The Elf's New Clothes

WELL, Y’all! It’s about time, for sure!! Thanks for your patience during this extended absence from the Kinky Elfery Kitchen. We are not COMPLETELY finished but enough to where we were able to COOK a real recipe yesterday. And it was a recipe worthy of a newly painted kitchen and cabinets! We'll share some pictures later, but right now, we need to COOK!! The recipe we prepared yesterday was REALLY REALLY good! Vegan Wild Rice and Mushroom soup. We first saw it on the Simply Vegan Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/groups/SimplyVegan/

compliments of Andrea Karsch’s post. We are HUGE fans of  both wild rice and mushrooms, so we had to make it. We looked up the original recipe and went from there.

https://lifeisnoyoke.com/wild-rice-soup/

So, we got our ‘mise en place’. Left to right, we had a mixture of coarsely chopped Baby Bella and Shiitake ‘shrooms, chopped carrots, chopped celery, soaked cashews, Thyme, Bay leaves, Cannellini beans, and the ever present chopped onions.

Though the recipe calls for Vegetable stock, we always use The Gentle Chef’s vegan Golden Chicken Bouillon, so that’s what you see here.

After that was nice and hot, we added our vegetables along with the wild rice.

Just a cautionary note here, if you try this recipe, it’s a good idea to read through the instructions a couple of times to make sure you get the order of things. We almost didn’t, so just a head’s up. This cooks, covered, for about 30 minutes. As that thirty minutes is winding down, we prepared our ‘vegan cream’ from drained cannellini beans, soaked cashews (is there anything a cashew can’t do?), and a cup of our ‘chicken’ bouillon. That gets blended to smoothness which takes about 2 minutes.

Next time, and there WILL be one, we’ll blend it a bit longer just to assure additional creaminess, but this worked quite well. The cashew cream mixture is added to the cooking veggies and rice along with the mushrooms.

This cooks for another 15 or so minutes until the rice is done and the soup is nice and smooth. We did tweak things a bit for our tastes. For example, we are not huge fans of an intense thyme flavor and this recipe calls for a TABLESPOON of thyme leaves. We only added 1/2 T and it was ‘perfectly thymed’. We also snuck in a bit of a kick to it by adding (incrementally so as not to explode our mouths) some Scorpion Pepper salt; probably about a teaspoon.

The result was quite a lovely soup. Very creamy, tasty, with great texture and substance.

We have already decided on a couple of new tweaks for the next batch, which will be soon. In addition to the extra time in the VitaMix for the cream mixture, we will use the same mushroom mixture chopped even coarser AND sautéed prior to adding to the soup (which means adding later in the cooking routine since they are already cooked).

We already have them prepared, sautéed with EVOO

and deglazed with Pinot Grigio.

And finally, we are going to go out on an herbal limb and substitute tarragon for the thyme.

Y’all, you have NO IDEA how happy Your Elf was/is to get back in the kitchen. We were like a fish out of water, an Elf without a country, a dog without a bone, and a elephant without a trunk. Completely discombobulated! Not to mention the canine upheaval that occurred with people going in and out all day long. But now we are heading toward normalcy. Take a peak. The stove area,

the other side of the kitchen area,

and a big ole cabinet area.

We even splurged on a new Keurig. It’s actually a gray lavender color that doesn’t quite show up in this picture.

AND, last but not least, even your Elf got a new look!

A GREAT new Elf hat compliments of Angel “Myth Hattie” Trott. She and her husband Toby are ProgDay buddies, so ‘hat’s off to Angel’. Your Elf loves her new ‘clothes’!

So, that does it for today…we apologize for being a day late but will get back on track for next Sunday. Until then, remember always to Look for the GOOD, be an EXAMPLE of the GOOD, and ACT for the GOOD as HARD as you can, in as MANY WAYS as you can, EVERY DAY that you can.’ DO EPIC and evil will never win!

Your Elf