I Am Thinking About It

Homemade hempmilk, cashew and basil ice cream with sugared srawberries. Happy May Day!

We made a delicious polenta pizza tonight. Miatake mushrooms are our new favorite food, so we put them on the pizza, of course. Plus toasted pine nuts, and fresh arugula on top. Hooray for our house guest, Keera, for inspiring something fancier then mac&cheese!

Ah, the kitchen before brunch. Lovely chaos.

Port and chocolate tasting for dessert… Don’t you wish you had dinner around our house more often?

Moms birthday dessert, at Andina. Mmmmmm.

Tonight was clean out the kitchen night at our house. We hit the grocery store for some staples (chocolate ice cream), then I tried to come up with the best way to use up our stack of leftover odds and ends. We began with:

2-3 cups cooked brown rice
3 wizened apples
a peeled but not cooked sweet potato (we over prepped for some sweet potato fries earlier this week)
a butternut squash
a few broken carrots
a few mildewy shallots
a cup of spinach
a quarter of a red onion

It was the butternut squash that led me to think SOUP, remembering a squash-and-apple soup recipe I read a few months back. It became possibly the best butternut squash soup I’ve ever tried, and so, I share with you:

Brown Rice Butternut Squash Stone Soup (with Apples, Spinach, and Caraway Seeds)

Peel and chop into evenly sized pieces:
3 apples
1/2 butternut squash
1 sweet potato
2 1/2 carrots

I stacked these in a large mixing bowl as I chopped, apples on the bottom and on up (think hardest to softest)

chop finely:
1/4 red onion
1 shallot
4 cloves of garlic

In a large pan, melt 1/4 cup butter, add onion, shallot, garlic. Stir until soft. Add enough vegetable broth to cover bottom, stir until it becomes creamy. Add carrots, 1 bay leaf, and a dash of caraway seeds (it just sounded like a good idea). Cook until the carrots are warmed through, then add sweet potato. Add enough vegetable broth to cover, boil until sweet potatoes are warmed through. Add squash and enough broth to cover. Bring to boil, add some salt. Toss the apples on top, put a lid on, simmer for 10 minutes. Add the rice and spinach, stir well to mix in rice.

When you can stick a fork in everything (especially the carrots!), you’re done. Remove the Blend the soup (I used a blender, but it’d probably be easier with a stick mixer), return to pan. Serve!

Enjoy the empty kitchen and the full tummy!

Home for the evening before Ana and I take a trip south to visit our brother. We stopped for dinner at Alfs.. the burger quality seems to have gone down, but the ICE CREAM? Still awesome.

We have decided to start a new weekly meal calendar this month, limiting our shopping to only Sunday & Wednesday, and scheduling the type of meal we’ll cook and eat every day of the week. Lots of variation, of course (Sunday night is “carbohydrate with veggies” night), but we’re hoping it a) makes sure we eat more regularly b) keeps us from eating out in desperation c) limits the grocery bills, which climb exponentially the more we make last minute runs for individual meals.

Monday nights, though, are Cook Something New Nights. So tonight I picked a recipe out of Deborah Madison’s The Greens Cookbook: Red and Yellow Pepper Tart. I think I either made to many peppers, or didn’t spread the tart crust high enough, but either way it seems to have overflowed somewhat. Smells pretty amazing though.

Truffle infused pasta with brie, green beans and walnuts.

Acorn squash with orange and cranberry sauce, fried fennel and lemons, and brown rice.