soup if you please….

For those of you that don’t know (which means you haven’t read my “about me” page, shame on you! 😛 ) I’m a vegetarian.  I made the actual decision about a year ago, but I had been eating *almost* vegetarian before that anyway.  I would really only eat meat when I had thoughts like “I haven’t eaten any meat this week, I’m a bad girl! What meat do I have in the house…”.  I just decided rather than trying to make an effort to get meat into my diet, I would just go with what seemed natural to me.  Most people (including my meat loving mother) are so surprised that I could live without meat.  But the thing is I wasn’t eating meat.  I would only get meat about once a week, if I remembered.  I did have sausage on my pizza, and I did love a good fish fry, but those were the exception not the rule.  So I made a clean break.

Now on to what I actually want to talk about:

I’ve been trying to get more variety into my diet.  I have a very boring diet, I eat the same things every week.  I’ve just not really tried to expand that.  But now I’ve decided that I want to try more things.  I’m a good cook, I just don’t take the time to actually cook.  Like my mother and grandfather I tend to make up recipes as I go along.  I made a veggie soup in march that was pretty much just whatever I thought sounded good thrown into a pot until it looked right.  The result was amazing.  But I don’t have time to cook like that every night.  By the time I get home I’m hungry, and I don’t want to spend an hour making something.  So I end up grabbing whatever is easy.  I want to change that.  So I decided that what I’ll try is making a recipe on the weekend and freezing most of it.  So that I can have “good for me food” any time I want it quickly and easily for at home and at work.  It will take a while to build up a good store of different frozen meals, but once I do it could be really awesome.

So to that end –
I really like the soup I made in march, so I’ve been thinking about making some kind of creamy soup.  Something like a potato/cream-of-mushroom/chowder type of thing.  Yeah, that’s really specific right?  I’ve spent all day looking at VegWeb which is a great site were people put up the recipes they’ve created.  I’ve noticed that those three soups (potato, mushroom, chowder) are somewhat similar.  They all have milk in them, most have butter, and alot puree the soup at least some what.  So I’m thinking of taking a blend of those and making another “not from a recipe” soup.  I also have been really hungry for dumplings, so I’ll include those as well.

–Here’s what I’m thinking of including:
Dumplings
Potatoes
Mushrooms
Carrots
Barley
Navy Beans
Celery
Cauliflower
Peas
Green Beans
Broccoli

I probably won’t include all of that, expecally the last three.  I’m not sure about those.  I’ll decide between now and when I go shopping after work.

I’ll probably cook it up tomorrow.  I’ll let you know how it turned out.