Creamy Vegetable Soup

I was bored tonight, so I decided to experiment while Ryan was working. I looked through our old Kraft Food and Family magazines, as I usually do when looking for inspiration (though I find them much more inspiring for desserts than for anything else). The recipe for Cheddar Biscuits looked good (and it had amusing cheesy pictures of a mother and daughter making them), but then I had to decide what we should eat with said biscuits. Not feeling inclined toward meat, I decided to make vegetable soup based on our experience with chicken pot pie since I felt that the chicken was completely unnecessary in that recipe. So I made the biscuits, put them in the oven, and then pulled out most of the frozen vegetable that we had and some carrots and onion. I chopped about 1/2 cup of carrots and 1/4 cup of onions (both in pretty small pieces) and stir-fried them in Roasted Red Pepper with Parmesan dressing (which is what we used for the chicken pot pie) for about 2 minutes. Then I dumped in the frozen vegetables, which included red pepper, snow peas, corn, peas, and mixed vegetables (probably about 3 cups of vegetable overall--maybe more--I'm bad at estimating such things). I let those cook for a few minutes and stirred them some, added rosemary, thyme, and a bit of savory, and then poured in 2 cups of vegetable broth. After boiling for about 2 minutes with the lid on, I let it simmer on low for another 3-5 minutes, then added about 3 oz of cream cheese and 1 tablespoon half-and-half (only because we had it in the refrigerator from making scones and it needs to be used). After the cream cheese melted, I let everything simmer a few minutes longer and then decided that I wanted it to have thicker broth, so I stirred in some flour. I was a little lazy about that with the first 1/2 tablespoon of flour and just threw it into the pot and stirred. It looked like we were going to have miniature dumplings in the soup, so for the next tablespoon, I applied the method I learned in....a Christian romance novel (isn't that where everyone learns to cook?!): scoop some of the broth out, whisk the flour into that broth until there are no lumps, and then pour the mixture back into the soup and stir. I'm not sure the flour actually contributed anything to the thickness of the broth in this case, but I felt better. I let it cook for another 2 minutes or so and then we ate. It was surprisingly good, especially with the biscuits (we did not put cream cheese on our biscuits, by the way, despite what the recipe says). I was thinking it was also somewhat healthy, but having reviewed the nutrition facts on the biscuits alone, I'm no longer convinced (though I did use skim milk...that has to count for something...and Neufchâtel cheese, not cream cheese). It does contain a lot of vegetables, so I suppose that's good.

Chicken Pot Pie

The other day (where the other day should be read as somewhere between the beginning of February and the beginning of May), after browsing through our collection of Kraft Food and Family magazines, we decided to make Deep Dish Chicken Pot Pie in our Deep Dish Baker (which, by the way, is not glazed with any color on the outside, but Pampered Chef has apparently discontinued that version...sad). We basically followed the recipe, but Ryan made pie crust from scratch instead of using a refrigerated one, I have no idea in what type of dressing we cooked the chicken (it may actually have been the one recommended in the recipe--if we had it--we usually just skip that part of the recipe but I know we didn't this time), we used more vegetables than suggested, and we added rosemary and thyme. Oh, and I'm sure we used less than a full pound of chicken because we rarely use the whole amount of meat in a recipe. It was really good (and pretty easy), but we're not convinced it would have been without the rosemary and thyme. I've decided that rosemary has recently pushed its way onto my list of favorite spices.

Scones

We ran out of muffin cups during Lent, and, as I had given up buying non-essential things at the grocery store considering the state of our pantry closet, no muffin cups were on the horizon any time soon. However, muffin mixes abounded seeing as I (before Lent) kept buying a few at a time whenever they were on sale. Ryan hates washing the muffin tins, especially when muffins have been made in them without muffin cups, and I'm not a big fan of it, either, so making muffin-cup-free muffins was out of the question. Hence, I started pondering the similarities between muffin recipes and scone recipes. After comparing them in Betty Crocker, I decided that I could make scones from muffin mixes as follows:

Dump muffin mix into bowl. Add 1-2 teaspoons of baking powder, stir all together. Cut in 1/3 cup cold butter (yes, butter--we have switched from margarine since we have become convinced that trans fats truly are awful for you--and us--though at the time I started these I was probably still using margarine or shortening if I didn't have margarine/butter) using a pastry blender--you probably want to cut the butter up into smaller chunks using a knife before attacking it with the pastry blender. When the mixture is the consistency that it should be (according to one scone recipe I looked at, it looks like "wet sand"--I just go with "fine crumbs" myself), add a beaten egg and a few tablespoons of milk and stir until dough comes together and leaves sides of bowl. You don't want to over-mix (same idea as with biscuits). You may have to add a bit more milk as you're going. I started just pouring some milk in without measuring at any point, but you want the dough to be kind of like biscuit dough, so don't add too much. If you're making the scones from a muffin mix that has things to add at the end, such as blueberries or apple filling, stir that stuff in carefully here--once, again, take care not to mix too much. Then, if you like round drop scones, drop the size you'd like onto a baking stone (or a baking sheet if that's all you have) and bake at whatever temperature the muffin box says for somewhere between 15-20 minutes (time is pretty variable on these--watch for whatever color of doneness you like and take them out then--I make it up every time). If you like triangular scones, you can knead the dough lightly on a floured surface 4 or 5 times, then squish it (okay, most cookbooks use the word "pat" instead of "squish," I think, but squish is more like what I do) down to the thickness that you think it should be before it bakes (they will rise some) either in a circle or a rectangle, cut that into triangles, and place the triangles on the baking stone/sheet (or squish it directly on the stone/sheet, score it into triangles and cut them apart as soon as you deem them baked to your satisfaction--but I think they take longer to bake using that method and I can't see any great advantage over separating them before baking. So it's your choice: break-and-bake or bake-and-break) and cook them the same way you would drop scones.

Having now used up all but one of our muffin mixes (and the last one is Cinnamon Streusel, which we had way too many of before, so I'm sick of them), I graduated to scones from scratch. The first ones I made were apple cinnamon streusel scones and chocolate chip scones based on the Betty Crocker recipe for basic scones. They both turned out more like flavored biscuits, so that recipe has since been abandoned. We had to take breakfast to church yesterday, so we tried two new scone recipes--this time Ryan picked them out. Both of them are from Joy of Baking. I was not impressed with the chocolate chip scones (though I did forget the egg wash and the cinnamon sugar, which may have helped), but the cranberry oat scones, even without the egg wash, the sugar on top, and the lemon or orange zest, were amazing. I was leaning toward the conclusion that I should just give up on chocolate chip scones, but Ryan says we should try making chocolate chip oat scones using the cranberry oat scones recipe, so we'll probably do that once before completely despairing. Oh, by the way, we only had salted butter, so I just left the salt out of the dough.

Based on these recipes, if I make scones from muffin mixes again, I will probably add 1/2-1 teaspoon baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, some oats, closer to 1/2 cup butter, and skip the egg instead of what I did before. They were good as described above, but more like rich muffin tops than scones, so we'll see if making these alterations makes them more scone-like.