I don’t know if I mentioned that in the Netherlands I did not have an oven or a microwave. You have no idea how grateful I was to get home to our kitchen. Over the past year I have discovered how much I love to cook. How much I love trying new meals to make and watching it all come together. And if I make something really good, poor Geoff has to hear me talk about it the rest of the night. I do enjoy eating, but it’s the making part that enjoy the most. I subscribe to two magazines: Eating Well and Cooking Light. I can’t say enough about either one. They are both wonderful in their own right.
While we were in the Netherlands Geoff started eating soup. Yes, he had never really eaten or enjoyed soup before, and now he can’t get enough of it. Although I am not proficient in the art of making a good soup, I am getting there. I was down right ecstatic about how my spinach and goat cheese bisque turned out the other day.
With that said it has not stopped raining in the past 3 days. So yesterday afternoon I pulled out the pots and pans and got busy.
I started out cutting vegetables to make my own vegetable stock. My sister and I have talked a lot about how to make this stuff lately and I now know that it is completely worth it to make your own compared to the price of a liter box in the grocery store. I think I ended up with 8 cups total, but I was able to freeze some for future use.
After I got that rolling I broke out the mixer to make some pizza dough. While letting that rise I worked on tomato sauce and then proceeded to garlic soup! It all worked out perfect. The tomato sauce made about 2 and a half cups, so I had plenty of that to freeze as well. I used some of my both for the soup. I had read that the longer you let your pizza dough rise the better the flavor and that was true too. And the garlic soup was something new. We didn’t hate it, but we didn’t love it either. In fact Geoff and I both agreed that it is missing something, so that will be one that I have to work on.
Geoff and I were both a little skeptical of how the pizza would turn out. But it was fabulous. Mixed with the garlic soup it made for a great dinner.
What have you been cooking lately?
{My cookbook that has the garlic soup recipe had a side note that “the garlic soup will give you a great sense of well-being, and is a treat for garlic lovers”. This was true. Geoff and I felt very light, content and healthy after eating it, but also realized that we are not lovers of garlic in big amounts.}
