We’re celebrating! Today Ward found himself on the last page of his “cooking notebook”. This is the notebook he started back in February, when he first discovered he really liked cooking. Since then, he’s carted this notebook around with him everywhere - it contains his shopping lists, names and page numbers of recipes he’s making and various food, cooking and wine thoughts.
Sometimes it feels like he’s been cooking delicious things for us since, well, since forever. So this morning we paged through his notebook, and it was so interesting to see his progression as he gained more and more confidence in the kitchen.
He also pointed out the page where he realized he’d have to start jotting down the names and pages of recipes as well as the cookbooks they came from. On that page is a long list of ingredients; he’d had various dishes in mind that he was going to try out over a few days. When he came home from food shopping that day, he realized he didn’t know what recipes he’d been intending to make!
We’ve been eating “internationally” ever since Ward took over the cooking, and this cooking notebook of his is one that we will cherish. He’s recently started jotting down his own ideas for recipes, so we think the next volume will be filled with even more good stuff.
We went to Staples this morning to stock up on more notebooks. He likes the Cambridge brand, because they’re a perfect size, and very very sturdy. And me? I just like that we have a record on paper of our food journey together!
The first time Ward made this Broccoli Soup, I thought for sure it had cream in it. Not much, but enough to give the soup a rich feel.
Turns out, I was wrong. What was in the soup? Basically, broccoli … and more broccoli.
Ward likes to make this soup because it’s super easy and the result is amazingly good. We’ve had it as part of a casual at-home dinner; we’ve also served it at a dinner party for 10, which simply required two batches in the blender, rather than one.
You can present it so elegantly when you have guests. We poured the soup into a glass pitcher, and poured it out at the table into bowls into which we’d placed the walnuts. We topped it with a chunk of Gruyere, which softened to a beautiful taste sensation.
This was actually our first introduction to Gordon Ramsay’s recipes; Ward found the video one night on YouTube. He was fascinated by the fact that the ingredients consisted mainly of broccoli and water, and since broccoli is one of his favorite vegetables, he just had to try it out. He had this smile on his face when I first tried it; the soup tasted so good, and I couldn’t believe there wasn’t anything in it but broccoli!
So here you go:
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