in a thickly oiled pan until brown like a pancake.
I am sad to report I have no pictures. Jonah was screaming and I had about 2 minutes to get food on the table. So we just cooked and ate. They didn’t bind as much as I wanted them too. I think I needed more oil. But they were GOOD. Jonah loved his, and Dusty and I had ours on top of a fresh green salad which was scrumptious. Creamy balsamic dressing topped it all off. “I thought these were going to suck” said Dust. “But they are really good.”
TAKE THAT! I only recommend you do this if you have a long boring day ahead of you. It was quite a lot of work, just to not waste a cup of rice and some turnips. And remember, you will never have to follow this recipe if you just use your noggin in the beginning.
So, that there is a green salad from my very garden, some amazing nectarines, and a black bean burger (it’s hidden in the big leaf lettuce). The black bean burger was a good idea by Dusty, and was REALLY good.
He chose the exact same horse both times, and both times pointed to the little sleigh behind it and opted to sit in that. You know why? I blame cousin Tots. Tots always has to sit in the sleigh and Jonah does anything tots teaches him. 
