Thursday, March 31, 2011

Fairytale Forest Soup

Sometimes, it's just one of those grey days. It may begin with a beautiful, sunshiny morning, and as the day wears on, it becomes progressively more and more overcast and grey. Today was one such day, and such a day calls for hot soup, cello concertos, and classic Fairy Tales.

Ingredients:

  • 3 medium-sized potatoes, cut into medium-sized chunks
  • 2 long onions, peeled and grated
  • 5-6 baby bella mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
  • 1/2 of a medium onion, diced
  • 1/2 cup of lentils, washed and picked over
  • 1/2 cup of buckwheat groats, washed and picked over
  • 3 cups of chicken stock
  • 3 cups of water
  • 3 tsp salt
  • 1 good pinch of Vegeta
  • 1 bay leaf
  • a sprinkling of ground pepper
  • a dash of nutmeg


Directions:

  1. Sauté the mushrooms, onion, and carrots in the bottom of your soup pot with 1 tsp of olive oil until the onions and carrots are slightly softened.
  2. Add the potatoes, the chicken broth and water, lentils and groats.
  3. Season with salt, Vegeta, pepper, nutmeg and bay leaf.
  4. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for about 20 min, or until the potatoes are easily broken apart with a wooden spoon and the lentils and groats are soft to the bite.
  5. Adjust seasonings and serve with a dollop of sour cream and toast, rubbed with garlic.
Potato chunks, chillin' in their water bath :)

All chopped up

Give them a good stir...

Add the stock (and water!)

And, finally, your potatoes,

lentils, and

groats!
Fairytale Forest Soup :)
Try before serving! You may need to adjust the seasonings.


This soup is best prepared while listening to Mstislav Rostropovich and other masters play classical cello, preferably for free on Pandora Radio, and best eaten after reading or watching classic Russian Fairy Tales :)

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

There are some changes here...

So, my laptop no longer likes my camera :( As a result, I can't post any pretty pictures, and as everyone knows, posts with no pictures are no fun ;)
  Therefore, I'm going to take a slightly different approach to this blog. Since it will probably be a while before I get a new laptop (NOT just because of the camera issues, silly! It badly needs to be upgraded anyway...), I'll be using the time I spend web-surfing to put together pretty things to show you guys, a la "A Cup of Jo."
  Cool? Cool :)

First up:
  I LOVE these dishes! They're so pretty, and elegant-looking... Now how should I go about convincing Hero we need new dishes? Maybe we lose all our old ones during a move?;)



Then, there's this pretty selection of tops and jewelry trinkets from Charlotte Russe (THANK you for coming to my corner of the world!)




And to round it all out, I've been craving chocolate like mad lately, and this recipe for a cookie looks like it might just fit the bill. OhSheGlows is generally super-good with quality control-testing, so I'll have to give it a whirl and see where it takes me :)

Have a beautiful day! :)