Sweet Potato Coconut Soup

Me. My blender. No ideas for dinner.

Soup.

32 ounces kitchen basics no salt added vegetable stock
A big can of sweet potatoes with most of the syrup drained
A can of Trader Joe's organic coconut milk
A tablespoon of cinnamon
2 tablespoons organic maple syrup
And a large teaspoon of nutmeg

I overblended to a thin liquid and put in the crockpot.

My husband had two bowls. I thought it tasted like something they'd serve in a fancy restaurant with sliced almonds and a dollop of some sort of cream in the center... Daughter, who loves soup and eats just about anything, HATED it. My heart is broken.

Two weeks! (and Paris)

It's been two weeks since I wrote in this blog, in part because of my trip to Paris. Ah, what culinary delights. I'm going to tease you now, by sharing some of my adventures and starting with my first lament.

Why can't Americans make a decent breakfast pastry? And a good cup of coffee? Starbucks exists in France now, and that confounds me. Why on this green Earth would you need Starbucks in France?  In the land of warm croissants, brioche, pain au chocolat, pain au noisette, pain au raisin, brioche au chocolat... Really, Starbucks?

Today I attempted my own café crème. My research suggested a tablespoon of warm cream in coffee brewed like espresso would do it. I pulled the cappuccino machine out of the basement and gave it a thorough cleaning. Then I prepared some Trader Joes whole coffee beans via the grinder. I measured out a guess of how much coffee I would need and brewed some Trader Joes coffee in my Krups machine. I warmed up some heavy cream, spooned it into demi-tasse cups and added the coffee and sugar.

It was good, but it felt thin. I'll keep trying.

Before I reflect more on Paris, I have to let you know I have completed two shifts at the Target café, my new part-time job. I purchased two of the turkey clubs I made and served with leftover Asian-style salad from dinner last night. Our Target is a "PFresh" which means it carries groceries and fresh produce but isn't a full SuperTarget. My employee discount is 10% and as soon as I get my Target Debit card, I'll get an additional 5%. This is cool news since some of the "splurge" items we like (like our blueberry cobbler coffee) are available at Target.

Avocado salad chez Célia's grand-mère

But on to food... in Paris. Some of these meals you will see me try to replicate. Like Célia's grandmother's avocado salad. I believe this is a vegan dish, if the recipe they told me is complete. It was very simple: avocado cut in chunks and a dressing of oil, vinegar, mustard and parsley. Good stuff. Really good stuff. I bought avocado and an Archer Farms lemon dijon mustard to try and do this.

frog with escargot in the background. I had already eaten one leg.

Something I won't be replicating really soon is my "tourist dinner" from Saint Michel. I ate escargot in this fabulous green sauce, frog, and rabbit in mustard sauce.

Pot au feu, so tender...

I would love to make pot-au-feu as succulent as Célia's grandmother prepared hers, but I have always viewed this as a dish for real chefs with lots of meat products that I'm not ready to deal with.

We'll call that post one from France. My next post will have to recount the ethnic foods I enjoyed.

Pasta with spinach in herbed lemon butter sauce

Since last week's pasta in lemon butter sauce was so popular I opted to try and repeat the experiment.

I started with the Le Creset skillet, a tablespoon of butter, 1/2 a clove of garlic, juice of one lemon, two tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, handful of fresh parsley from the garden, and several tablespoons fresh chives from the garden. I stirred over low while it all cooked. I believe I added another tablespoon or so of butter to balance the lemon juice.

Next I added about 1.5 cups chopped spinach leftover from the omelet the other day and increased the heat. Then I added slices of Trader Joe's chicken sausage with apples. Let that cook until the sausage browned and the liquid started to dry up.

I made some whole wheat rotini, put them back in the pan with another two tablespoons of butter and a trickle of extra virgin olive oil. Then I mixed it the spinach mixture from the skillet. Voilà, c'est prêt.

Leftovers in lemon-butter sauce

Today for breakfast we had raisin bran and I forgot to have my second breakfast. That made the morning challenging.

It's cold and rainy so my multigrain pizza crust didn't rise properly (still tasted fairly good and kind of like a soft pretzel). But the pan pizza came out nicely.

The perfumed pineapple, well, my daughter over perfumed it and I over-buttered the crumbs again so it was far from perfect but edible.

But I made up for all of this with dinner.

I started with some white rice in the steamer.
Assembled the following:

• Le Creuset skillet
• 1 clove garlic sliced
• extra virgin olive oil (cold pressed)
• butter
• lemon juice
• 1 crown broccoli, chopped into bite-sized pieces (2-3 cups?)
• 2 chicken sausages with apple (from Trader Joe's), sliced
• 1 chicken breast prepared "chicken frances" leftover from the diner last night, chopped
  
• leftover rice from the diner

• 1 slice garlic bread from the diner

Okay, so I started with two tablespoons of olive oil and a slice of butter in the skillet as I dropped the garlic in on low. I added the chicken, because it came out of the fridge and was cold. Then the sausage. Then the broccoli. Every time the liquid got absorbed, I pushed everything to one side of the skillet (now at medium heat) and added a couple tablespoons of butter and equal amounts of lemon juice and blended them vigorously. Then I let the sauce seep to the other side of the pan and mixed everything up again.

I probably made this little batch of sauce three times and then I added the leftover rice from the diner and two heaping serving spoons of white rice from my steamer. More vigorous stirring.

Then, when the liquid disappeared and the rice started to stick, I moved everything to the coolest side of the skillet, reduced the heat to low, and added another couple tablespoons olive oil and mixed it up one last time.

And served.

I put the garlic bread in the skillet (once I pushed everything to the side, again) and fried each side a minute to get it warm without getting it soggy. Who says you can't reheat garlic bread?

All in all, I used 3/4 stick of butter and equal amounts lemon juice for the sauce. I love lemon-butter sauce.

Sausage and rice with veggies

Tonight I prepared Trader Joe's chicken sausage with apples (3 sausages) in my Le Creuset skillet with about 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil and 2 cloves fresh garlic. When the sausage finished cooking, I sliced it and added the broccoli from one broccoli crown and a couple cups of fresh chopped cauliflower. I let that sizzle for a while until the vegetable soaked up all the "juice" and then I added another tablespoon olive oil, the last of my French butter (probably three tablespoons) and about three tablespoons champagne vinegar.

And then I added the long grain white rice I had cooked in the steamer with garlic powder and four color black peppercorn. (It was 1.5 cups unprepared rice) And stirred it all up and let it cook until the rice turned a soft yellow (and wanted to stick to the bottom as I stirred. I stirred constantly.)

I was nervous about it because of the champagne vinegar, but it was good. Really good. I had two plates and I'd really like another...

Eggs and Trader Joes sausages

My daughter woke up starved this morning and helped herself to a Nature Valley granola bar. This meant she had no interest in breakfast, so we started a school project instead of eating.

At nearly 10, I realized I was dangerously starving so I made us both scrambled eggs with parsley and the leftover chicken-apple sausage from Trader Joes.

Lunch will be leftover pasta, and dinner depends on whether or not my daughter has girl scouts. My thoughts are vegetarian cheese steak wraps, blueberry pancakes, or parmesan-herb breaded pork with a side of fresh mango and steamed veggies...

Cornichons

So my mom brought me these cornichons today... yes, because they were French. Stay tuned as I incorporate them into our lives.