Potato-Leek Soup

Food Guy has a YUMMY potato-leek soup recipe. The base is from Alton Brown, and to this FG has added bacon and a step of deglazing with white wine. We like to keep it chunky at the end instead of perfectly smooth.

Sweating Vegetables:


Add chicken stock:



Blend and eat!

Kudos to Mr. Brown; we love this recipe with a hunk of bread. We generally ration ourselves so we get two dinner soups, a lunch soup for lunch the next day, and then enough to freeze a portion or two to pull out another night.

Week ending 1/17 round-up

Fitness round-up: Ran once. In there I did run a mile at 10 minutes, surrounded on either side by some walking (and some gasping for breath, not going to lie). Going to do better next week.

Food round-up: This was a good food week—the menu worked really well. On Sunday, Food Guy and I spent a few hours in and out of the kitchen, making Potato-Leek Soup for Sunday dinner and Monday lunch.



Since I’m rarely home to help with the cooking, I asked if there was anything I could prep for the next few days. He doesn’t like to chop veggies too far in advance, so there isn’t usually anything, but instead we started making the tomato sauce for Monday’s dinner. We had two big pots simmering and cooking, and once the set up was complete it was mostly the occasional stir. And with two of us in the kitchen, we could wash dishes as whoever was at the stove finished with them. This prep helped Monday be not nearly as crazy.



We had two healthy meat free nights on Wednesday and Thursday, and Friday night we ended up having friends over and just serving various dips and cheese and snack foods that we all ate as we felt like it, so we still have our fish in the freezer for this week. The Tortilla Stoup was lunch two days, and I love it—I’d never had tomatillos before this recipe and I love the way they taste in here (although Food Guy had to go to three stores to find them, so I have to limit how often I put them on our menu! And despite his Italian heritage he’d never made meatballs himself before, so that was a fun project. We have plenty of leftovers for today’s lunch and dinner and will not have to leave the house in the terrible cold here and can have a long, lazy day at home cleaning up after our impromptu party and reading.

Frugal round-up: Suddenly having people over on Friday changed our budget for the week a bit. We bought two bottles of wine and chips and cheese, and ice cream although everything else we had on hand. (I like to keep the makings of my mom’s amazing artichoke dip on hand—three ingredients, 30 mins in the oven, and everyone always loves it. Not health food though.)

We did manage to save about $60 with the gift certificate my mom gave us. I put half into our Dream Fund, and half into our new Vacation Fund for the weddings we’re planning to attend.

Cooking with All Things Trader Joe’s

I saw Cooking with All Things Trader Joe’s in one of the publishing trade mags as a break-out book, a book that had just made a bestseller list somewhere. I mentioned it to Food Guy and he got it out of the library that day. We love Trader Joe’s —the green principles, the quality of the food, the set up of the store, and the prices, and each week consists of a visit there as well as one to a more traditional store in which we can get the cereal, tea, and other items TJ’s doesn’t sell.

My initial impressions of the cookbook were mixed, as the format is not as slick and glossy as the books I love to touch and drool over, and a lot of the recipes seemed overly simple. But on second thought that seemed like a good thing—this may really be a cookbook for those of us with real busy lives who can’t spend a lot of time in the kitchen. And while I’m lucky enough to have the equivalent of a personal chef, it would be great for both of us if I could make a meal plan with more days of simple prep and quick recipes. So I went through and chose a bunch of recipes for the next week.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Weekly Menu

Weekly menu: week starting 1/12/09

Mon: Spaghetti and Meatballs and small salad mostly a la Jamie Oliver (lunch potato leek soup)
Tue: Chicken Tortilla Stoup a la Rachael Ray (lunch spag & meat)
Wed: Big Salad and leftovers (lunch stoup)
Thurs: Corn and Black Bean Quesadillas a la America's Test Kitchen (lunch leftovers or caf)
Fri: Fish & broccoli (lunch quesos)
Sat: Leftovers
Sun: brunch at the in-laws