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Archive for the ‘Holiday eating’ Category

New year, new me, blah, blah, Brussels sprouts

Time to get re-revved. I’ve rejoined the YMCA after 6 years away. I can walk on the treadmill, do weight circuits, take water aerobics, spin and zumba classes, swim laps. If only it weren’t so much easier to lie in the recliner, read novels (ooh, like Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior) and eat leftover Christmas candy!

birthdays 030

Birthday girl and fairy godmother.

Christmas around here really isn’t over until our middle daughter’s Groundhog Day birthday. Between Christmas and then we have 3 others — Vlad the Plaid’s, Dora the Explorer’s and middle daughter’s daughter’s — so it seems like a six-week present spree. With presents, of course, come cake and ice cream.

Actually, the best birthday meal we’ve had in forever was Dora’s fairy godmother’s birthday supper for her and Vlad at New Town Bistro in Winston-Salem. This is a modestly priced, pleasant little place our dentist recommended (!) as his and his wife’s go-to restaurant.  The food is consistently good and imaginative (although we still can’t figure out why the apple-chicken sausage with Vlad’s pork tenderloin), and the menu changes just enough to give it an atmosphere of adventure. The desserts are OK, but the emphasis is on meats and fish and vegetables. The basil-sprinkled sweet corn,  thumb-fat stalks of roasted asparagus, tender spring-green slices of fried squash, sautéed mushrooms with the sweet tang of red wine, Brussels sprouts with walnuts.

Now my daughters and I belong to a small but loyal cadre of Brussels sprouts fans. We’ve loved them since before they were trendy, since my mother cooked them only until tender-crunchy and served them only with a dab of mustard and a squirt of lemon juice.

Love sprouts but not cilantro which is in original Food Network recipe. I omitted.

Love sprouts but not cilantro which is in original Food Network recipe. I omitted. Photo: Christopher Testani.

Even before New Town, He Who Does Not Like B.S.  brought in a bag of baby sprouts from his winter garden. They were a pretty jade and closed as tightly as a sleeping newborn’s fists. I X’d their tender stems, sliced them in half and soaked them in salt water to discourage hitchhiking insects, patted them dry and oven-roasted them, using this Food Network magazine recipe. Even He said they were “interesting.”

Roasted garlic Brussels sprouts

Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a small skillet over medium heat; add 2 chopped garlic cloves and 1/2 teaspoon each cumin seeds and kosher salt and cook 2 minutes or until fragrant. Stir in 1 tablespoon brown sugar, the juice of 1/2 lemon and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Toss with 1-1/4 pounds halved Brussels sprouts on a baking sheet. Roast at 450 ° until tender, 18 to 24 minutes. Toss every few minutes but not so often you don’t get the little crispy bits which are the best part of this dish.

I can’t tell you how many servings this makes because 3 of us polished it off with seconds. We like our sprouts!

Category:

Brussels sprouts, healthy cooking, Holiday eating, Olive oil, Roasting vegetables, Rural life, vegetables

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Full moon setting; rosemary mashed sweet potatoes with caramelized shallots

Florida-grapefruit yellow moon dropping to the horizon outside study windows this morning, something I’d miss if I could sleep past 4 a.m. The last of the moonlight makes luminous the mist exhaled by the sleeping pastures, and I wonder, again, how I can leave this extraordinary beauty for a more prosaic site with more people,  more life.

Because I drove more than 150 miles yesterday for lunch with a cousin I hadn’t seen in 44 years, my glamorous second-cousin Amy with her mother’s smokey eyes and voice.  Amy’s dad and my mother were first cousins in the more-or-less gothic Lawrence clan. Not that they wore black eyeliner and tattoos, but each of the four children of Amy’s and my great-grandparents seemed to suffer blows beyond the usual twists in life’s journeys. Which doesn’t mean they weren’t beautiful and privileged — they were, all of them. 

So it was extraordinary to sit for several hours with someone who has her own take on our shared family dramas, who remembers me half a century ago, someone who was there when the elderly siblings dove into their Manhattans before every family celebration, someone who also beheld our formidable great-grandmother swathed in black and swirling snowflakes before the annual Christmas Eve blow-out. The Cheever biography I’m reading disparages autobiography-as-novel, but I think my mother’s family was the ultimate, hair-raising novel.

That’s my beautiful cousin on the right who looks WAAAAY more than 6 years younger!

But if they didn’t do well at emotional expression, they excelled in the kitchen. Thus, as their true descendant (even if I do look like her despised mother-in-law as my mother said all the time), I would rather cook and eat than say something meaningful to someone else or, for that matter, see long-”lost” relatives. Which is why I need to live where there are someones, particularly those who walk and hit the Y (which is what I’m going to do instead of joining Weight Watchers — I have to feel good enough to work out which is only going to happen with some water exercise classes).

My FB friend Peg R. has an interesting proposal, that all of us struggling with food/weight issues commit to being 3 pounds lighter by Jan. 1. (She’s also suggesting each of us be able to do as many pushups by then as we are years old, but that’s not going to happen.) A  manageable goal that should, nevertheless, make us feel that we’re constructively dealing with  the stressful holidays.

By way of a positive beginning, I gained nothing over Thanksgiving. It was more important to do things other than eating and, when eating, to choose the healthy foods. The following Nov. 2010 Cooking Light recipe is my go-to sweet potato casserole for the foreseeable future. Farewell marshmallows and gobs of butter; hello, crisply caramelized and lightly sugared shallots.

Rosemary mashed sweet potatoes with shallots

2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons good-quality olive oil, divided

3/4 cup thinly sliced shallots (about 2 large)

2 teaspoons brown sugar

2 pounds sweet potatoes, roasted and peeled

1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

Heat 2 tablespoons oil in skillet over low heat. Add shallots and cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Sprinkle with sugar; cook 20 minutes or until shallots are golden, stirring occasionally.

Nothing but healthy food and drink as far as the eye can see.

Put sweet potatoes through ricer. Add rosemary, salt and pepper, whisk until blended. Spoon into serving bowl; top with shallots and drizzle with remaining 2 teaspoons oil. Makes 6 servings of 202 calories, 6.3 fat grams each.

Category:

healthy cooking, Holiday cooking, Holiday eating, Importance of others to recovering addict, Weight loss, Why overweight?

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Ten commandments

Things I need to accept:

1. All weight “lost” will be found as soon as I think I can eat like a normal-weight person. I dropped to 186 pounds before my high school reunion in August and, magically, I’m back up to 203 after yesterday’s first of two Thanksgiving dinners this week. Beef producers should study my body chemistry for secrets of efficient and speedy weight gain.

2. I need to list everything I eat every day. I cannot decide I’m tired of logging into livestrong.com and just keep the list “in my head.”  I pride myself on my memory, but, amazingly, I can forget an entire sandwich when calculating calories eaten!

3. Sugar’s my gateway drug. That’s how three “tastes” of cranberry turtle bars wind up being three entire shortbread-cranberry-caramel-dark chocolate cookies. And a search for something to go with them because, after all, it’s late and eating supper at this hour should allow extra calories.

4. I am the Queen of Rationalization.

5. Sugar makes me feel lousy. After my usual overdose, my skin itches, I feel tired and “hung over,” my joints ache and — I don’t know how much scientific support exists for this idea — my immunity dips. I do know that whenever I overdose for a lengthy period of time like the holiday season, I get sick.

6. I must exercise. Not so much for weight loss but for maintenance, for keeping my joints fluid. After two months of bronchitis and pneumonia this fall, I couldn’t move without hurting somewhere (which means sitting and noshing). An adjustment by the chiropractor and her advice to “walk as much as you can, as fast as you can to get lubrication into those joints,” and I realize — at last? – that this is as necessary, or maybe more so, than brushing my teeth.

7.  Fruits and vegetables. Vegetables and fruits. Three-quarters of the plate. My goal with my contributions to yesterday’s dinner was to bring some of both to the family table that I could eat for seconds, rather than ham or bread or dessert. Holy cow — it worked, pretty much.

8. “Just do it” is not mere merchandising. It’s how grownups live. They just go for their walks, just go to bed, just fix a real meal. My mini-epiphany when grocery shopping a few weeks ago and fretting about something I’d missed a few aisles back: I can get it/try it/fix it/eat it another time. I have enough (a very difficult concept, along with delayed gratification, for addicts’ damaged psyches to grasp).

9. I can take a shower. (See name of blog.)

10. When all else fails, I can at least eat something nutritious.  A perfect navel orange, a handful of nuts, diet cocoa with skim milk. I can keep less junk in the house — heaven knows, there’s nowhere I can go up here for a late-night sugar fix except to the kitchen. “No life except what (she) made” writes New Yorker profiler Larissa MacFarquhar of author Hilary Mantel’s stay in Botswana. True of  this empty stretch of  North Carolina as well: No life and no food except what I make.

Category:

Compulsive eating, Emo eating, Food addiction, Holiday eating, Maintaining weight loss, Stress eating

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Food & family

Thanks to FaceBook and e-mail, I’ve reconnected with cousins who were once a part of every trip to my mother’s mother’s hometown in northern New Jersey. Their father and my mother were first cousins but even though I’ve lived in the South for more than 30 years, I don’t know if that means we’re first cousins once removed or second cousins.

Shot from staircase in my grandmother's house, my cousin Amy (left) and I unpack my new nurse's kit and treat her doll for an unspecified ailment.

 Amy is the oldest of three children of Mother’s cousin Ted and his glamorous wife Flo. Besides being fun and exotic (Amy inherited her beautiful tip-tilted eyes) to the wasp-ish Lawrences, Flo was a memorably good cook in a sea of good cooks. Amy and I have been e-mailing about Flo’s meatballs, her mustard sauce and her winter squash casserole. (If my fuzzy memory serves, Flo was born in Burma, the daughter of missionaries and also fixed the first curry I ever ate. However, those details could also be from a movie I once saw.)

We shared a formidable great-grandmother, Josephine Ward Lawrence, and holiday dinners spread across mahogany tables the size of cow pastures. I remember Amy’s  brother Philip under one of these tables at my great-aunt Charlotte’s on a Christmas Eve, cramming into his mouth as many of those meatballs as possible.  When one of the proper old folks asked if he weren’t going to have a proper plate with a proper balanced meal (on Christmas Eve!!), Flo pulled the little boy into her lap and said he was getting protein. She was ahead of her time.

I just came across my mother’s typewritten recipe for Flo’s Meatballs. It’s decorated with a perky aqua ’50s housewife, and, of course, sleeved in a plastic protector. A note says that you can get 50 meatballs from every pound of ground beef.

Flo’s Meatballs

Sauce: 3/4 cup catsup

1 tablespoon dried minced onion

Cayenne pepper

Minced garlic

2 tablespoons packed brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1/2 cup water

2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon dry mustard

1/4 cup salad or tarragon vinegar

1 teaspoon salt or soy sauce

Dash Tabasco

Meatballs: 1 pound lean ground beef

1/2 cup breadcrumbs (Italian if you have them)

2 beaten eggs

1-1/2 tablespoons dried minced onion

1 teaspoon horseradish

Dash Tabasco

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

2 tablespoons water

My mother’s directions say to mix up the meatball ingredients, “adding water a bit at a time, “fry and dry on paper towels.” I would probably bake them in a 400º oven for 8 to 10 minutes before draining. I’d mix up the sauce in a slow cooker and add the cooked meatballs.

Thinking of these makes me see in my mind’s eye our great-grandmother in a black coat with the collar turned up, backlit by the porch light against the swirling snow, standing like Anastasia’s grandmother in Great Uncle Frederick’s doorway on another Christmas Eve. Good times.

Pretty Amy a few years later

 

Category:

Family, Family recipes, Holiday cooking, Holiday eating

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Out of the mouths of babes

 In today’s Parade magazine 22-year-old (!!!!) Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, says he gave up drinking last year (!!!!) because “My inner life was being drowned…the way I do it, there is no romance to it!…There is nothing glorious or triumphant about it — it was pathetic, boring, and unhappy.”

Hunh. That would pretty much describe me and holiday food. I weigh 8 pounds more than I did before Thanksgiving. Inner life being drowned: I scarcely wrote, had to whip myself outside for walking. A high-school reunion questionnaire this week asked what I considered my greatest ability: Wow, gaining weight! I can slap it on like a grizzly getting ready for hibernation.

At least I’m not going to waste any time or energy castigating myself for my slide down the slippery slope. I re-opened livestrong.com yesterday afternoon, and I’m again counting my glasses of water, measuring my grits, etc. As soon as we recover from our New Year’s trip, I’m re-joining the YMCA. I got in a pool on this vacation and remembered how good swimming makes me feel, during and after.

The way I understand (fuzzy at best) what happens to me when I fall face forward into the Christmas fudge is something like this: Some few lucky people have their metabolisms revved up by refined carbs. The rest of us poor schlumps take those carbs as a cue to store fat. The more carbs we eat, the more insulin we produce, the more resistant we become to the insulin, et voila!,weight gain and fatigue. At least I almost always got myself to bed at a reasonable hour, not adding sleep deprivation to the self-abuse.

This zippy soup will make your head sweat, open your sinuses and pretty much fix anything that ails you. The golden glow on top is a couple tablespoons of olive oil.

So, of course, my immune system tanked, and I came home from our 1,800-mile drive with a whopping cold. Lay in bed and on the couch for two days and today I wanted a healthy soup, one packing a wallop, hitting me (and my sinuses) upside the head, as we like to say in the South.

I found it by modifying a Woman’s Day magazine slow-cooker recipe. The WD calorie count is 462 per each of 4 servings, but we got it down to about 300 a serving by making it 5 bowls and using 5 ounces of pepperoni instead of 8. With the substitution of Rotel (even mild Rotel) tomatoes and green chiles, you’ll never miss the sausage!

Pizza in a bowl

2 tablespoons EVOO (extra virgin olive oil — I just learned that!)

1 large sweet pepper, chopped

1 large red onion, chopped

2 14-1/2 ounce cans diced tomatoes with roasted garlic, undrained (I used 1 10-ounce can Rotel and extra broth to make up the liquid)

1 14-1/2 ounce can lower-sodium beef broth (I used vegetable because it’s what was open in the fridge plus a beef bouillion cube)

8 ounces pepperoni sausage, diced (see above)

1-1/2 cups sliced fresh mushrooms (I used 8 ounces canned mushrooms and rinsed them off)

1 cup water (I used more broth)

1 tablespoon dried Italian seasoning

Black pepper to taste

1/4 cup shredded cheese for each soup serving

In soup kettle saute onions and peppers in olive oil. Add tomatoes, broth, sausage, mushrooms, water, seasonings. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Top each serving of soup with the cheese.

Investigating water aerobics weight with grandson Logan.

Category:

Food addiction, good food, healthy cooking, Holiday eating, Soup, Weight loss

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Vegetarian vacation

Apricot and brandy-glazed coffeecake with pecan, currant, brown sugar and butter filling.

As wonderful as it is when the children come home, it stinks when they leave to go back to college or work or both. Our youngest drove off in pouring  rain this morning, leaving the house feeling chillier and duller.

We had a wonderful time, saw 9 movies during the 8 days and 9 nights she and her imaginary cat were here (although last night her ‘fraidy cat  actually made it all the way from bedroom to living room) and ate ourselves silly.

Since she’s a vegetarian, we ate shells stuffed with mashed sweetpotatoes, blue cheese and caramelized onions, cream cheese- and blueberry-stuffed oven-baked French toast (stuffed being the operative word in both recipes), cannelini bean soup and a green chili and egg casserole. We ate in Lebanese, Mexican and Chinese restaurants. We ate homemade oat bread, James Beard’s sweet coffee cake and a melt-in-your-mouth fruitcake that begins at Thanksgiving with fermenting fruit. We had enough sugar, butter and chocolate to last us until next Christmas.

We are blessed, which does not stop me from feeling sad on this drippy morning. The house looks like Times Square on New Year’s Day, but  next week someone else’s children will spend the night here when the choir from Westminster College of Pennsylvania sings at our church. And we’ll give thanks again for young people of passion and talent.

Green chili and egg breakfast casserole

10 medium eggs

2 cups small curd cottage cheese

2 cups grated sharp Cheddar cheese

2 4-1/2-ounce cans chopped green chiles, rinsed and drained

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Butter 2-quart rectangular baking dish or spray with cooking oil.

Break eggs into mixing bowl and beat with electric mixer until light and fluffy. Stir in remaining ingredients and blend thoroughly. Pour mixture into baking dish, place dish into oven and bake for 50 minutes or until center is firm. Bake only until casserole becomes firm but remove it from oven before top browns. Allow to sit for 10 minutes before cutting into it. Serves 8.

Beloved college junior focuses on sugar cookie decorating.

Category:

Breakfast-brunch, Desserts, eggs, Family, Holiday baking, Holiday cooking, Holiday eating

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Hark, the chocolate angels sing

If I could catch the house cats, chances are I’d dip them in chocolate. It’s that time of year.

 And here I am, married to someone who only likes peanut butter cups because of the peanut butter. Before the December feeding frenzy finishes, he’ll have some sugar cookie cutouts, but for today: Mas chocolate. I’ll use the rest of yesterday’s truffle chocolate to dip dried apricots and then bake and freeze rocky road brownies. In the fridge already: The truffles. In the freezer: A chocolate-pecan-bourbon pie. The peanut butter cups — tucked away on a shelf where I can’t see them.

Because as you know if you cook, eat and gain weight, you must eventually blow the whistle on sugar consumption while going full speed ahead on cooking. And how did I do that yesterday? Protein at every meal: A turkey sandwich for breakfast, baked chicken for lunch and tuna for supper. I must do this every day during the holiday food fest because I feel better, snack not at all and go to bed and sleep.

I also ate one little truffle with lunch. I counted it as about 100 calories and wasn’t gnawed by feelings of deprivation all afternoon.

food & family magazine’s Oreo Truffles
1 8-ounce package full-fat cream cheese
1 package regular Oreos (1 pound, more or less)
2 boxes (8 ounces each) good-quality semisweet baking chocolate
 
Unwrap cream cheese into mixing bowl to soften at room temperature. Crumb

Store truffles, tightly covered, in refrigerator after chocolate loses its sheen and hardens.

Oreos in food processor, reserving 1 cup crumbs. Add remainder crumbs to cream cheese and blend until smooth. Melt chocolate in microwave, stirring every 30 seconds to avoid scorching.

 
Make the cream cheese-Oreo mixture into 48 balls. Dip in melted chocolate, set on waxed paper to dry and sprinkle crumbs over.

Category:

Candy, Chocolate, Desserts, Holiday cooking, Holiday eating

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Out of sight, out of feeble mind

Nobody, meaning me, can eat just one of these 93-calorie jokers.

This was not a good weekend, healthy eating-wise. Well, actually, lots of what I ate was healthy food with the key word here being “lots.” Lots and lots. Like Ray Milland finding the bottle in the overhead light, I made choco espresso gems, pumpkin pie bars and peanut butter cups and sampled them all.

The sound of my falling off the wagon was  likely heard from here to Santa’s Workshop. Ditto for my howls upon discovering the 1,000 calories in Red Lobster’s Warm Chocolate Chip Lava Cookie a la mode (we split it but still…)

The one smart thing I did was ask He Who Can Sleep and Forget Any Temptation to hide the Cape Cod potato chips or they, too, would be gone this morning. If I don’t see a food, I’m likely to forget about it. Leaving out any temptations means I’ll see them and lay waste unto them.

Which makes me the perfect target of television advertising. Suggest it to me, dance it across the screen with a snappy jingle and I’m in the kitchen looking for it. Some part of my resolve is evidently warm chocolate lava when it comes to snack foods at night or to just walking away (more effective than saying “No”).

So this morning it’s back out on the road to walk and think about the errors of my ways. And if I put the last of those darned peanut butter cups in my husband’s lunch box, I will have forgotten all about them by the time I’ve walked a few miles.

Here’s the quick and easy recipe. There is no simpler way to enjoy your chocolate unless you just take it in an IV.

Taste of Home’s homemade peanut butter cups

7 ounces milk or dark chocolate

1 tablespoon vegetable shortening

4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter

1/4 cup creamy peanut butter

Line 12 cups of mini muffin pan with gem papers. Melt chocolate, shortening and butter together in microwave, stirring every 30 seconds to keep chocolate from scorching. Put 1 tablespoon of this mixture in the bottom of each paper cup.

Melt peanut butter in microwave, stir and divide among 12 cups. Top with remainder of chocolate mixture. You can refrigerate to harden quickly or just leave on countertop if you’re not in any hurry to misbehave.

Category:

Candy, Chocolate, Desserts, Holiday cooking, Holiday eating, Simple foods

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Reasons for the season

“After all, recent research shows that by the year 2020, it’s estimated that 83 percent of men and 72 percent of women will be either overweight or obese.” Adam Bornstein, livestrong.com editorial directorImagine, a nation of Michelin men and women, waddling in and out of big-box stores and home to collapse on their sagging sofas in front of hundreds of cable channels. 
So, as Bornstein suggests in the same posting, in the interests of avoiding such a fate, we need to plan now, this morning, to start our New Year’s healthy eating and fitness regimes today, rather than spending the entire month of January simply recovering from our December excesses. Well, yuck. That would be like looking for meaning in the month and not excuses for indulgence. Real grownup stuff this, and, not coincidentally, real possibilities for epiphany.
 
Last December I baked cookies like a Keebler elf. Every day and in every way. I also ate cookies like a full-sized person, more than full-sized. Not as many as in previous holidays, but enough to sometimes have days or nights of the sugar “blahs.” And I exercised if I felt like it, if the weather was good, the stars were propitious or it was a day beginning with the letter “W” or “X” or whatever.
 
This December morning I weigh 6 pounds more than when I and Mr. Honeybuns Are a Food Group married 23-1/2 years ago. Yet the other day when I tried to fasten a pretty snakeskin belt I wore on our honeymoon, it was at least 6 inches from latching. An unfortunate reality to put up against dear friends’ saying recently, “You’ve never looked better.” Alas, there was  a time, brief though it may have been, when I wasn’t built like a sparkplug.
 
For Christians this is the season of Advent, of waiting, anticipating. And how does this connect to nurturing ourselves, physically as well as spiritually?
 
From Gail Godwin’s “Evensong” (her 1999 sequel to “Father Melancholy’s Daughter”): “…in inner-world terms, as people drawn to the light, we go about preparing for the hoped for and the unforeseen in exactly the same way. You clean your house and make yourself ready, you light your candles, you say, “Come, Lord, come.” And then you compose yourself and wait for the knock.”
 
Making ourselves ready, composing ourselves, is — for want of a better cliche — being the best that we can be. We should be able to take a child in need onto our laps and extend ourselves for that child (literally: others). We should be good stewards of the resources with which we’ve been blessed, and good health is certainly one of the greatest of blessings. Being ready can be as simple as being physically able to take a walk when son or daughter suggests one.
 
So I’m headed to the kitchen now to make lentil-tomato soup for friends and a lemon cake to put into the freezer (cake batter’s not nearly as appealing as cookie dough!) for the 12 Days of Christmas. Tomorrow is St. Nicholas Day, and neither cake nor soup will fit into a a wooden clog, but I’ll  just re-read “The Christmas Anna Angel” (Ruth Sawyer, 1949) instead of baking more small and tempting comestibles.
 
From the November 2011 issue of Taste of Home magazine:
Lentil tomato soup
4-1/2 cups water
4 medium carrots, sliced
1 medium onion, chopped
2/3 cup dried lentils, rinsed
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/4 teaspoon dried dillweed
1/4 teaspoon dried tarragon
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
In soup pot combine water, carrots, onions and lentils; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes or until vegetables and lentils are tender. Stir in tomato paste, parsley, sugar, vinegar, salt, thyme, dill, tarragon and pepper; return to boil. Simmer, uncovered, for 5 minutes to blend flavors. Serves 6. Each 3/4 cup serving has 138 calories, a trace of fat, 351 mg sodium, 9 g fiber and 8 g protein.
NOTE: You can also saute carrots and onion in 1 to 2 tablespoons EVOO before proceeding w/ recipe for a slightly richer vegetable taste.
 
 

Category:

Advent, Holiday baking, Holiday eating, Soup, vegetables

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