potato leek soup Archives - Mamma's Cooking

One pot meals

My husband is always happy when I make a one pot meal. He is the one who does the dishes 🙂 A one pot meal can be anything from soup to chili to pot roast to pasta. Fewer dishes means less time in the kitchen and more time for the many other tasks you have to accomplish or maybe (gasp!) even give you 5 minutes to take some time for yourself.

One of the favorite one pot meals in my house is my Hot and Sour Soup.

It only takes about 20 minutes to prepare and is the recipe I chose to display when asked to be one of the featured blogs on Wayfair.com’s Stock, Soup and Multi-Pots page. Check it out!

If you don’t like hot and sour soup, try my French Onion, Butternut Squash, Sweet Potato Coconut Curry, Potato Leek or Carrot Ginger soup. One pot can also make amazing chicken stock or healing chicken noodle soup.

Another flavorful meal you can create in a snap, is my One Pan Roasted Chicken.

Serve it with some zoodles and you have a tasty spring-like meal!

Chili is a one pot meal that can either be made in your slow cooker or in one pot on the stove. My Crowd Pleasing Quinoa Pumpkin Chili can easily be made, simmering on the stove in 2 to 3 hours.

Quinoa risotto is a decadent and healthy one pot meal for dinner one night on its own or you can serve it with some leftover chicken or steak.

One pot meals are versatile and easy. Try one of my recipes above! Let me know how it turns out. Let me know if there are other recipes you want to see.

Sweet Potato Coconut Curry Soup and my favorite soups from 2016

Soup is warm and comforting especially on crazy cold, rainy/snowy and windy days like we seem to be having here south of Boston. Coming in from shoveling, walking the dog or just your hectic day, having a bowl of soup is a great way to slow your day down and unwind for even 5 minutes, while you enjoy it.

Here is a great recipe for one of my favorite soups which happens to also be naturally vegan and gluten-free.

Sweet Potato Coconut Curry Soup

Ingredients

½ of a large sweet onion, thinly sliced (about 2 cups)

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 Tablespoon of olive oil

2 medium Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and diced (about 2 cups)

3 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and diced (about 6 cups)

2 Tablespoons fresh grated ginger

3 cups vegetable OR chicken stock

13.5 oz can coconut milk

1 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

Directions

Cook onions and garlic in the olive oil over medium heat, until tender. Pour into your crock pot and put the crock pot on high. Add the potatoes, sweet potatoes, ginger and stock. Cook on high for about 4 hours. Once all the potatoes are tender, puree the soup, either with an immersion blender or allowing to cool and then carefully pour into your blender or food processor. Puree until smooth. Add the coconut milk, salt and pepper. Cook for another 30 minutes in crock pot and then serve.

Here are my other favorite soups from 2016:

Butternut Squash Soup

Potato Leek Soup

Hot and Sour Soup to Warm your Soul

Chicken Noodle Soup

Any of these would be a great addition to your New Years feast! I am making French Onion soup 🙂 Recipe will follow in 2017!

Happy 100th Birthday to Julia Child!

Next Wednesday, August 15, 2012 marks the date that would have been JuliaChild’s 100^th birthday. Restaurants around the country are doingspecial menus to honor Julia Child. PBS has lots of specials on TV among otherfun things on their website. Cooks and Bloggers around the country are writingand cooking to honor her memory. Here is one with 8 ideas on how to honor Julia from Robin Shreeves at the Mother Nature Network. I am going to try to make one recipe a daynext week from one of her cookbooks to honor her legacy. The French Chef was the first cooking show Iwatched on TV growing up. We watched a lot of PBS. She pioneered the era of cooking shows whichhas now exploded with popularity to a point I’m sure she probably couldn’t evenhave imagined. We all like to pretend we are cooking on a cooking show in thekitchen (don’t tell me you have never done it!) while making a meal and veryfew of us will ever get the chance to, but she made gourmet cooking accessibleto home cooks.

I have been reviewing Julie Child recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking to find some easyones and maybe one challenging one to make this week. If you are bored with your regular weeklymeals, picking a theme and sticking to it one week a month or however often youhave the energy for, can help spice things up (pun intended)! Or choose one night a week to make a newrecipe or make one of those hundreds you have pinned on Pinterest.

Pick a Julia Child recipe to make this week inhonor of what would have been her 100^th birthday. Don’t beintimidated. You don’t have to pick sweet breads or duck, or a fancy multi-step,multi-ingredient recipe. Make a quiche, roast chicken, pork chops, boiledartichokes or buttered green beans. It’s still a Julia Child recipe. Her goalwas to make gourmet cooking accessible to home cooks.

These are some of the recipes I’m hoping to make this week:

Chocolate Almond Cake, p677. Supposedly one Julia’sfavorites.

Boeuf Bourguignon, p.315. I’ve never made it and think Iwill while watching Julie and Julia.

Potato Leek Soup, p.37. One of my favorites. I’ve never madeJulia’s recipe though.

Quiche au fruits de mer, p.149. Sounds really fancy, butreally is just eggs, shallots or onions, butter (of course), lobster, shrimp orcrab, cheese, cream, tomato paste, salt and pepper. She also adds Madeira ordry vermouth, but I don’t have those and don’t usually by whole bottles ofthings for a couple of tablespoons, so I’ll use something else like whitebalsamic vinegar. I might even buy the crust. Shhh…don’t tell.

Crepes, p.190. These are just fancy pancakes that my kidswill hopefully love!

Moules A La Mariniere, p. 227. This is one of the onlyrecipes that I am repeating. I’ve made it before and loved it!

Poulets Grilles a la diable (Chicken Broiled with Mustard,Herbs, and Bread Crumbs), p.265. I chose this recipe because I already haveeverything for this in the house! It is similar to how I usually make chicken,but with basting. I don’t usually baste. Maybe I’ll do it, if I can stop thetwins from reaching into the oven.

Roasted Pork marinated in Marinade Simple (Lemon Juice andHerb Marinade), p.376. I also chose this one because I have most of the ingredients.

Artichauts au Naturel (whole boiled artichokes), p. 424. Probablythe easiest of the recipes. We’ll see what the kids think of these.

I’ll probably pick a couple other vegetable recipes too.

If you don’t want to cook, go out and have some oysters anda glass of champagne and have a toast to Julia Child!

#CookforJulia

Sundays at our house…

Well, I’m back to work now and even though I’ve been stocking the fridge (and freezer) I’m trying to cook 2-3 meals on Sunday to take us through most of the week for lunches and dinners and saving the reserves for Thursday through Saturday. Its fall here in Seattle so I have been making soups. I bought a 2o lb bag of potatoes at Costco (don’t ask) so many versions of potato soup are making their way into my freezer.

I actually used the last of it today making potato leek soup. I peeled and diced up about 6-7 small to medium sized yukon golds and put that in the slow cooker with 3 diced leeks, 6 cups of chicken stock, salt and pepper, 3 sprigs of rosemary, 3 sage leaves, and about a teaspoon coriander. Stir and cook on high for about 30 minutes. Then turn down to low and cook until potatoes are very tender (can smash them into the side of the crock pot easily with the back of your spoon), 6-8 hours. Then remove the sage leaves and rosemary sprigs. Use an immersion blender to blend everything until smooth. Add about 1/4 cup of white balsamic vinegar, cup of fat free half and half and 1/4 cup of unsalted butter, blend together and let cook on low for about another 3o minutes. Add more salt, pepper, half and half, or vinegar to your liking. Here is another recipe I have also used in the past.

I also made a beef stew with turkey bacon, onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots, Worcestershire sauce, balsamic vinegar, apple cider vinegar water, coriander, salt, pepper and rosemary. So good.Cook bacon, onions and garlic then sear the meat, add rest of ingredients and cook in a low oven (about 275) for about 3 hours.

Then for dinner we had chicken and spinach enchiladas. Store bought cooked roasted chicken, shredded. Defrost frozen spinach. Shred about 4 cups of cheddar cheese. In a lasagna dish roll chicken, spinach and cheese into whole wheat tortillas and place in row. Pour jar of Goya tomatillo salsa over the top and then top with some of the cheddar. Cover with foil and cook for 35 minutes at 375 degrees. Uncover and cook for 15 more minutes. Serve with sour cream.

This is what my stove usually looks like now on Sundays:

Another fall favorite is butternut squash soup. Here is my recipe.

I bought my first acorn squash of the season today and cannot wait to roast it. I love the fall!

Happy New Year! I’m back…

As I suspected, once I started my full time job, on top of being a full time mom, the blogging kind of took a backseat. The cooking also has. I have been cooking on weekends and we survive on leftovers until Wednesdays, then Thursdays and Fridays are either pasta, chicken fingers or fish sticks with sweet potato fries or takeout 🙂

On the weekends I have been cooking 3 large meals. One on Saturday (like mac-n-cheese), then on Sunday while I’m making dinner I make 2 meals (like a pot roast in the slow cooker with mashed potatoes and squash and then turkey chili on the stove). One meal for Sunday and one for Monday night. This also helps because then we have ready made leftovers to bring for lunch through Wednesday or so.

This takes a lot of planning so I have been planning on Saturday and then shopping either Saturday or Sunday for the week. I am looking into grocery delivery services to make this easier.

My news resolution is to try to keep writing as much as possible about what I’m cooking for our family.

Last night for our New Year’s Eve dinner I made potato leek soup and moules marinieres. The soup is made in a similar process to my butternut squash soup. This is not a healthy soup, but is soooo good. Melt 1/2 cup of butter in soup pot. Then saute 1/2 medium size onion with 2 large leeks and about a tablespoon of garlic. Add salt, pepper and some fresh thyme to taste. Once onions and leeks are soft, about 10-15 minutes, add about 1/4 – 1/3 cup white balsamic vinegar and let that reduce. Then add about 5-6 small yukon gold potatoes (sliced thinly). Add more salt and pepper to taste. Stir and let cook for about 5 minutes. Then add about 8 cups of chicken stock (or veggie stock if you are making it vegetarian). Let this cook for about 30-40 minutes. Once potatoes are soft, take off heat and use immersion blender to make a smooth thick soup! Add more seasoning if needed and more stock if too thick.

The moules marinieres are simple and not bad on the budget. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a deep saute pan that has a lid. Saute 2-3 chopped green onions (the white parts, save green for topping once finished) and 1 Tablespoon of garlic. Then add in 1/4 cup white balsamic vinegar, 1/8 cut white wine vinegar and 1 cup of chicken stock. Let this reduce by 1/2 (about 10-15 minutes). Add 1 lb of mussels (which have been cleaned and debearded. Let them soak in cold water for about 20 minutes to let the sand fall out). Cover and cook for about 10 minutes. When all open (or most and discard the closed) serve with crusty bread!

Happy New Year and happy cooking!