Rebecca Weger

My first thought after pouring the last of the coconut milk into the soup? “Oh.  You should have saved some of that to drizzle on top of the soup in some fancy pattern.  You’re never going to catch on to this food staging business.”  Luckily, that had nothing to do with how dinner tasted.  That, after all, is the priority.

Tonight’s dinner held lots of bits of excitement all rolled up together.

For one, it was the second time I’ve used our brand new crockpot.  My crockpot died a painful death a number of years back and I just never got around to replacing it.  It was expensive.  Where would I store it.  I stopped eating meat.  Recipes frequently called for things like canned soup that I can’t eat while gluten-free. Then we started eating some local meat.  Then the peer pressure set it ( you know who you are).  We bought it Friday. Saturday it was christened with a batch of stew.  That batch of stew helped burn off all the weird chemical smells of the new appliance.  Today we just got to smell dinner.  Starting at noon.

Exciting bit the second, I found a new cookbook.  I’ve had lots of cooksbooks over the years, and I simply rarely use them.  Long ago I had some slow cooker cookbooks, but they just weren’t my style.  Too many packaged foods used to cook food I don’t really like.  On our way to buy the new crock pot we stopped at a bookstore to see what was out there now.  We hit the motherlode.  I discovered “Make it Fast, Cook it Slow” by Stephanie O’Dea – hot off the press. On page 4 of the introduction I see a subheading: Everything is Gluten-Free.  I proceed to flip through the book and find the majority of her recipes use actual food ingredients.  Then noticed many of her recipes are vegetarian.  Since I couldn’t find the fabulous squash soup recipe I made up/cobbled together/wrote on the back of an envelope last year, I thought I’d try hers.

And third, we bought an immersion blender. Oh. My. Goodness.  And on a friend’s recommendation we cleaned it by using it in a container of hot soapy water.  I may never use my blender again.

So we made squash soup.  I followed Stephanie’s recipe to the letter until the end.  Well, except for adding a few cloves of garlic.  And her recipe called for a butternut squash.  I had two very small ones from the CSA share and a small acorn squash from our share a week or so ago.  We used all three of them together.  Then I added more cinnamon and a can of lite coconut milk.  I almost didn’t use the apples, but we had some tart ones around and I threw them is.  I’m glad we did.  It added just the right bit of sweetness.

We made a batch of one of my favorite breads, the same artisan seed bread from this post.  It was earthy and nutty, with 2 T of sunflower seeds and 2 T of toasted sesame seeds.  In a shocking performance we whipped up the bread, set it in the warm oven to rise, dashed to the mall for errands, and made it back just in time to turn up the heat and set it to baking. A couple of emails and tweets later we were pulling fresh bread out of the oven and beginning our first session with the immersion blender.  See above comment.

Dinner was on the table at a reasonable time, and despite making bread and soup, we didn’t actually spend all day at home making it.  The soup and the bread were both vegan and gluten-free, which just expanded our potluck repertoire – as long as I remember.