Soup's not dinner, Jerry. ~Kenny Bania

My husband and son would agree.  Not huge soup fans, particularly of the thinner ones.  And my husband really only enjoys them when the weather is cold.  Well, there are times when I could just LIVE on homemade soup and bread!  I didn't make bread tonight, but I did make a simple soup.

Ingredients for Sweet Potato Vichyssoise, and the cookbook.

Healthy Cooking for Two (or just you)

Looks like I didn't catch a picture of the completed soup by itself, so we start from the ingredients.

I made this once before and my seven-year-old niece tried it.  She's so cute...I guess the word "vichyssoise" is a lot for a kid to wrap her head around, so she called it "Sweet Potato Squishy-Squash".  I will never, ever forget that!  

This is a pretty easy soup.  It called for leek but I didn't have one so I subbed an onion.

Things get cooked.

Things get blended.

Pretty yummy way to get your beta-carotene.  Also, this cookbook is nicely set up with two sets of quantities for the ingredients - for two servings or four usually.  This is nice for smaller households.  My sweet potato weighed in at 1 lb, enough for the four-serving portion.  But I only defrosted 2C of chicken stock, the two-serving amount.  I figured I could just add water if I needed to, but it turned out pretty nice the way I did it.  It was thicker, so hubby liked it.  I did use butter and chicken stock, but I think this could be made very nicely as a vegan/vegetarian soup with just a couple simple modifications.

Now, that really isn't quite enough for dinner, unless your appetite is off for some reason.  However, I didn't have any meat defrosted, so I had to resort to an old fall-back.

Pierogies and sauteed onions.

Ok, that may not look like much but we hardly said a word during dinner....just a lot of quiet happy-noises.

The Victory Garden Cookbook

The pierogis are simple enough...buy at store, boil a few minutes, drain, saute in a little butter - and you don't even have to saute them if you don't want to.  You know what they are, right?  They're like fat little raviolis but stuffed with mashed potatoes and cheese.  How can you go wrong with that?  But I like a LOT of sauteed onions to go with them.

I love this cookbook - Marian Morash is so good about explaining all kinds of things about each major group of veggies.  She gives you gardening advice if you are so inclined to that.  She gives you a bunch of basic information about the item, basic ways to cook it, and some more complex recipes, too. I turn to this book for new ideas, and also for reassurance sometimes.  I think it's out of print (I heard they were going to reprint it at some point...not sure if it happened?)  Anyway, I've only seen it in a used bookstore once, whereupon I snatched it right up.  (I LOVE used bookstores for cookbooks!)

There go six medium onions...and I wish I had done more!

Here the onions are about done and the soup is waiting in the wings...ain't it purdy?

And there's the little dumpling darlings getting browned up a bit.


This recipe is vegetarian in the looser sense of the word, but it isn't vegan, since the pierogis had cheese in them.

This is a pretty easy put-it-together-quick sort of thing.  The pierogis could also be used as a side dish, but I never have.



~ks