Saturday, March 7, 2009

Cream of Mushroom Soup

Day 66: Recipe 14

Friday night after the fun scallop experiment I went through and made a menu plan for the week, because I've decided that I need to stop making excuses for not cooking, and just do it. It helps my mood so much, so I just need to get it done.

One of the things that I've found is that there are a handful of "quick and easy"-type recipes that require cream of something soup - most often, cream of mushroom. So when I was looking through recipes I've bookmarked from A Year of Crockpotting I decided that a good place to start would be to make my own cream of mushroom soup!

My husband was less than thrilled with this proposal, since he's not a fan of mushrooms, but he was a good sport and let 2 pounds worth of mushrooms cook in the apartment all day anyways. The recipe is modified because we only have a 4 qt crockpot, and she suggested a 5 qt for the proportions she mentioned (though now I think I could have done her proportions with my size anyways).

Cream of Mushroom Soup from A Year of Crockpotting

1.5 lbs mushrooms
1 cup water
4 cups vegetable broth
juice of 1 lemon
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
3/4 tbsp dried minced onion
1 1/2 tbsp Italian seasoning

3 cups milk (added later)

Wash and cut up your mushrooms. Dump in the crockpot. Add the spices. Add the lemon juice. Add the vegetable broth and water.

Cook for 8 hours.

With an immersion hand blender, blend it all up. It will look kinda grainy, but it doesn't taste that way - just make sure all the big chunks are blended.

Stir in the milk. The only thing we had in the house was lactose-free milk, which tends to be a little on the sweet side, but it was fine.

Let it cool on the counter for a few hours. We watched The Wrath of Khan to kill the time.

Stir it to mix up anything that may have settled, and then pour it into whatever storage device you're using. We used sandwich-sized freezer bags. Freeze them flat, then you can store them wherever you have room once they're solid.

Survey Says
It was good! Even Will said that "it was okay." He's also said that he's "willing to try more of it." For someone who hates mushrooms, I'd say it was a ringing endorsement.

I used the same amount of pepper as was used in the original recipe, and there was a bit of a kick to it, so if you're really sensitive to spice, I'd tone it down a bit (or use more mushrooms). Also, it didn't have the thickness that I'm used to with regular cream of something soups - it was pretty thin, but I didn't mind that.

Definitely using it in recipes, and just eating it all alone.

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