I'm not giving up just yet . . .

Doesn't this look divine? Homemade cream of asparagus soup,

made with the ends of our Easter asparagus.

I sliced the pieces lengthwise and simmered them in water until soft.

Next I pureed them in the pitcher blender, added milk, onion powder, dried thyme, black pepper and salt. I thickened the soup with a slurry of flour and water. At the very end I swirled in 2 tablespoons of butter.

Don't you think this would be wonderful? Looks can be deceiving, however. I call this "cream of dental floss soup." The entire batch has short little bits of floss-like fibers throughout. My family thinks it tastes wonderful, but agrees the texture is off-putting.

But I'm not giving up yet. If it has "texture" perhaps I just need to lose that texture amongst other textures. My thought is to use this soup as a binder in a rice and chicken based casserole, one that also has some diced celery and perhaps some diced red pepper. I'll use brown rice, which adds more texture than white rice. And I'll give it a cheese and crumb topping. 

It isn't so much that I don't want to throw away costly food, as the asparagus ends were something most people discard anyway. And the rest of the ingredients were budget-wise too. It's the time and effort that I put into making the soup that I can't seem to just let go of. And that is what's driving me to use a soup that we simply didn't enjoy.

Have you ever cooked a dish that you didn't care for, then remade it into something else, hoping it would be better enjoyed in a new rendition?

In any case, I try to use every last bit of food in our house. And I'll try to use this highly textured soup in one way or another.

Bean Efficiency

We've been shying away from using beans in everyday dinners for several months. Then at our most recent hot dog cookout last Saturday, as I was putting out side dishes, I had a thought that baked beans or BBQ beans would be so good with that meal. And I've often thought how quick and easy bean and cheese burritos would be to make on a night when I needed a meal on the table in a hurry. But alas, cooking beans from dried requires advanced planning.

On Monday afternoon I was restocking containers of dried foods in the pantry, and I saw that the pinto bean container was about empty. This was the end of the previous sack of pintos, and I have a replacement sack of pintos ready to be opened. So I decided to cook up all of the older pinto beans and prepare them in a couple of ways that my family would enjoy.

And that's what I did. I cooked up the pintos, refrigerated them overnight (I got a late start cooking beans on Monday), then today I made enough refried beans for 3 family meals of burritos or beans to go on nachos and 2 family meals of BBQ beans to have with a hot dog cookout or to serve with cornbread and salad/fruit for a simple supper type of meal. I've now got 5 family meals of cooked and seasoned beans to help ease us back into putting beans on our meal rotation.

I know, a lot of folks cook up lots of beans at once and can or freeze those cooked beans. I just haven't consistently been one of those people. So this was my version of cooking beans once to eat for several meals.