One of my February financial goals is to only go out to eat once a week, which means spending more of my life providing my own sustenance. I am currently out of string cheese, so I was forced to get fancy.
Creamy Wild Rice Soup
(I made a double batch for some unknown reason, so if you want to halve these amounts you'll kind of have what the actual recipe called for... except they wanted chicken instead of garlic. And only a quarter cup of onion. Fools. I mean, I'm sure your version is also delicious, Nick...)
1 cup wild rice (uncooked)
1 chopped large onion, white or yellow (Mine was yellowy white?)
3 cloves chopped garlic
4 cans (14 oz.) Cream of Potato Soup
32 oz. Chicken Broth
3ish cups of chopped carrots
2 cups of Half & Half
...and let's be real here...
2 additional cloves chopped garlic
Prep Time: Approximately one play of Aly and A.J.'s "Insomniatic" CD. But I'm a very slow chopper and get easily distracted by Aly and A.J. and the cat.
In typical me fashion as I was chopping the vegetables the onion and carrot vastly overwhelmed the garlic so I ended up chopping more garlic at the end. I was completely flummoxed that the original recipe didn't call for any garlic. If I'm going to spend my afternoon cooking there better be garlic. If you wanted to use chicken this is the point where you would chop up some chicken thighs, but then you would have to touch raw poultry which is something I leave for the professionals or Nick. I am unclear whether you need to pre-cook the chicken before putting it in the soup, but I'm sure the Internet can provide that answer. I'm moving on.
Find a large pot and put it on your 'power boost' burner. Scoop the four cans of Cream of Potato soup into the pot, an extremely fun task. Pour in Chicken Broth; splash yourself and realize you forgot to put on one of your roommate's super cute aprons. Whatevs, you're in your pajamas anyway. It is 2 p.m., after all. Then pour all your chopped veggies in carefully. Actually, you could probably put those in before the Chicken Broth and not have to worry so much about splashing but life is about exposing yourself to a little bit of danger.
Cook Time: About half hour's worth of bustling around the kitchen cleaning up, the SuperBowl episode of "Glee" streamed online (which means short ads but multiple stops for buffering, and even more stops to go obsessively stir your soup), plus a short struggle fest trying to find lids to match your Tupperware. Expect to have the soup heating for somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours.
Bring soup to a boil. Then turn burner down to a simmer. If you don't know what a simmer looks like... well, we're in the same boat. So every time you get up to stir the soup (I estimate I stirred this soup about thirty-seven separate times, but I think stirring things is the greatest activity ever... so...) fiddle with the burner level, varying it from 'low' to one dot above 'low' then back to 'low' then slightly higher as you near the end of the episode and your taste tests of the rice reveal it is still quite rigid. Shrug a lot. Eventually the carrots will get soft. And onion is good at any consistency. The wild rice, however, will refuse to soften no matter how long you cook it or how many cute kitten YouTube videos you show it and that's just how some kinds of rice and some people are in this world. That's life. Moral of the recipe.
When it gets to the point where you're really bored waiting and figure since there isn't any meat that might kill you with its rawness you can pour in the Half & Half. Stir some more. At this point the soup will look like real live Creamy Wild Rice Soup and you'll feel pretty proud of yourself. Scoop some into a soup bowl. You'll know it's a soup bowl if it is clearly labelled 'SOUP', like mine. If you don't have a soup bowl any other bowl will work too. Eat. I bet dipping bread in it would be quite delicious, but if you don't have bread you can use taco chips too. Or pretzels. Freeze the left-overs.
And now some pictures for proof:
