Soup!

My energy has returned (hooray!) which means I can start being a little more creative with the baby food I have to eat while my mouth heals.  Instead of yogurt, applesauce, and mashed potatoes I've been making some healthy and filling cream soups the past couple of nights.

Last night Brahm and I recreated a cream of cauliflower and leek soup that we learned to make in a cooking class at Hole in the Wall last March.  It was super easy, super healthy, and super delicious.  I haven't made a lot of soups from scratch myself other than chicken noodle and the occasional broccoli-cheese, and I'd forgotten how easy this soup was to make.  Basically all you do is caramelize onions in butter, add your vegetables, boil them in weak chicken broth, add some spices, and toss them in a blender with some cream and that is actually IT.

This fall I was on a bit of a pumpkin kick - for whatever reason, I was just craving pumpkin a lot!  Mostly the seeds, but I also roasted and froze the better part of two medium-sized pumpkins.  I made pumpkin cinnamon buns (OMG so good but so much work), pumpkin pie, pumpkin fries (tasty but sadly not crispy), pumpkin muffins, and recently I added some pumpkin to a batch of homemade hummus.  And today, I tried my hand at pumpkin soup.

I couldn't find a recipe on the internet that seemed to have consistently good reviews for pumpkin soup but I figured if I just followed basically the same procedure as I did with the cauliflower-leek soup, how bad could it be?  Once again I cooked the onions, then added a few cups of frozen pumpkin chunks, water, a teaspoon of chicken broth powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, and some All-Bran cereal (I'm trying to work more fibre into my baby food diet), boiled it all up, blended with cream and it turned out pretty tasty!  Next time I'd skip the All-Bran but honestly it doesn't seem that out of place - the flavour "matches" anyway.

Not being able to eat solid food has been totally sucky, especially for someone like me who loves food and cooking - but I think I'll be making more soups now as a result of this week's successes, even when I can chew things again.  So I guess that's one thing I can thank my stupid wisdom teeth for?