Rustic Dinner

For some reason, today I became obsessed with the idea of making a "farmhouse dinner." When I lived on a farm, we ate a lot of beets and Ryvita crackers. So consider this a modified farmhouse dinner. We started with potato leek soup. The leeks in this case were refreshing, as I didn't actually have to harvest them myself. My fingernails would get really dirty on gardening mornings. It made me bitchy, let me tell you. The soup was okay. The recipe was from America's Test Kitchen. I tried to find a link for you, but it's "premium content" on their website. Anyway, the recipe just says to cook the leeks and potatoes until the potatoes are tender. Bob liked it, but I thought it was too watery, so I mixed it with our hand blender. With cream, it was much better. I also made popovers. They were awesome, even though the tops collapsed. The recipe comes from my beloved Apartment Therapy's kitchen page. The recipe is here, and it's stupid easy. Even if I did sort of mess it up. In my defense, I was trying to do a million things before Bob got home, so I don't think I mixed the batter well enough. Still, though, they were delicious. I served them with honey and some black currant preserves I got at Surfas, the best kitchen supply store ever (we also got new cookie sheets, a pan, a muffin tin, a highly unnecessary handle sleeve for our cast iron frying pan, a pepper mill, a mesh strainer, a couple ramekins, a cooling rack, and, you know...bacon-flavored chocolate). Then for desert we had fruit and cheese. And in honor of the stuff I made under my bed and in my closet that lovely year, we drank hard apple cider throughout. The dinner was hardy and pretty darn good.

Oh, also, I picked up some Bar Keepers Friend. Aside from their dubious omission of an apostrophe, I'm a fan. It's a very effective cleaner.

(Images from Apartment Therapy and the Bar Keepers Friend page)