i know i have lamented to many of you how little real cooking i've done in new york, since my kitchen is small and shared with five other girls and i don't have all my cooking supplies up there with me. i make pasta or tacos or big salads or heat up frozen trader joe's indian food, but rarely go further than that. so when i was in north carolina this week i knew i wanted to do lots of cooking before i went back to new york, including trying four new recipes from my "recipes to try" file. here's what i made!
saturday: ben's mushroom soup
(ben is a friend in my grad school program and he made this soup for a group of us once - and we fell in love with it. he has been forced to make it for us several times since.)
how to make it:
saute 4 cups mushrooms (the fancier the mushrooms, the better) with one onion until the mushrooms are pretty well cooked.
add 2 Tbs flour and make a rue
stir in 14 ounces vegetable broth and cook 5 minutes until thickened
stir in one cup half and half. heat but do not boil.
my family is kind of crazy for mushrooms, so this soup was a huge hit.
sunday: blueberry cornmeal butter cake from the smitten kitchen cookbook. i love this woman. we had a cup of blackberries mom picked over the summer in the freezer, so i modified it to be half blueberries and half blackberries, and we took it over to some family friends' house for dinner. we are trying to eat healthily, but dinner with friends is the perfect excuse to make dessert, so i jumped on it. it was delish! moist cake with a sweet crunchy top.
monday: it poured down rain all day - the perfect day to make lasagna soup! (we didn't put in the sausage, obviously.) willis made this for us a couple months ago and it's delish; it's exactly what it sounds like - all the ingredients you would use to make lasagna, but in a thick tomato-vegetable broth. it's better than lasagna, i tell you. quote from dad: "i could eat 5 gallons of this!" i call that a success!
tuesday: leek, chard, and corn flatbread, another smitten kitchen recipe. if you like cooking and aren't reading her blog, you are missing out! great, easy, interesting recipes with beautiful photographs and encouraging commentary about how you, too, can make yummy food. making pizza dough is one of my newest tricks, and this one turned out well - good crust, great toppings, and an easy way to eat lots of vegetables even in the winter. (we substituted fresh spinach for the chard.) mom and i decided there were enough vegetables on top of this pizza that we didn't have to have a salad on the side. victory!
wednesday: more mushrooms! tacos with mushrooms and cabbage, which was fine...but i don't think i'll be rushing to make this again - black bean and corn burritos are better, in my book. maybe a nice change of pace, if you're in the mood for that.
and now, back to NYC! i fly up tonight and should be back in my dorm room in time for the duke basketball game. let's go duke!
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