Slow Food Weekend

With DH and the girls both gone, I am in the enviable position of having no-one to please but myself when it comes to meals. Yesterday I had a craving for pumpkin pie, and after looking around, I settled on a somewhat exotic recipe calling for sweet potatoes and coconut milk called cazuela pie. As I took the fragrant spiced sweet potatoes out of the oven, it made me crave a soup I had had somewhere in my past- sweet potatoes, peanuts, coconut milk and spices. I filed that thought away and continued making my pies.

The pies were done, half of one eaten, and the craving persisted this afternoon, so I turned to my most likely friend in such a food emergency: the Rebar cookbook. I found it immediately: African Yam and Peanut soup with ginger and pineapple. (Recipe is found here... is this even legal to type out recipes from books and publish them on the Internet???)

Anyhow. Unwilling to take any short-cuts, I made a lovely vegetable broth from leeks, celery, carrots, fresh garden herbs and spices, and then used this broth as the base of the yam soup. All afternoon I chopped and stirred, blended and sampled. It's funny how I usually couldn't be bothered to go to this lengths for dinner with a house full... but perhaps since it was only me, I took great pleasure in the preparations.

Dinner was excellent. A glass of Merlot, some whole-wheat naan bread, and a beautiful creamy orange soup graced with cilantro and dull red squiggles of hot sauce. Should have taken a picture but I was too hungry. An excellent recipe, though pretty time-intensive. Fortunately, I'll have left-overs for days, and a freezer stocked with delicious soup.