One of my reasons

I have owned the New Basics cookbook for years, probably almost since it came out, yet I have never noticed the soup section. When I looked at it the other day, I pooh-pooed at the 90s-ish-ness of it. Make two creamy soups and pour them into a bowl from either side, make a lovely sight! Really?

However, some of these soup recipes seem quite enticing on their own. I long to try Beet Vichyssoise, for example. 

I made some bread (super easy, from a Company's Coming baking book I picked up at a Little Free Library) and thought we needed to have something not-very-carby to go with it, so made Broccoli and Spinach soup. 

I didn't have two big bunches of broccoli to hand, so pretended I was halving the recipe. I still put in an onion and two leeks, a carrot and six cloves of garlic. But I did use only one tomato. I started with their 4 tablespoons of butter but soon realized that was ridiculous and took half out before it melted. I used frozen spinach which seems to come in little pucks these days. A handful of spinach pucks was added. I forgot the lemon juice and added tarragon instead of the spices they suggested. 

I hesitated about making any of these soups because they all involve a blender, it seemed. Well, today I just stopped in a London Drugs to see if they had a soup blender, and indeed they did. So, although I have a perfectly good one in Toronto, I now have another one here. 

We made some turkey bacon and crumbled that in. Toasted bread made by me, a bottle of wine. Perfecto. 

Almost perfecto. It could have used that lemon juice for sure, and maybe a shot of tabasco. But it was just what we needed. 

This is why I am doing this cookbook challenge! Who knew this book contained decent soup recipes? Not me. 

Now that I have made one nice loaf of bread by hand, one might ask if we need the large bread machine that we don't really have room for here. Good question. I have two more envelopes of yeast so let's see what happens with that! Today's loaf was free-form, partly because that's what the recipe said to do, and partly because I don't have a loaf pan. But now I do have a new stick blender!

The adventure continues. Next time, bikes for sure.