Soup Night! Oh Yeah!

Beginning today you will notice a slight change at Adventures in Food and Wine. I will now post the recipe picture and a link at the bottom of the post to the recipe on Adventures Recipes. Please be patient with me as I learn more about blogging. I thought it might get too unwieldy and unorganized with all the recipes on this blog. One of the purposes of this blog is to help me organize the recipes I try. Hope you will like the new format. In the future I hope to have a drop down box like Sweetnicks does for the recipes also.

I went to the library today and picked up Cooking Aboard Your RV. We are planning to spend a few days in June on a houseboat. RV, houseboat, should be about the same so I thought I would check this baby out. If any of you know some good recipes for camping/houseboating let me know. I have been put in charge of coming up with the menu for this trip.

Today my DS Chris moved closer to home. He moved to Cleveland Ohio and arrived today. He will still be working in the restaurant business. He plans to come for a visit again soon and we hope to visit him in Cleveland. After all, Cleveland is the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and we have never been there.

I felt a bit ambitious today and made a couple recipes from cooking magazines. For me, nothing compares to hot soup and chewy bread for a meal. Brown Butter Soda Bread comes from the February 2006 issue of Bon Appetit and Kale and White Bean Soup comes from February 2002 issue of Gourmet. Both were excellent.

The bread was dense yet chewy and with the combination of rosemary and black pepper it is an excellent bread to serve with soup. This being a soda bread, it does not contain yeast which makes it great for throwing together without a lot of pre-planning. I changed the recipe a little by subbing some King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour for about half the required flour and subbing turbinado sugar for white sugar. I will be taking the extra loaf to work to share tomorrow.

Brown Butter Soda Bread

The soup was a bit more time consuming since it uses dried beans. I think it would work just as well with canned beans however. I like to use dried when I can because I think they have better flavor and texture. This is the first time I have ever cooked with kale and I must say it is good. I did have to fish the Parmesan rind out after cooking since it did not dissolve completely. I could definitely taste the Parmesan flavor however. I used Healthy Choice Keilbasa for the smoked sausage.

Kale and White Bean Soup
Isn't it cool that you can see the steam coming off the soup in this picture!

Tomorrow night will be leftover night since we have a lot of leftovers in the fridge. I have to work late anyway so a night off from cooking will be fine. I have been working on coming up with my own healthy muffin recipe. I have a few ideas and I hope to try one out this weekend. Until then.

Brown Butter Soda Bread
Kale and White Bean Soup