Cooking Adventures

I am the queen of procrastination. But I guess I needed a day off, so me not working at all today is okay. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

So I made two things today. Veggie lasagna, and vegetable soup (pictured above).

The lasagna turned out good, though I now know to use the best quality mozzarella I can find for optimum melting and browning. I ended up using eggplant and zucchini and totally forgot the mushrooms I was going to put in. Oh well.

The soup was more of an adventure in that I totally had no idea what I was doing. It started with me having some extra eggplant and zucchini from the lasagna and so I chopped them up and was just going to make a stir fry when I remembered that I had carrots so I chopped up three of those too and threw them into the frying pan. Then I thought to myself, when I am going to eat a dish with chunks of carrot and actually enjoy it? (My aversion to plain carrot chunks is much like my aversion to plain tomato chunks, only in very particular situations.)

So then I got some boiling water, poured in the contents of the frying pan into the saucepan, threw in some salt and pepper and then let it boil for aaages. Then after they got all soft I started thinking about how I probably wouldn't eat soup with chunks THAT big, so I poured the whole kit n' caboodle into a blender and ran it through. Out came a nice tasting soup, but without enough body, so I remembered I had some potatoes. Which I chopped, boiled 'em until tender and threw them into the blender too.

I was left with a yummy, full bodied and textural treat. Which is what you see above, with the addition of home made croûtons, i.e. bread cut up, drizzled with olive oil and sent into the toaster oven for a few minutes.

Yum.