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I somehow have accumulated some cookbooks even though I don't cook. Given my recent decision to cook once in a while with ingredients and not bags or boxes of food, I recently looked over what I had. I settled on Meatless Meals for Working People: Quick and Easy Vegetarian Recipes as my starting point. This seems pretty much perfect for me since I lack skill and usually complain about the time commitment of cooking.
Alex helped me choose Cream of Broccoli Soup as my first recipe and even went shopping with me at Giant. Maureen saved the day when she told me I didn't need to own a steamer to steam vegetables. Already the secrets of the world open up to me.
Then I get home to cook and called Maureen to ask her about whether I should chop the vegetables before steaming them. Then I actually read the ingredients: 1 pound broccoli, chopped. Ah ha. RTFM indeed.
Chopping was pretty easy. By the way, chopping broccoli is really messy.
For some reason this recipe called for using soy milk instead of normal milk. On the one hand this is fine since I don't have milk in the house. On the other hand, it's a Vegetarian cookbook, not a vegan one, so what gives?
Maureen's steaming trick worked like a charm. I even used a Pyrex glass I did not know I owned. Blending in the Oster was awesome. Cooking was pretty straightforward. I had to season with pepper, salt and tarragon twice before it tasted right.
My last question was answered by Rachel when she told me to sprinkle the cheese on as I served rather than while the soup was cooking.
I thought it would be odd because of the funny smell of hot soy milk, but it was pretty damn good.
Notes for future: I didn't use the big stalky parts and this seemed fine. I had four normal bowls and there's a small bowl left. The cheese was Cheshire Farmstead Imported English cheese. It was like cheddar, organge, crumbly, sharp and good.
