Today was Day 5 of cooking from "THE BEST OF COOKING LIGHT". My daughter asked what I was making for dinner tonight, and when I told her the recipes I was going to make she said "no, not that, what else?" So I told her what I'd be making tomorrow and she wanted me to make that instead, so I switched today & tomorrow's dinners for her. Then to top it off, my son, who lives an hour and a half away in college showed up to surprise me for the afternoon and evening, so he was home for dinner too. Instead of 2 of us at the table for dinner we had 5, which was wonderful. I love having my family around and miss those times when the kids were growing up when we always had dinner together and had many lively conversations around the table together. When we get together now we still have those conversations where we talk about anything and everything, laugh, and share joys and trials of life. I think dinners together are SO very important, and no matter how busy we are we should always take time to share meals together. Anyway, on to the food... today's dinner was Baked Potato Soup and Beer Cheese Bread. I was looking forward to trying both of these recipes since I absolutely love carbs, potatoes, cheese, and bread.
We all liked this dish, though it was a bit heavy, even though it was "lighter" than a typical baked potato soup recipe. I ended up adding an extra potato to the recipe because I didn't think it had enough potato flavor for me. The toppings really made a huge difference in making it really taste like "baked potato". I have another potato-cheese soup recipe that I make that I think the family likes better than this one. But it's a tasty recipe and quite filling.
BEER CHEESE BREAD, a hit with everyone...
I had a little trouble with the bread at the beginning, which I will probably tweak on a bit when I make it again in the future (I WILL make this recipe again and tweak on it since everyone liked it so much). I make breads and cinnamon rolls and can tell by the feel and texture of the dough if it's going to work or not, and when I added the 2nd amount of flour as described in the recipe, it was too tough and I knew it wouldn't turn out right. It didn't rise quite as much as it should have and was a bit more dense, rather than lighter. Next time I make it I will only add 1 cup of flour in the second addition of flour instead of the 1 1/2 cups of flour the recipe calls for, and gradually add in more if I need it. Too much flour made the bread a little denser than it should have been. The recipe called for it being light and it wasn't. But I think that can be an easy fix next time around by decreasing the flour a little bit. However, the family didn't care about the density and loved the flavor and ate 2/3 of the loaf of bread (that says it will serve 16!). This is a keeper recipe and I'm sure will be fantastic with just a little tweaking.
12 recipes down, 535 more to go!
If you're wondering about the recipes, I can't post them all because of copyright laws, but I will share 1 recipe a month as our favorite of the month. However, you can buy the cookbook here.
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