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.

New Stoneware

Ryan got a new stoneware round baker thing for Christmas. He has been wanting one for awhile, so he was very happy to finally be the proud owner. Stoneware, as many of you probably know, spends the first few months of its life with a cook being seasoned--absorbing all kinds of fats and oils so that it can make its own non-stick coating. You're supposed to bake some high fat items on it at the beginning to get it on its way to a happy, non-stick life. The first item we baked on it was biscuits (ok, I say "we" but it was really just Ryan--I had no part in it other than saying that I wanted biscuits for breakfast). They were very tasty, but not exceptionally helpful for the stoneware in its quest to be seasoned. So we decided to try something else. Since this new stoneware was from Pampered Chef, it came with a variety of recipes in which it (along with many other specially-named Pampered Chef products such as the "3-qt. Batter Bowl," etc.) could be used (all Pampered Chef products come with recipes in which they can be used--even things like strawberry corers--which, of course, have some sort of fancy name that appears somewhere in bold in the recipe--like to make a strawberry banana smoothie, "core all the strawberries with the Strawberry Coring Device." Anyway, back to the story). We took Blueberry Pizza Dessert to the January potluck at our church. Granted, what we actually took was "Mixed and Mashed Berry Pizza Dessert," but it was based on the Pampered Chef Blueberry Pizza Dessert recipe. It was very good, and since it has a real recipe, I'm going to include it here. The special name for the new stoneware is "Deep Dish Baker," which seems a bit odd to me since the depth of the baker is about 1.5 inches....

Blueberry Pizza Dessert
1 package (18-19 ounces) yellow cake mix
1 1/4 cups quick cooking oats (We used regular oats.)
1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 egg
1/2 cup chopped nuts (Ryan chopped the non-chopped almonds that we bought because they were a lot cheaper than pre-chopped nuts.)
1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 can (21 ounces) blueberry pie filling (We used semi-defrosted/semi-mashed frozen mixed berries--a whole bag--with a bit of sugar.)

Preheat oven to 350. In a Classic Batter Bowl, combine cake mix, 1 cup oats, and 6 tablespoons butter until crumbly (Pampered Chef must not make a pastry cutter or it would be mentioned here since that's the easiest way to do this). Reserve 1 cup crumbs for topping. Blend egg into remaining crumbs. Press into Deep Dish Baker forming a short rim. Bake for 12 minutes. Meanwhile, to reserved crumbs add remaining 1/4 cup oats, 2 tablespoons butter, nuts, sugar, and cinnamon. Mix well. Remove base from oven and spread with pie filling. Return to oven and bake 15-20 minutes or until crumbs are light golden brown. Cool completely. Cut into wedges. Serve with a dollop of whipped cream (oh, yeah, we skipped the whipped cream).

Happy Valentine's Day!

We forgot to set an alarm last night, so we slept in a bit. Hence, Ryan had to start working right when he got up. He was so deep into his work that he didn't notice me making noise downstairs (except when I had some crashing going on trying to get out the big thing of cookie cutters my Aunt Susan gave me a couple years ago--then he asked me if I was okay, but not what I was doing). So I made these biscuits, and right before they were done, I went upstairs and asked him, "If you were to have biscuits today, what would you want as topping on them?" His answer: "Pink with your face on them." I looked at him like he was nuts, so he said, "Chocolate chips? Is that the right answer?" So I had to clarify that I meant in the butter/jam/honey category. He then gave a very reasonable answer involving butter (ok, so it's margarine--not that it matters, just maintaining the accuracy of our reporting) and apricot low-sugar preserves (we recently discovered, compliments of Ryan's parents, that Smucker's low-sugar preserves taste a lot better than the full sugar stuff without any nasty-tasting artificial sweetners--they use half the normal amount of sugar so the taste actually resembles fruit instead of sugar with a faint hint of fruit). So I went downstairs, took the biscuits out of the oven, laughed at how some of them had risen, and margarined and preserved (hey, butter is a verb, why not margarine and preserve in the sense of jam?) his five biscuits and put "my face" on one of them with raspberry preserves--so it was kind of pink. He was shocked that I was so fast seeing as he had not noticed the noises I had been making previously were all involved in the biscuit-making process, so the biscuits were already done when he placed his order. You may notice that he didn't take the picture until he had eaten one and a fifth or so biscuits.