Another Easy Slow Cooker Soup

Another quick and easy soup in the slow cooker - with hardly any chopping!

Corn and Leek Soup

Add to slow cooker;

• 2 leeks chopped very fine (pale part only)
• 1 can of corn kernels (or two corn on the cob's worth of corn kernels)
• Chicken stock (3 cups+)

Cover and cook for 6-8 hours on LOW or 3+ hours on HIGH. 

In the last hour, add 1-2 cans of creamed corn (depending on how thick you like your soup). 

When cooked through, blitz with a stick blender or put batches through a food processor for a smooth finish. This stores well in the freezer - simply heat up in microwave or stove top. 

GF with GF stock and vegetarian/vegan with vegetable stock. 

Nom.nom.nom. Have I mentioned I love my Slow Cooker?

How I Made 3 litres of Winter Soup for under $5

My Mini Kitchen Garden

Colds. They are annoying.

Home sick today and thought I had better get some cooking done to get ahead in case its one of 'those' winters. I thought I would get my appliances working for me and make some soups for the freezer.

I think this one is my favourite - it was super cheap!

While shopping at Aldi last night I noticed Soup Packs of veggies for just $1.99. The pack contained two carrots, one swede, one parsnip, one potato, and two sticks of celery. bargain.

I chopped all this up and added;
- 1/2 cup of red lentils
- 3 teaspoons of crushed garlic
- A sprinkle of sea salt
- 1.5L of chicken stock (you might need more to cover the veggies)
- Some leftover BBQ chicken I had in the fridge
- A handful of chopped basil and oregano from my mini kitchen garden.

5-6 hours on LOW or 2-3 on HIGH in the slow cooker. Way. too. easy.

Use GF stock and its a GF soup. Vege stock and minus the chicken and you have a vegetarian/vegan option. Everyone wins! The principle for the slow cooker is the same. If you have one and are scared to use it, give this a go. You will not regret it.

Someone who is much much better at cooking than I am, and whose recipes are somewhat more accurate, check out my beautiful friend Jessica's blog home.

Feeding Time at the Zoo

polkadotmom.com

I reached breaking point one night when Awesome scraped most of his dinner into the bin. Again.

"Any chance we could have some time to plan decent meals for a change?" He asked. I wasn't offended. It was an honest question, and he was right, we had been eating a lot of toast, and throwing out a lot of perfectly good food that I hadn't taken time to cook. But that night, I knew I needed to make some changes to save us from eating over/under cooked creations of who-knows-what mixed together and called Dinner.

printable.tipjunkie.com

So I did what every modern wife does when trying to come up with a plan. I hit the 'net. I know how to cook. So that wasn't the problem. I own a large collection of pristine-looking recipe books. So that wasn't the problem either. It was planning. Or rather, failure to plan.

Someone should coin a saying about that.

Anyway, I google searched "menu planner printable" and there are a LOT to choose from. There are some very creative people out there with expensive publishing software. I graciously allowed them to do the hard work for me. I searched until I found something that met our needs exactly.

Here are our exact needs;
- One week at a time. Monthly planning scares me. And I already tried it and it just didn't work for me.
- No amount of colour-coding, or fancy scrapbooked tags that you stick up with blutac, is going to make me try harder in the kitchen. At the end of a long day at work, I need two things, a clear picture of what I want to achieve, and everything already in the fridge. I hate to shop on the way home from work (I'm allergic to people), so I have to have everything already in the house. Or we eat toast. I picked a simple planner that just covered the basics.
- Dinners only. Awesome gets his own food during the day, as do I, so I only wanted a dinner planner. I have a problem with empty boxes and lines. Its an Type A personality thing. Deal with it.
- We are not home every night, and frequently only one of us is home, and it can change, so a pen and paper list was not going to work for us, and I really didn't want to have to print a new one each week.
I picked a list that could be printed A5 and stuck it in a frame with glass - I use a whiteboard marker to write out the menu and make any last minute changes by rubbing it out with my finger. Classy.

Here's what I do;
1. We shop on sundays on our way to church. I'm not sure why. It's habit.
2. Because Awesome sleeps in on Sunday mornings, after quiet time in the morning, I grab my diary and menu planner and plan for the week. I work out what nights we are out and how many dinners need to be made at home. I also update the Google calendar (which IS colour-coded - see not totally slack) for Awesome so that he knows what is happening during the week.
3. I plan out what meals we are having, and then adjust my weekly vege and fruit box order online (it gets delivered to my work on Tuesdays so I plan around that and can tailor the order down to the last carrot, which is helpful for minimising waste.
4. I write out the meals and a quick shopping list for later reference, so that I know what to pick up and so that we don't spend one zillion dollars at the supermarket. It works well - I rarely spend over $80-$100 a week at the supermarket. Keep in mind that that is mainly dinners, lunch fixings and some minor breakfast foods - we do eat out of the house 1-3 times a week out of necessity, so that's where the balance of our grocery budget goes.
5. I then put it all away and move on with my day and don't have to think about planning a meal for the rest of the week.

Working full time in a job that has variable hours, and with a number of outside committments, I can safely say that I could care less most days about cooking when I get home. But I have been using this system now for three months, and most of the weeks have been so easy. Some times things come up, sometimes I'm just too exhausted to cook and we eat toast, or order-in. That's life and we are ok with that. But I can understand the kajillion women on the internet who post their meal plans each Monday. It actually does make sense. 

Because I'm sure that you care (!) here is this week's menu for us.

Monday: Polenta chicken homemade 'nuggets' and salad (the link is to Alana Chernila's website Eating From the Ground Up - but her recipe is in her book The Homemade Pantry - which I purchased recently and I am in LOVE with).
Tuesday: Baked zucchini and sweet potato chips with steak
Wednesday: Greek Turkey Meatballs with tzatziki and vegetable sticks
Thursday: Slowcooker Minestrone
Friday: Leftover night
Saturday: (store bought) Veal ravioli and napoletana sauce
Sunday: Cold wraps

We are actually home most nights this week, so this is a very 'fancy' week for us. Usually you would see a steak and salad, a chicken dish, a beef dish, pies made in the pie maker and toasted wraps. That's a standard week for us. This week I am also moving back towards a low GI diet and so I am including more low GI meals. 

Can you see how much I love food? How crazy long is this post????

Sadly I can't locate the exact printable I am using, but its best to find something you love any way, so get googling!

From the Recipe: Slow Cooker Potato Bake Review

Cookbook: Australian Women's Weekly Slow Cooking

Recipe: Potato Bake

Method: A simple potato bake flavoured with dijon mustard and chicken soup mix. 

Prep Time: I measured out all the ingredients, cut up the leek and bacon and left everything out on the bench for Awesome to put in the slow cooker. Unfortunately it took about and hour to cut up the potatoes apparently so the prep time took longer than an ordinary oven potato bake... 

Cooking time: Our slow cooker is ... slow... meaning that I add 2 hours cooking time to every recipe, and most things are only just cooked at that point!  This dish should have been 4 hours but was still a little crunchy in the potato domain at 6 hours. I think I used the 'wrong' kind of potatoes (I don't know much about potatoes...) so my own tip would be to slightly pre-boil the potatoes... or otherwise leave the cooker on longer. There was enough liquid still in the mix to make it work. 

Verdict: The cooking to a recipe thing was actually counter-intuitive for me... I felt as though I could have tweaked this recipe to make it easier to cook. Having said that, the flavour was amazing and much tastier than most things I prepare (as Awesome likes mainly plain foods.)  

We liked this and would make it again, but even though I halved the recipe (and yes, still had to increase the cooking time!) there was way more than we could eat. So I would use this a s a side dish for guests rather than a main for us. 

From the Recipe

Dear Readers, 


What kind of cook are you? 


Are you a peel and press, microwave-loving kind of person?


An exact-measurement-to-the-letter chef?


A we'll-just-chuck-it-in-and-see-how-it-goes type?


I am of the latter variety. I love to look at a bunch of ingredients at the last minute and make it up as I go. If I was a cooking show, I'd be Ready, Steady, Cook. And I thought I was pretty good at it. 


But after yet another hmmm.... not so good meal, Awesome pointed out that perhaps it was time for a change in strategy... 


So, I began to look through the 30 or so cookbooks I have on my shelves. I thought about great websites I have read like http://www.bfeedme.com/ and http://www.101cookbooks.com/ who cook and review recipes from cookbooks they come across. 


I'm not aiming to attain their status by any means, but I have decided, that for the next couple of weeks, I will try to plan the majority of our dinner meals at home from cookbooks. And, I thought you might like to join me :) 

My Cookbook Collection

Here's the rules:
- Plan 1-4 meals per week from cookbooks you already own
- Create your shopping list and stick to it
- Cook your meal following the recipe
- Blog your experience and then come back to Eyes Above to share your success (or area of potential growth!!). 


You can blog and post as many meals as you like, but try to aim for at least one meal a week for the month of June. 


I'll be back on Monday to share how I went with my slow cooker Potato Bake recipe!