You can't spoil these siimple soups

Pumpkin soup

Lisa, chop-chopping

I am starting Korean Level 3 at Seogang University tomorrow. Yahoo! I am excited and a little bit worried. December and half of January are going to be incredibly busy. The first two weeks of December are the two last semester weeks at the school where I work, and the first two weeks of the semester at the school I'll be attending. When the regular work semester ends, I'll jump right into three weeks of winter school, where I'll be teaching English for Presentations. This every day, 3 hours. That's not all. I'll also be teaching three hours three times a week at our graduate school. While I have heaps of experience teaching English for presentations (and now am creating quite acceptable power point presentations myself), I don't know what to expect in the 'graduate school.' The students are the ones who keep failing their regular English requirement and cannot graduate. They are frustrated and I expect quite resentful. God help me with this one. Since I also need to review my Level 1 and Levels 2 Korean, between now and tomorrow, not an easy takes considering it's already 9:00 pm, I'll cut the long work story short and say that for about a month I'll be spending 9 hours in the classroom, 6 as a teacher and 3 as a student. And this immediately after the two last hellish with grading weeks of the semester. Fun!It is winter here: an early, beautiful, bright, crisp winter.The sky has been incredible. I am addicted to daily walks in the nearby park where the fallen leaves and withering grass smell wonderful. It is cold, though, so I crank up the heating in my house, except when I go to sleep,when I turn it way down. I can't sleep when it's hot in the room. Then I wake up with a headache and cemented sinuses.What I really wanted to blog about is how I'm planning to keep my energy up 'in this long dark winter days' of work and study voluntary slavery.First, I will keep walking in the park, of course. I'll add some yoga/ streching and light weight training. I've been pretty good in the past month with that. Pretty good, I say, which means, I have to be better.Second, I'll eat well. I'll plan in advance. This means I'll make a huge pot of healthy soup, divide into individual servings and freeze. I bought great German bread to go with it, and individual one-serving packages of cheese. I have fruit, vegetable, big pot of yogurt. I should be fine. I must be fine. I don't want to fall back to junk when I feel exhausted.While looking for a recipe to use up two heads of broccoli, I found on youtube that scary Hell Kitchen guy, Gordon Ramsey, showing how to make a fabulous broccoli soup with only three ingredients.The recipe:2 heads broccoliwater to boil it ina wee bit of saltLEt water boil rapidly. Add broccoli floweretts and boil till you can cut a knife through it easily. Get your blender; transfer broccoli into the blender, add the cooking water to cover about half the broccoli. Carefully blend. Check for taste. Add salt if you want. OHMIGOD! It was so delicious:broccoli in its own juice with salt.He served it with two slices of goat cheese and some walnuts placed in the middle of a soup bowl and the soup carefully poured around it. I didn't have anything fancy like that. I added some milk. Yummy!I finished my soup that day, sharing some with my Korean teacher and friend, Prof K.Later that day she gave me a big pumpkin. It was a specila pumpkin because when prof K went to the market she said she had bought one for herself, one for her son -and one for me. I had told her that I love pumpkin. Isn't that really thoughtful of her.I experimented with this pumpkin, applying "the Ramsey method." Simply, I washed the pumpking, seeded it, cut in four pieces, and boiled until it was tender. Then I removed the skin, cut the flesh in chunks, added them to the blender, and added some cooking water; blended it carefully, as to prevent 'explosions', pusling at first then going into bolder modes. For more flavour I added cinammon and nutmeg. Heaven!!!On Friday, I went out for dinner with my friend Lisa. We ate at Zelen,a Bulgarina restaurant, whose name Zelen (green) should not fool you: meat abounds there - nice juicy, perfectly marinated and grilled meat. We admired the food and the warm atmosphere almost as much as the plentiful attractions of the young Bulgarians: the waiter, the cook and Misha, the owner himself, who played Kusturica for us, acknowlegding our mutual eastern European roots. We stayed out late,so Lisa slept over at my house. She needed to go to a wedding quite close to my place the next morning. In the morning while she was getting ready for the wedding, I cooked a.k.a. burned us some pancakes from the batter mix I had brought from the Philippines last summer. I fed Lisa, then turned her into my slave, 'ordering' her to chop a bowlful of champignons and shitake mushrooms. I made a mushroom soup a la Ramsey, with some modifications. I sweated some onion, added mushrooms and salt, and waited till most of the yummy juice oozed out of them. For pureeing, I used mostly milk instead of water. The best! Maybe because I really love mushroom soup...Lisa loved it, too.

Although I am not going anywhere this winter vacation, the idea of improving my Korean, catching up on sleep/reading/writing, having long walks, and eventually lazy winter weekends at home with popcorn and movies, is really appealing - especially with all the great veggies waiting to be pureed into soups. Bon apetit!