uh oh... mommy got a new cook book!

This whole cooking new things and eating new things hoopla has been going on for about 5 months now. My birthday was two weeks ago and I think my mother decided to tell everyone how INTO cooking I have become. Well... I don't think. I know. I know, because everyone and their mother gave me a cookbook for my birthday! All types of cook books. Everything from great female chefs and their recipes to a gluten free cook book. I am not allergic to gluten... but if you are, I can totally cook for you now.

In the past couple weeks I have leisurely browsed through Eat Well, Live Well, The Quick Fire Cook Book, and The Food Lover's Companion but one book in particular caught my eye. From the Kitchens of Martha Stewart Living comes Great Food Fast.

This book has AMAZING food photography and it has totally got me excited.

Side note... Martha Stewart's daughter has a tv show called "Whatever Martha" where her and a friend watch old reels from her shows and comment on them. Hilarious. I swear. Google it.

Ok... back on tropic. So I am flipping through all the yummy pages and I stumbled up on this...


POTATO LEEK SOUP!!!

This is a serious, serious favorite of mine and Martha seemed to have a really easy way of making it.

In. Sold. I had to make it. Until I got to the store and realized I actually had no idea what a leek was, let alone looked like. Luckily the bf got a clue and looked on the little hidden tags on the grocery shelves. Otherwise we would have been there for hours and my poor roommate would have been waiting at home for dinner!

Luckily, Martha made sure to tell me that leeks are often very dirty and hard to clean so you need to soak them in water.


Looks easy enough right? Well everything was pretty easy. Just hang out and cook the rest of the meal as the soup simmers. Piece of cake right? Right. Until you try and put your hot soup from the pot into you brand new blender that you have put together wrong and it leaks (not leeks) all over the kitchen and you lose all the broth!! I wish I had a picture of this incident but it was a little hectic w/ boiling leek broth dribbling all over the kitchen!

Luckily I recovered by just putting in some extra broth. That's part of the joy of cooking. It's hard to really really mess it up. You can kind of mess it up... but you can usually fix it.

Well... this is how it looked after I fixed it.


And of course, we couldn't just have soup. Here is the finished meal. Seared sirloin steak with parsley sauce, sauteed mushrooms and a red leaf lettuce salad with herb dressing. Oh geez. Now I'm drooling.


Love and Beer Floats
Angela