Broccoli and white cheddar soup

Happy New Year, everybody!  I hope you all had pleasant celebrations and are starting 2010 off right.  I started this year much better than I ended the last one, but we'll get to that later.  For now, let's have a bowl of the best broccoli and white cheddar soup you've ever made.

This is my own take on a recipe I found at the grocery store.  It cooks up very easily and is perfect midday eating on a chilly day, especially when paired with a grilled ham and cheese sandwich.  Here is the list of ingredients.  Metric equivalents are given in parentheses.

New Year's Broccoli and Cheddar Soup
1 tablespoon (15ml) olive oil
1 tablespoon (15ml) butter
1 medium onion, chopped
1 large head (600g) of broccoli
3 cups (750ml) vegetable stock
1 medium potato, peeled and thinly sliced
1/2 cup (100g) creme fraiche or sour cream, whichever is available, plus a bit more for serving
1 cup (150g) mature white cheddar, grated

Ready to cook?  Here we go...

Chop, chop!

First things first, cut up all your veg so you can have it ready as soon as you need it.  Next, prepare the broth.  If you're using pre-made broth, all you have to do is open up the can or box.  But if you're using bouillon cubes, boil up your water and mash in 1.5 Knorr cubes (or amount as designated on package) until it's all dissolved.  Whatever you're using, have it ready to go so when the time comes, you can just pour it in to the pot.

The beginning of a fabulous soup

For this soup (and all stick-blended soups, if you ask me), you should use a large, deep stock pot - the bigger, the better.  Your soup itself won't need that much room, but there's a lot of splashing and flinging of soupy bits when you begin to mix it up with the stick blender.  This is when the high, protective walls of a big stock pot come in very handy.

Back to the ingredients.  Heat up the big pot (low to medium) and add the oil and butter.  When the butter is melted, throw in your onions and let them sizzle for about five minutes until they look nice and soft. 

A big pile o' veg

Once the onions have achieved niceness and softness, add the broccoli, potato and pour the stock over everything.  Leaving the heat at the same level, put a lid on the pot and let it all simmer for about 15 minutes.  By this time, the broccoli should be quite tender.  If you can easily stab into the stalk with a fork, it's tender enough.  If not, give it five more minutes and another stabbing.

And now for the really fun part: turn the burner off, dip your stick blender into that stock pot and whizzzzzz your mixture until all the big bits have succumbed to the green soupiness.  It should be an even consistency when you're finished blending.  Yes, it looks great, but you're not done yet!  Turn the burner back on to medium low, add the sour cream (or creme fraiche) and bring the soup to a simmer.  When that happens, remove your pot from the heat, stir in the cheese and add a bit of extra sour cream or creme fraiche when serving.  Voila!

 Soup-erb!

This recipe makes about six hearty bowls of soup.  I often double it up just so we can have seconds the next day.  It reheats very well.  I should also mention that it tastes really good with low-fat cheese and sour cream, if you've made THAT kind of New Year's resolution.

Now, back to why my 2009 didn't go as well as it could have.  In short, it's because I spent too much of the year being a homesick killjoy and I often lacked patience with myself in this still-active process of settling into my new home and my new life as a wife and stepmother.  My resolution for 2010 may sound completely trite to you, but I'm doing it anyway and it's going to be great; I'm keeping a diary of happy thoughts.  I decided to do this because my stepsons gave me a very sweet week-at-a-glance journal for 2010 with a picture of a kitten on the cover.  Since I had already purchased a boring maroon day planner for my deadlines and dental appointments, I've decided to put the kitten journal to good use by using it to remind me of the happy and uplifting things in life, of which there are SO MANY.  So I'll be writing in that every day without fail (4 days strong now!) and maybe I'll share the occasional entry here.

All the best to you.  I'll be back for an update when I'm able.

Thursday night dinner

The bacon, pea and basil macaroni turned out to be a quality family meal, but with a few lessons learned.  Of course I have a report.  We've moved since the last time I posted cooking pictures, so the kitchen are a bit different (welcome to our new flat!).  Here's how it all went down tonight:

 

 Chop, chop!

I did all the chopping first so I could just grab ingredients as needed.  Do you like my internet-fabulous tea towel trick here?  It hides the countertops so well!  Clockwise from the top in this picture we have six bacon rashers that I snipped with kitchen scissors, two leeks, shredded cheddar cheese, frozen peas and fresh basil (though using dried is totally not the end of the world).

It's starting to sizzle

After chopping everything up, the first step in cooking the dish is to put the bacon and leeks in the hot frying pan with a tablespoon of vegetable oil and let them cook for ten minutes or until the bacon is golden - I cooked the bacon on a low temperature until it just started to take on a golden hue. Next time I make this dish, I probably won't put the leeks in with the bacon right away.  They wasted away as the bacon cooked and you could barely tell they were ever there by the end.  Next time I'll put them in about 3-4 minutes before the bacon is finished cooking so they have some chance of staying partially intact.  I'll also use a bigger pot altogether, because it got a bit crowded at the end.  Every meal is a learning experience!

 

A two-burner meal

I added the peas and let them cook through and my water has still barely come to a boil.  Another tip for the future: start the macaroni earlier!  To avoid burning the bacon, leek and pea mixture, I had to turn that burner off while the pasta cooked.

 

Oven-ready!

Finally, the macaroni cooked all the way through.  I stirred it all up in the frying pan with some of the cooking water, half of the shredded cheddar and a small tray of soft cheese (this is cream cheese - please refer to my brief "Americanization" at the end of this post if you're in the States and want to cook this without going crazy or doing all the converstions yourself).  Once all the ingredients were well worked in, I sprinkled the other half of the cheddar cheese on the dish and put it in to grill.  Our grill (broiler) takes a bit longer than others I've seen, so I decided to serve up the soup while our pasta dish developed a nice, slighly crusty top.

 

 For starters...

This is the carrot and parsnip soup that I posted about two days ago.  Doesn't it have a lovely color?  And it's so smooth!  This soup is easy to make, packed with nutrients and a big hit with the family.  That's what I call a keeper.  I served up this soup with a bit of my signature "everyday garlic bread," which is wheat toast with a thin spread of butter and a tiny bit of garlic salt sprinkled on top.  You can use white toast, if you prefer, but wheat is better for you and I'm sure you already know that.  Okay, I'm done preaching.  So we ate up the soup while the pasta baked away and when we were done...

 

A super cheesy pasta bake

The pasta finished baking!  What a super dish.  It went down very well with the stepdudes and it wasn't hard to make at all.  I'll be doing this one again in the next few weeks, that's for sure.  However, I'll ditch the frying pan next time.  Bacon cooks up just as well in a bigger pot and it would make it so much easier to stir everything up if I had a bit of elbow room to work with.

One word of advice: if you plan on cooking this recipe for your family and you're thinking of skipping the mustard so your mustard-hating kids will like it better, don't!  Both of my stepsons are big-time mustard-haters and they gobbled this dish up like crazy, despite the fact that I put a huge dollop of yellow mustard in the dish before grilling it.  I strongly suggest keeping the mustard...just make sure your youngsters don't see the jar on the kitchen counter!

I hope you enjoy making this dish.  For any of you U.S. readers who want to try this, here is an recap of the ingredients list with any relevant "Americanizations" in bold:

• 6 rashers streaky bacon , chopped (8-10oz. regular bacon)
  
• 2 leeks , finely sliced into rings
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 140g frozen peas (3/4 cup)
  
• 400g macaroni (3 cups uncooked macaroni)
  
• 200g pack soft cheese (8oz. tub of regular or low-fat cream cheese)
  
• 85g mature cheddar , grated (3/4 cup)
  
• 1 tbsp English mustard
• small bunch basil , shredded (1 tsp. dried basil is fine, too)
  

And for the reserve water you draw from your pan of macaroni to add to the casserole dish, 150ml = 3/4 cup.  Enjoy your meal!

Why I love blended soups

Last night at the store, I spotted parsnips on sale for next to nothing.  Being American, I've never cooked with parsnips before in my life, but this deal was really too good to pass up.  So I bought several parsnips and decided to comb the internet for recipes as soon as I got home.  After just a few clicks, I found this very simple recipe for a blended carrot and parsnip soup.  With so few ingredients, how could it possibly go wrong?  It couldn't.  The soup was positively delicious.  After simmering all the ingredients together for half an hour, I whizzed it up with our stick blender (Do you all have a stick blender?  You totally should.) and it turned a wonderful light orange color and took on a smooth, thick texture.  The best part about it is that there's plenty more to store in the refrigerator for later.

I love keeping soup in the fridge.  Knowing that a hearty blended soup is there, especially during the colder months (and they're just around the corner), makes menu planning so much easier.  It also adds a touch of handmade goodness to a meal that might not be as wholesome on its own.  For example, my husband and I had burgers and fries last night for dinner - not part of our normal meal plan, it must be said, but my culinary creativeness is a bit low at the moment.  It happens to the best of us from time to time.  But I digress.  With our sinful burgers and fries, we had this fabulous, nutrient-packed soup which really rounded out the meal.  We're certainly not going to do this every night, but it is a nice option for those hurried dinners we all have sometimes.

So my dinner plan for the guys tomorrow is to have the carrot and parsnip soup (probably the last of it by that point) with a first-time recipe, bacon, pea and basil macaroni.  I hope this goes well.  We grow basil on the windowsill and the guys are good about eating peas, but that's a lot of stuff in one dish.  In my experience, the more ingredients that go into a dish, the less likely youngsters are to enjoy it.  Am I playing with fire here?  We'll find out tomorrow night.  I'll take some pictures and give a report for those of you who are interested.  I'd be so happy if this goes down well because one-dish meals are great to have in the recipe file.

It's good to be back

Hello, fellow stepmoms and friends. It's been quite a while (6 months!) since I last posted, but I had a lot of catching up to do here in my new life in my new country with my new family. I went back to the States in February to get my UK spousal visa and that whole process went just fine, even though it was terribly expensive and the visa only lasts for two years before I have to renew for another exorbitant fee. No gripes, however. I'm here now and I'm legal. That's plenty of reason to celebrate!

The guys are back in school now - what happened to the spring and summer?! Wherever the time went, we enjoyed ourselves even though we didn't get to go on a big family holiday. These are just tough times and I'm sure you're all feeling it to some degree. Next weekend, we're going to the Peak District for a two-night camping holiday. That's about as far as we're going to get from home for a while, so you'd better believe we're going to make the most of it. I hope the weather cooperates. We could really use a bit of sunshine around here. It's been raining nonstop all week here in Glasgow.

On a more domestic note, dinner tonight was breaded fish and chips with steamed carrots. I'm just trying to keep track of what I'm doing for dinners so I don't run out of ideas. It's inspiration for future meals when I can't be bothered to plan in advance! Though I try to avoid pub fare at home (burgers, fish and chips, etc.), it always goes down a huge treat with the boys and requires the least amount of effort. Of course, the trade-off is that these ever-so-popular meals aren't as healthy as the ones I lovingly prepare from scratch. I always try to maintain a good balance and so far, I think I'm doing a pretty good job.

My brother and I were chatting on the phone last night and he asked me what my stepsons call me. "Do they call you Devin or Stepmom...or what?" I laughed and said that they sometimes call me Devin, but most of the time they call me Hon, because that's what my husband calls me. He thought that was hilarious. We're a house of hons.

For those of you stepmoms out there, what do your stepkids call you?

Shepherd's Pie in detail

We had the Italian-Style Shepherd's Pie last night. This is a great meal for four with a bit left over for lunch the following day. I’ll describe the steps I took to make this dinner. Experienced cooks might find parts of this explanation a bit pedantic, but it’s important to remember that not everyone is completely comfortable or intuitive in the kitchen and some of us need a bit more hand-holding. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that! There were many holes in my culinary knowledge base when I first moved in with my new family and I roved the internet for hours on end looking for inspiration and ideas. That’s pretty much the point of what I’m doing here. So on with the dinner…



Do this stuff first!

The first thing I do when I'm cooking anything, but especially a first-time recipe, is go through the list of ingredients and make sure I have sufficient quantities of everything I need. There are few things as frustrating as having a dish halfway cooked and then realizing you don't have something the recipe calls for, so take the time and get it right before you start. Once I'm sure I have all my ingredients together, I do all the chopping and measuring first. As you can see in the photo above, I chopped all my veggies ahead of time so they would be ready to add exactly when I needed them.



The heat is on

Once all the ingredients were properly chopped and measured, I put the meat, onions, carrots and spices in a skillet to cook for about 5 minutes. The recipe calls for seasoning salt, which isn't available in Scotland, so I cobble together my own little mix of spices that's a bit different every time: salt, a couple of dashes of cayenne pepper, garlic salt and cumin. This blend doesn't resemble actual seasoning salt, but it seems to work well in all of my dishes. Once the meat browned evenly, it was time to add the last ingredients to the filling.



A fine filling

For the final step of preparing the filling, I added the mushrooms and a 350 gram (14 oz. is fine) jar of tomato and basil pasta sauce. You can add whatever kind sounds good to you. As I mentioned in the earlier menu planning post, I use real mashed potatoes in this pie, as it's more economical than using the flakes, not to mention MUCH healthier and better tasting. It requires a bit of extra work, but it's well worth the effort. I dropped 6-8 medium peeled potatoes into a pot of boiling water just before I chopped up all the veggies. While the filling mixture simmered away, I mashed up the potatoes.



A fluffy layer of mashed potatoes to top it off

The dish is nearly ready to pop into the oven! I poured the filling into a 13x9 casserole dish and then spooned mashed potatoes evenly over the top. If you don't have enough mashers to coat the whole dish, don't worry. You can try spreading the potatoes a bit thinner, or even leaving a hole in the middle! Remember, the recipe only calls for 8 dollops of potatoes around the edge. I just like to coat the whole dish for aesthetic reasons and to keep more moisture in the pie while it cooks. Plus, it increases the potential for leftovers. Once the dish has been coated in potatoes using whichever style you choose, sprinkle a thin coating of parmesan cheese over the top, place it in a 375° (190°C or gas mark 5) oven and check it after 25 minutes.



Italian-Style Shepherd's Pie, finito!

If the top has turned a nice golden brown with maybe a little crust forming on the side, your dinner is ready. The thing I love most about this Shepherd's Pie and other dishes of its ilk is that they are one-pan meals. It has veggies, meat and potatoes all in one casserole dish, which means less fuss in the kitchen overall and not as much washing up to do at the end of the meal. Plus, veggies seem to go down easier with kids if they are part of a dish rather than their own side. So it all adds up to a winning dinner in my book. The family gave it high marks, too - an all-around good dinner.

Dinner Pictures

The tartiflette went well tonight. I made a few on-the-spot recipe changes and if I'm being honest, I should have allowed for a bit more baking time than I did. The potatoes could have been just a teeny bit softer and the top just a little crunchier. But c'est la vie...it was a late dinner anyway, so if I jumped the gun, it was only to get all the hungry mouths fed faster. Here are some pictures of our Wednesday meal:



Bed of Potatoes

First, I peeled and boiled two pounds (~900g) of potatoes for about 10 minutes. Then I chopped up an onion (no onion pics, I was too busy crying) and put them in a hot pan with a spoonful of oil to fry while I cut up the softened potatoes. After slicing them thinly, I spread them across the bottom of an ungreased 13x9 dish. A 13x9 dish has a 3 litre capacity and the recipe called for a 2 litre dish. I still don't have all my conversions down pat, nor do I know how many litres all our baking dishes hold, so I'm making up a lot of this as I go along! This is one of the main reasons why I augmented tonight's recipe. The other big reason is that I made it for five last Thursday (Grandpa came over for dinner) and there was just enough for everyone. I happen to be a fan of leftovers, so I decided to make more this time.



Oven-ready dinner

This is probably the least appetizing of the whole batch of dinner pictures. My apologies. Everything in the dish is cold and it hasn't had a chance to melt into potato and cheesy goodness yet. But you can see the potential! The oven is hot and ready to bake this dish into a fine dinner.

I mentioned above that I fried up an onion while I was layering the pan with potatoes. Once the onion was nice and soft after about 10 minutes of frying, I added the cut up bacon. The easiest bacon to find in Scotland is thick rasher-style slices, rather than the thin strip bacon that's most common in the US. I must say, I prefer the rasher bacon and that's what I'd encourage using in this recipe.

After the bacon had about three minutes to fry with the onions, I added just over a cup of wine and brought it to a boil, per the recipe. Next time I make this, I'll try a non-alcoholic wine and report on its effectiveness in the dish. As soon as it reached the boiling point, I poured the wine/bacon/onion mixture over the bed of half-cooked potatoes. Then I spread about four big spoonfuls of creme fraiche (sour cream) and 150 grams (~1 3/4 cup) of cheddar cheese on top of the mixture and popped it in the oven. The recipe called for Reblochon or Teleggio cheese, but I couldn't find either at my local grocery store, so I just went for a white mature cheddar. It works just fine, trust me.

So we let it bake for about 25 minutes and...



The finished product

It's ready to go! As I said at the beginning of this post, I really should have let the dish cook for just a few minutes longer because the potatoes were not as soft as they could have been, but it went over very well anyway. I was the only one who seemed to notice this minor shortcoming (well, and my husband, but this is only because I was grumbling in his ear about it for the first few bites) and it was a hit with the kids, which makes for an easy evening all around.



Plating up

So there you go. Add some steamed carrots and you have a hearty winter dinner with some good leftover potential, too. This is a nice easy meal with a name that's SO amusing to say: tar-ti-fle-tte. I think it's supposed to be pronounced with three syllables (like pirouette), but I say it with four, adding a fake flourish at the end. It's more fun that way.

Menu plan

Today is my dad’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Dad! It’s also Tuesday, the day I start thinking about our meals for the rest of the week. On Wednesday, we get the boys and we have them until Saturday, which is when they go back to their mother. This is our routine every week without fail. With that in mind, I usually take some time on Tuesday to come up with a menu plan for the nights we have the boys. Since we're still in the midwinter freeze, it will be hearty fare this week for sure. Here's my plan:

Wednesday: Bacon and Cheddar Tartiflette with steamed carrots. This is a new favorite of ours, and it's SO easy. It's like eating a big baked potato, but only the very best bites.

Thursday: Italian-Style Shepherd's Pie. I do mine a bit different than Betty Crocker by using REAL mashed potatoes and covering the entire dish with them, not just dolloping. There's a big difference! This is a great, hearty dish and since it already has lots of good veggies in it, there isn't any need for side dishes. So it's a very meat-and-potatoes type of week lined up for us until we get to...

Friday: My husband's homemade pizza!

No matter what kind of culinary masterpieces I prepare in the kitchen throughout the week, Dad's Famous Pizza is always the crowd favorite, no contest. A big part of the appeal of my husband's pizza is that it is not only eaten with the hands in front of the TV (a special Friday-night-only concession), but of course it's a hit because it's SUCH GOOD PIZZA!

So that's the meal plan for the next few nights. I'll try to take a few pictures of these dishes as they're cooked. They're so easy and very popular with the kids.