The Trunk's Junk: Makin' food

And as if we didn't do enough on Saturday, we TOTALLY maxed it out on Sunday. I don't know where the motivation OR the energy came from; it's like I was trying to get 2 weeks worth of work done in 2 days.

After we woke up, had breakfast and walked Rosie, we got to work. We started out by de-seeding more pomegranates. After that endless and messy task was done, we started getting ready to make vegetable stock. I had been saving the veggie extras in a bag in the refrigerator, and I figured I better do something with it before it all went bad. I'd never made stock before, but it didn't look too hard. While I was getting that ready, I let Izzy try to peel some carrots to make a carrot salad. Look at her sticking her tongue out.....THIS is something she gets from Joacim ;)

And yes, you must check out the outfit. I think this was outfit #2 of that day. I had taken her shirt of during the poms because it's so damn messy, and she just neer put it back on.

Here's our carrot salad. Joacim's mom made this when they visited in 2008, and I've made it ever since. You shred about 5-6 carrots, peel a couple of clementines, mix in a little sugar and lemon juice and voila! I added pom seeds too because they're just so damn good! Easy, light and healthy.

Then we made some cheddar broccoli soup using this recipe. I LOVE the soup from Panera, and this is pretty close. Making it at home allows me to control the salt content better, because the Panera recipe has a ridiculous amount of sodium in it. I used low-sodium broth, and held back on the cheddar cheese a bit. It's probably not a huge difference, but it's an attempt.

And THEN I made some baked potato soup using this recipe. I did make a few modifications though. But I DID cook real bacon...for this sometimes there's just no substitute.

I went ahead and cooked all of the bacon and drained all but a tablespoon of the fat, and then pretty much followed the recipe. I DID use the vegetable stock that I had made earlier, and it was a nice addition...it made the soup MUCH lower sodium than it normally would have been because I didn't add salt to the stock.

After the potatoes were cooked, I pureed the mixture in a blender. I think Oprah's recipe was for a smoother soup, but I wanted something a bit chunkier, so I boiled some Yukon gold potatoes in another pot (diced into ~1 inch cubes) and added those to the soup when they were cooked. The gold potatoes are nice because they've got a firm texture that holds up well to re-heating the soup. Here's the final product...soup garnished with the bacon pieces, some cheddar cheese and fresh chives that I'm growing. Oh. So. Yummy.

And it made a HELL of a lot of soup.

Here's our bounty from the day....a total of 14 cups of veggie stock, 6 bags of potato soup at 1 1/2 cup each and 5 bags of broccoli cheddar soup. I froze everything. This makes for a quick, easy go-to meal, especially for lunch.