Let's Dish - January 2025

If you've talked to me in the library, you know that I am a huge fan of movies and TV. Something else I'm very passionate about (and need to make an excuse to do more) is cooking & baking. I love trying new foods and recipes and sharing that with loved ones. With this blog series, you get to come along for the ride. So, let's dish!

It's National Soup Month again! This year, I found 101 Greatest Soups on the Planet by Erin Renouf Mylroie. A very boastful title, but I don't think it's entirely wrong. I made three different soups from the book and still have plenty more bookmarked to try later.

The book is very straight forward and jumps right into the soup recipes. Most seem to be very basic as far as cooking skills involved, so extra information isn't really needed. To start off, it has some recipes for broths if you prefer to make your own. But, to quote Ina Garten, store-bought is fine.

One nice addition is the table of contents. It lists every soup and what page it's on, so if you're looking for something specific, it's easy to find.

The first soup I made was the Hungarian Stuffed Cabbage Roll Soup. I love cabbage rolls and never even thought of a soup form. Even though I have had stuffed pepper soup and it's a pretty similar concept.

It took a bit of time between cooking down the cabbage and simmering everything together, but otherwise was very easy. The flavor was delicious with a little tiny kick. I had picked up some fire roasted diced tomatoes for another recipe and used those in this as well and loved how that turned out.

One thing is, for leftovers, you will need to add more broth or some water when eating. As it sits, the rice will continue to soak up the liquid. I used water and didn't find it to dull the flavor since I didn't have a ton.

Tip: when you're cooking your ground beef, a great way to get rid of the rendered fat is with paper towels! I just use some tongs and soak up what I can with the towels and toss. No need for draining!

Next, I made the Lentil Vegetable Chili with Honey-Drizzled Cornbread Dumplings. Again, easy. And it's pretty customizable. For the veggies, you can use whatever you like or what you have on hand. I used yellow squash, corn, poblano pepper, carrots, and celery.

The recipe calls to add your veggies when you add your broth, but I wanted a bit of browning to them, so I added them with the onions and garlic. This will probably depend on personal taste and the veggies, but it worked well for me!

I definitely want to try adding the cornbread dumplings to other soups. They were so good! And the honey added some sweetness. Again, customizable depending on how much you add.

Finally, I made the Smoky BLT Tomato Soup with Homemade Croutons. Probably the easiest of all three.

I feel like this is something else you could customize a bit. One way I did was by adding some red pepper flakes. I thought it was missing a little something. You could also use different bread for the croutons. I stuck with the sourdough, but I think any kind of bread you liked would work. Personally, I'm interested to try with sweet Hawaiian.

I really liked the addition of the lemon cream cheese. It made it creamier and added some extra flavor.

Tip: when making the cream cheese mixture, use a little whisk! The recipe just says to "combine" the ingredients. Using a spoon wasn't helping the mixture come together for me as well as I'd like. The whisk helped so much.

If you love soup, I think this is the perfect book. I've talked it up to coworkers and patrons already. As I've already said, I have so many recipes bookmarked for later. A couple I think might be up next are the Sunset Butternut and Lentil Stew and the Cider Braised Beef Stew.