Vegetarian Recipes

It must be almost spring…

…because I actually want to cook interesting things again and not just live off frozen food and take out.

A week or so ago, while I was out enjoying a shockingly 60-plus degree day, I picked up a loaf of Eli’s sourdough. The first half of the loaf was spectacular; the second half, sadly, went rock-hard overnight. What to do with half a loaf of stale bread? As I thought about what to do, something kept tickling the back of my brain. Some kind of soup… recipe posted by someone I like… has bread in it…? After several fruitless searches, I finally found it:

bread soup from Everyone Likes Sandwiches

Titled, obviously enough, have stale bread? make bread soup! over at the perennially rad Everyone Likes Sandwiches, I quickly adapted the recipe to what I had on hand — most notably, I replaced the stock with water and a crusty old rind of Parmesan I had hanging around, which gave the broth a meatiness I think it would have lacked otherwise. It was fantastic.

(One caveat to this soup: don’t make more than you can eat in one go. This soup defies the First Law of Soup Alchemy [soup is always better the next day] and made for a really bland, squashy lunch the following day.)

After making something actually really good, I was so delighted, I promptly went online and ordered a slew of cookbooks from the library. Some of them have been disappointments (too complex and/or too many unusual ingredients I will use once and then let quietly expire at the back of a cupboard), but two of them have had me reading long after I should have gone to bed: Mediterranean Harvest and Olive Trees and Honey.

As I was reading Mediterranean Harvest last night, I leapt up from the couch, grabbed some yogurt, some coffee filters and a colander and made some strained yogurt.

I have not leapt up to do anything since Daylight Savings Time ended.

I think this is a sure sign of spring.

(Photo credit: Everyone Likes Sandwiches)

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