Homemade Soup is Fast Food!

The other night I came home wanting to cook something quick and use up my carrots and potatoes I still had.

When speed is of the essence, I pull out my pressure cooker. Mine's not a fancy one, but it cooks veggies great and soup is done quick as a snap.

I peeled some carrots and potatoes and tossed them in covering them with water - maybe double or triple the amount of veggies.

While that was coming up to pressure I cut up an onion - not too finely because of my later trick - and a couple of garlic cloves with some fresh basil.

Seven minutes of pressure cooking later, I ran the pot under running water to release the pressure quickly. I opened the top, tossed in the onion, garlic and basil and cooked it down for about 10 minutes while adding some Creole Seasoning. I didn't measure anything. I just seasoned to taste.

I also had maybe an ounce of coconut milk left in a can in the fridge so I tossed that in for a touch of creaminess.

When it was all done I grabbed the immersion blender and let it rip at slow speed to just mix it a bit. I left some small pieces of carrot and potato just for fun. It was good with a salad and some pita bread I had.

Homemade Carrot Potato Soup done in less than 30 minutes.

The carrots were left over from another great recipe I tested for Julie Hasson's upcoming "Vegan Diner" cookbook. I've been cooking lots of new recipes from it.

This is really going to be an awesome cookbook. Here are some shots (from my lousy camera, sorry) I took of some test recipes (note: some of these recipes are still in development, but they're all great.)

Carrot Pineapple Loaf Cake - also great with a schmear of Tofutti Cream Cheese.

Grace's favorite - a rack of Banana Biscuits, which are almost like scones.

Smoky Potato Scramble, which stars an amazing ingredient I had never tried before.

My FAVORITE - Orange Cornbread Waffles. I can't tell you how many of these I've eaten. Incredible!

Breakfast Benedicts

Sorry for not posting lately. I have been cooking new recipes, but all I can share are pictures so far because I was fortunate enough to be chosen to be a recipe tester for an upcoming cookbook called "Vegan Diner" by Julie Hasson.

Julie is the incredible video chef and baker at Everyday Dish TV so I was thrilled at being chosen to help test her recipes for her next cookbook.

I can tell you beyond any doubt this will be her best ever. If you haven't seen her making her wonderful recipes on the videos at her website, check them out. She also has a subscription option for some of her more incredible recipes, but many are free.

I wrote about one of those a few posts ago when I mentioned her Spicy Italian Vegetarian Sausages recipe. This was the one that was so good and yet easy to make that it swept the internet when she posted it last year.

This is Julie's first all-vegan cookbook, and will use comfort/diner food as the theme. How fun is that!

So far I've made two different kinds of pancakes using variations as Julie has refined them with her testers' input, breakfast sausage patties, and these Breakfast Benedicts, which have no eggs (natch) and I made using three of her recipes.

First, I started by making her Fluffy Biscuits, an option she gives in the recipe.

This batch was pretty fluffy, but I've since learned to follow her guideline on dough thickness before I cut them with a glass turned upside down. Her recipes are FULL of tricks and hints like that.

With the biscuits finished, I moved on to the making the bennies and one of her simple and healthy Hollandaise sauces (this was a Lemon Garlic one before I thinned it out a bit) to top it off. Here's the final product:

This was so good I ate two of them.

Bird Update:

On my last post I wrote about our back patio dartboard cabinet that had been used by at least two bird families so far this Spring. Grace told me it was actually four by that time and a fifth was looking at moving in on the nest.

She described as though it was bird house hunting. One day, the empty nest was spotted and looked at by one bird. Shortly thereafter, we cleaned the empty nest off and the dartboard inside to make it usable again. For us, I mean.

The next day, she swears she saw the same bird come back with another bird and it was like, "I swear, Alice, the nest was right here!" "Sure, Ralph, you made me come all this way to see an empty lot with no improvements. Honest, you have the worst sense of direction! And you call yourself a bird?"

- The Honeymooners as played by doves.