Cold Potato Soup (+ carrot recipe)

Searching for something to  do with 5 boiled potatoes that were hanging around my fridge, I checked out MANY, many recipes for cold soup.

In the end, I decided to combine the potatoes (and their cooking liquid) with some pan roasted onions, and the leftover cooked carrots from yesterday's carrot experiment (I can't help it. Carrots are cheap, so I keep buying and serving them, but everyone is getting bored of eating them.  I cut the carrots into "coins" and pan roasted them in my cast iron pan with a little oil, then added a mixture of honey, ginger, garlic, and teriyaki sauce, and reduced. I thought it was tasty, and most of my kids ate it...)

So here's how I turned it into soup:

5 med. size potatoes, boiled
cooking liquid from potatoes
1/2 c. pan roasted, carmelized onions
1 c. cooked carrots (these were seasoned as mentioned above, but I'm sure you could do this with plain ones, too)

Combine in a bowl, and puree using an immersion blender. Or use a food processor and process in batches.

Add salt and pepper to taste. If you need to thin it down, you can add a bit more water.

Serve cold.

Shared with The Hearth and Soul Blog Hop, July 4th 2012

Foraged Greens in My Soup

Tonight's supper was a little last minute...

I was out in the back with the kids this afternoon and they had this desire to weed the yard (and the area right behind our yard leading out to the field). So we pulled up lots of milk thistle, and a bunch of dead branches, and picked some mallow too. The milk thistle got a taste of my scissors as we collected it - so much easier to take the thorns off the leaves BEFORE bringing them into the house...

(While we were out there, we discovered a scraggly looking prickly-pear cactus that had been hidden behind a bunch of dead branches. Time to clear out  that area - maybe we'll be able to nurse that cactus back to health? And enjoy the fruit at some point?)

So, I washed, checked, and chopped those greens, then wilted them in my cast iron skillet. Then I stared at them... Once wilted, a whole bunch of greens doesn't look like so much food...

Here's what I made with them:

1 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, diced
3 large potatoes, diced
cook the above in a soup pot, with olive oil, till browning and fragrant.
Add water, soup stock, spices to taste (I only used salt and pepper).
Bring to a boil.
Add wilted greens.
Lower flame, and simmer about 10-15 min.
Serve hot with some croutons!

That was our yummy, if slightly too peppery, soup tonight. A few of the kids EVEN asked for seconds. Sounds like this recipe is a keeper!!

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Tonight's menu was a little too starchy, but just helped me use up things we had around the house. I'm wondering if I can get by this week with only buying milk. What are the chances?!


Potato soup (with fennel hidden inside of it. Too late, family who is reading this after the fact, you ALREADY ATE IT!) - dice and saute large amounts of onion, garlic, fennel bulb, and potato. When the onions are translucent, add water, salt, and pepper. Bring it all to a boil and cook till the potatoes are soft. Puree the whole thing and serve with croutons or your favorite soup addition.

Pasta with cheese sauce / Pasta with tomato sauce

Cucumbers, Avocados, Purple Cabbage

Shabbat Parashat Eikev, Aug. 19-20

I am back in the business of cooking for my family! The oven is here, and is ready to use.

Here's our Shabbat menu (sorry, I ran out of time to write up recipes!):

Gezpacho
Some sort of Baked or Roasted Chicken
Roasted Potatoes
Roasted Vegetables (I had onions, green peppers, mushrooms, and tomatoes for this)
Corn Bread
Rice
Fresh Fruit
Chocolate Cake

I also made chocolate chip banana bread, for a Shabbat treat.

What's on your menu?

Tuesday Night, July 19, 2011

Post-fast menu... this should be interesting. The pickings around here are getting pretty slim!

Here's what I can improvise:

Pita crisps


Mushroom Quiche


Pesto infused roast potato wedges (I only have a couple of potatoes)

Couscous (as an alternative to the potatoes!)

Sliced cucumbers

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

I decided that not going to the supermarket is good in so many ways - I don't lose hours in the checkout line, my kids don't lobby me to buy ice cream and popsicles and chocolate, so I don't have to listen to all that whining, and I don't spend $ on gas (and everyone knows that is a huge budget buster here! Recently, one of the gas stations here lowered their price to under 7 NIS per liter, and I was so happy. Until I realized I must be crazy. It's still a TON of money.).

So, I'm trying really hard to stick to the pantry challenge.

Here's tonight's plan:

Tofu sloppy sams with pitot

Steamed kishuim (summer squash similar to zucchini)

Homemade oven-baked "french fries"

Melon

And now I'm off to spend the day with my kids!
Let me know what you're making, and if you're doing a pantry challenge, let me know how it's going!

Monday Night, Feb. 7, 2011

I ended up going out shopping on Sunday afternoon, only to be very disappointed with what I found. I went to Kimat Chinam, where for the past few weeks I have found amazing produce deals, and for the past few months in general  has had very good produce pricing... only to discover that they raised all their produce prices (cucumbers for over 5 NIS/kilo, for example)! So, I left and went to Mega, since I noticed an ad the other day about some low produce prices.

At Mega I found a bunch of produce, so I bought according to the sales. Once again, we have lots of cauliflower. I'll have to get creative with cauliflower! (I also found tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, and red peppers for decent prices)

Let me know if you are finding stores with good produce sales! (The shuk here in Teverya isn't really less expensive than the supermarkets, only perhaps right before closing, but that timing doesn't work out for me right now...)

Tonight's menu is a bit different. We like to mix things up every once in a while....

Breakfast for Supper!

Omelets
Cut Veggies - carrots, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes -  with avocado dip
Hash Browns
Carrot muffins
Citrus fruit salad


Some notes about these dishes:

My kids think omelets are so much cooler than scrambled eggs, so we'll go with omelets.


I have tons of avocados left from when I bought them at Yesh for 1.99NIS/kilo a week and a half ago. They are all ripe now. So, avocado dip is in order. I'm going to try to freeze some, as rumor has it that does work. What do you think?

Hash Browns allow me to pretend that I really am a southerner. I like to think I have southern roots, even though they're not very deep... I like potatoes in most any form, in any case, so I will introduce my kids to the idea of hash browns tonight!


Citrus Fruit salad - I have been buying all those citrus fruits that are in season right now. We have white grapefruit, pink grapefruit, pomelit, naval oranges, and clementines right now (yes, we also have lemons, but I'll leave them out of the salad!).  My 6 yr old really wants honey-cinnamon oranges, so I'll indulge her and make them again.


Let me know what you think, or what you're making for supper tonight!

Monday Night

Aside from the frugal aspect, I'm looking for easy meals. We usually have busy days, and since I homeschool my 4 kids, I really don't have much downtime...ever.

For Monday evening, I'm looking to incorporate leftovers into the plan (I've been trying harder not to have to throw those out. If you have tips to make sure that leftovers get used up, please share! My kids sometimes groan when they see a food served "AGAIN".).

I just took stock of the fridge, and while most of our Shabbat food actually got eaten (and the leftover barley went into the freezer), we have plenty of vegetable noodle soup left!

(By the way, I'm really big on soup right now. It's winter, and we live in a "warm" location in Israel, which means we have a poorly insulated house and not-so-efficient heaters. And it's raining - a good thing! In other words, sometimes it's colder inside our house than out, and I'm too frugal to heat the place all the time!)

So here's what we'll be eating (it's a vegan menu!):

Vegetable-Noodle Soup
Sloppy "Sams" in pitot
Steamed Cauliflower and Broccoli
Oven-crisp Roasted Potato Wedges
I rarely do dessert during the week, but maybe I'll even bake muffins! I have a few wrinkly apples to use up.

Some notes about these foods:

The soup is the same one from Friday night. I keep all my Shabbat soups pareve, so I can use them again during the beginning of the week.

Sloppy Sams are Vegetarian Sloppy Joes. I'm making these with drained and crumbled tofu (I buy these at Kimat Chinam; if you buy 3 tofu cubes at a time, they are 3/23.99 NIS. Does anyone have a better deal to share?), browned in olive oil with diced onion and peppers, cooked with tomato paste, water, and spices. We still haven't worked out the perfect combination of Sloppy Sam spices, so if you have any TNT recipes, please share!

Cauliflower and Broccoli - the cauliflower was on sale for 1 NIS/kilo, so we'll be going heavy on the cauliflower, light on the brocolli. The best price I found for broccoli was 8 NIS/kilo at Yesh. Kimat Chinam was 14 NIS/kilo and Rami Levy something like 17 NIS/kilo. My kids love broccoli, so I figured I would have to continue to buy it and stretch it with the cauliflower...

For the Potato Wedges, I usually combine olive oil, mustard, garlic, salt, and pepper. Mix well with potato wedges (just scrub and cut - leave those peels on so you get the vitamins and trace minerals!), and bake in the oven at 400 F till crispy and turning brown. The kids like to eat them with ketchup...

Today's Menu

Today seems to be a "Pantry Challenge" Day. If you're not familiar with the idea of a pantry challenge, I'll give you a quick explanation:
A pantry challenge is when you challenge yourself to cook meals only using the food you already have in your house - pantry, fridge, freezer - without running out to the store. (There's a Yahoo group I've been a member of for several years devoted to this practice. People get really creative!) Some people do a Pantry Challenge when their budget is too tight, and they really cannot afford to shop anymore till the next paycheck, some do it because they simply aren't able to get to the store (that's me!), and still others do it as a "test" - to see if they are stocking up on the right things when they shop. This has lots to do with emergency preparedness, and also everything to do with bargain hunting.
I haven't been to the supermarket since 9 days ago (no good reason, really), so the food situation in my house right now is interesting, to say the least.

For now, my menus are going to focus on Supper (or Dinner).
I found a bunch of wilting broccoli at the back of the fridge that must get used - or thrown out, and that would be a shame - so I'm building my supper around that:

Minestrone Soup
Crustless Broccoli Quiche
Baked Potatoes
Cut veggies with dressing (all that's left are tomatoes and orange peppers, so that's what it is!)