Sunday 2 November

I'm really happy to be over here on blogspot since it's so much easier to use. I'm going to customize it and make it all cool and even repost some of the old posts, but for today, all I'm going to do is this update.

Yesterday was a very nice Sunday Soup. I made a roasted potato and mushroom soup. Does that sound weird? It was actually delicious. I got the idea from baked potato soup. I've been wanting to make baked potato soup (minus the bacon bits) for a while, but you need baking potatoes. It was too hard to convince myself to go buy baking potatoes when I still have ten pounds (or more) of The Southerner's home grown potatoes (red, white, Yukon gold). So I thought to myself, well, I could roast these potatoes and see what I get.

I roasted about eight cups of potatoes tossed with olive oil, garlic, and two roughly cut onions. When they were all golden brown, I added them to vegetable stock and let them simmer for a while. Then I used the hand blender to puree them and thickened it a bit with a white sauce made with Silk (soy milk) and butter and flour. After seasoning it, I was pleased with it, but it looked kind of like mushroom soup without the mushrooms so I sent The Southerner to the store on his bike (a task he loves!) to get some shrooms. I sliced brown mushrooms paper thin and added them to the soup with green onions and simmered it until they were tender. It was really good! I got the idea for slicing them so thin from a soup I had in Victoria last Friday when we went for the day.

The "event" was very nice. We had five guests overall, and The Irish One went back to her generous way, bringing fruit salad that everyone enjoyed. The soup was good, but the challah bread was the real hit. It's pretty amazing bread. I braided it and put it in pans this time, rather than on a cookie sheet and it puffed up and was really large and gorgeous. I tried to take the first loaf out too early though and it fell apart. Part of the reason it stuck was because last week my pastry brush died (fell apart) after making bread sticks. I sent The Southerner to get a pastry brush and he came back with the only thing they had, a rubber, high temp, basting brush. We're so not going to be roasting a chicken or basting a turkey so when I said, "No worries. We'll take it back next time we're at the store." he was out the door and on his bike like a flash! Anything to ride that bike makes him happy! He's a double star!

Anyway, yesterday I had to brush the egg wash on the loaves with a spoon and some of it leaked down around the edges and glued the bread loaf to the pan. I waited a bit longer with the second loaf and used a knife to loosen it and it came out beautifully. I'm eating some of that right now as cinammon toast. Yummm.... Ken liked it so much that he stopped by this morning and when I let him inside he said, "Got any more of that bread?"

Some neighbours are getting me a slab of stone for kneading bread on and so I'll be making them a couple of loaves of this as a thank you.

Anyway, that's about it here at Anthony Sunday Soup. I hope you like the new blog, and sorry to those of you who have RSS feed and have to change it, but I think this will be better!