Say Cheese!

Yesterday I ran into the Fleece Lady at the market (selling her lovely fleece goods!) and she mentioned that she had bought some fabulous tomatoes and intended to bring salsa today. I had been thwarted in my attempts to buy cauliflower (no more until the fall - boohoo!) from the farm gate, so I spent a bit of time trying to think of some kind of soup that would be complemented by a salsa appetizer and I decided on cheese.

I had a lot of half & half left over already, so a creamy soup was in order anyway. This turned out to be one of those soups where I just cannot allow myself to add up the cost of it or I we'll be eating oatmeal all week to stay in our food budget. Some soups are like that...especially anything with dairy, but they are usually sooooo worth it, and this time was no exception. I made a lovely cheddar soup with carrots, potato & onion diced up very small, and a hint of sherry. Another problem with expensive soup is that the recipe never makes very much and so even though I tripled the recipe, I only just filled the crockpot. Usually I have a couple of quarts left over to refill with, but not this time. We did not run out, but the last five people to show up did have smallish portions.

Luckily, there was lots of bread, the aforementioned salsa & chips, blueberries brought to us by The Writer, and grapes and more blueberries brought by more guests and cake. Yes, cake! The Older Sister had a birthday yesterday, so today she wore the traditional Sunday Soup Birthday Princess sash and I made a cake for her. She had told me that she wanted a vanilla cake with thick frosting. I wasn't sure if she meant a white cake or a vanilla cake, but I took her at her word and found this recipe online. I added the innards of one vanilla bean to the batter to really up its vanilla quotient, made a vanilla butter cream frosting, and put raspberries and frosting between the layers. It was quite decadent.



The missing raspberry is not because I ran out, but because a certain Birthday Princess thought that she needed a raspberry, and it was her cake after all! You'll remember that I'm teaching The Sisters to cook and it is apparent that we have a ways to go because the Older Sister was surprised to hear that I made the frosting. I make the butter! I make the bread, the soup, crackers, everything you eat here! I can only assume she didn't know one could make frosting. Well...we are going to be having some more cooking lessons ASAP! My work here has clearly hardly begun. But it's fun work and it looks like yummy lessons are in order.

We had a large gathering and it has become apparent that we really need to enlarge our deck, so I think we'll order the supplies and then maybe everyone can come a few hours early one week and we can just knock it out. I'll make cake.