yum

[liralen]

Crisp crusted French style bread with just a hint of the nuttiness and chewiness of whole wheat flour, sliced thick with just a sheen of butter on the surface. Dipped into a thick soup of carrots, celery, onions, sweet pepper, red potatoes, chicken and crisp, sweet, fresh corn all seasoned with salt, four peppers, a pinch of cayenne, plenty of chicken stock, and a half a handful of dried parsley. All the vegetables were cooked al dente, still firm enough to give good bite, but not crunchy.

Since it was so cool I settled down and really cooked something that took a while on the stove and in a fairly hot oven. It's been quite a while since I did that. Soup and bread, the simplest of meals. The soup was actually mostly from leftovers and vegetables from the farmer's market that was only going to go bad if I left them too much longer. The bread took ten minutes of work while Jet napped and then another ten minutes while he was playing. I'm still amazed at what just flour, water, and a bit of yeast can do. It was so good right out of the oven. And the neatest thing was that the majority of all this was vegetable or grain and very little fat or meat.

I've decided that two dinners a week get to be 'healthy' things, with more vegetables in our diet and just plain less fat and salt and stuff. It'll, hopefully, help expand my repertoire of more healthy, whole foods. That may help change our eating habits in the longer run to stuff we can run longer with. This was quite the success, so I'm encouraged.

Comments

[ambar.livejournal.com]

My yen for homemade bread and butter does not need to be fed, Liralen!

But I'm glad you're having fun. :-) I have a whole lot of homemade chicken stock lurking in my freezer, but it's not going to be cool enough to inspire me to haul it out until the rainy season starts hereabouts...

whoops!

[liralen.livejournal.com]

<giggles>

Sorry about that!

Mmm... homemade chicken stock. With as many chicken carcasses as we go through in a month, I should probably have some homemade stock as well; but I'm lazy. There was this really cool idea of putting a cardboard milk carton in the freezer and popping stock bits into it until it's full and then just dumping it into a stock pot with water which I might start doing now that I'm going through so many more veggies and all the usually tossed veggie bits could go into that carton. Since compost is pretty much impossible in this high desert climate, it's the other way to use all the bits.

But I completely concur about not using it until it's a decent temperature outside. It's been so miserably hot around here for so long, yesterday was quite the fun relief.