Cooking

I've broken out the camera more times in the past few days than I have probably my entire adult life put together. Not sure how long this will continue. I'm just not much of a photograph guy and taking still-lives of things I've cooked is a little bizarre.

I'm putting up two things. The first was a dish I had been hankering for and decided to fix again. It's a celery soup from the website 101 Cookbooks. As a matter of fact, here's the recipe link. No sense recreating it here. It is also noteworthy when you compare pictures.

Here's my before picture (I like these before and after things) with all the ingredients.


Here's the after:


Mine differs in that my celery had no leaves with which to make the pesto and I used basmati instead of wild rice. Oh, and I used chicken stock. I love my version. It's tasty and has a great celery flavor. Unlike most celery soups, this keeps all the veggies intact - no efforts at turning it into some unidentifiable cream soup. I also think it is more filling this way.

The second thing I made yesterday was a sweet potato flan with sesame cookies. I forget what the exact recipe is called but it came out of Deborah Madison's Local Flavors cookbook. I love Deborah Madison. I was vegetarian for a number of years and relied on her cookbooks and the Local Flavors one was a new one issued this past year.

I give you four pictures. First, when the milk exploded on the stove (yes, I have an electric stove. I hate it). It didn't look like it was boiling and then it erupted. The second photo is the finished product. The third is my assistant helping with the cookies. The final one is a serving with the nicest cookie. The cookies are cool in that they make neat little C-shapes.






The flan is really not much more than a glorified sweet potato casserole. It was really tasty but I'm not enamored with it enough to put it up here. Besides, if you eat vegetables, you should get Deborah's cookbooks. And if you don't eat vegetables, you should eat vegetables and then get her cookbooks.