Garlic Glorification

Who doesn't love garlic? People always complain about garlic and garlic breath, but everyone I know really likes garlic in his/her food.

To celebrate all things garlic, we made cheesy garlic bread, cream of garlic soup, and some green beans almondine with garlic salt for supper.

The garlic bread is from the Pioneer Woman Cooks blog. It is EXTREMELY filling. I couldn't finish my piece (and I eat a lot). This could have been because we added extra cheese, and our pieces were halves of the loaves.

Look at all of that cheese. @_@

I could, however, finish all of the garlic soup. It was pretty good for just garlic, bread, and onions with broth and cream. The hardest part was watching the bread and garlic to make sure it didn't burn. I failed that part....but the good news is, if everything isn't super burned, you can cut off the burned parts and resume cooking. That's what we did, and we didn't think it was that bad.

One thing I would have changed was the size of big pieces of garlic in the finished soup.  The next time I make this soup, I would either use a blender to puree the cooked garlic cloves or roughly chop them and add them back to the soup.  I love garlic, but even I find biting into a whole clove of garlic disconcerting.  I would have preferred smaller bits in my soup.

This is a good soup for a winter night.

Cooking some breads in a pot.

Bread + stock. It's getting more soup-like.

Wow! It looks like a Campbell's product?

Cream of Garlic Soup
(from Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin by Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreño)
Serves 4

• 4 tablespoons butter
• 12 whole peeled garlic cloves
• 6 to 8 inches of baguette, cut into cubes
• 2 thick slices onion, chopped
  
• 3 cups chicken stock
• 3/4 cup heavy cream
• 2 teaspoons grated Parmesan cheese
• Ground nutmeg (optional)
• Salt and pepper (optional)

Heat butter in a saute pan (or pot) over high heat. When the butter is hot, but before it browns, add the garlic and bread cubes. Brown them on all sides, but watch to make sure they don't burn. (This happened to me. I didn't watch the pot closely enough and burned some of the garlic. I ended up cutting off all the burnt segments so the soup wouldn't be bitter.  While you have the garlic out to cut off the burnt sides, you could chop or puree them.)
Add the chopped onion and saute until soft and translucent but not brown, about 4 to 5 minutes.
Add stock and whisk. Keep whisking until the bread is sort of disintegrated into the broth. The crusts didn't really disintegrate for me, so I eventually gave up.
Add the cream and Parmesan cheese.
Stir some more until cream is heated. Add salt and pepper if desired. Also, add the nutmeg now if you don't top the bowls with it.
Ladle out the soup into bowls (or plates?). Season to taste with salt, pepper, and nutmeg if you haven't done so already.

It's my soup in a bowl! (OooOOhhh.)
Soup in a bowl? Dick in a box? Get it? No?

One of my roommates made the green beans almandine from what I can only assume is a secret family recipe. It was a nice green counterpoint to the cheesy bread and creamy soup.

Happy (Belated) Halloween

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and there's no better way to spend it than by eating 5 pounds of cookie cake.

Huge Halloween cookie cake with festive Halloween decorations!

Look at that thick layer of buttercream sandwiched between two huge cookies!

It took us about 2 weeks to eat half of it.