Another Way to Choose Recipes

You would think with all the cookbooks I have that it would be easy to figure out what to make for dinner. But I think mostly I love to read them as if they were novels, and dream about which recipes I would make if my family would eat something besides macaroni. Sometimes, just for for fun, I go to Amazon and read reviews of the books I have to see which recipes other people have loved.

One such book is called "Olive Trees and Honey." It was published a while back. It's a book of Jewish vegetarian recipes from around the world, mostly eastern European and Middle Eastern. It's interesting because it gives you a lot of different versions of a recipe, depending on country of origin. Lots of emphasis on eggplant, peppers, chickpeas, tahini, etc.

The recipe I chose for last night was for Hungarian cream of mushroom soup that someone raved about in a review of the book. I had some soy creamer to use up, and had bought some fresh mushrooms that day. The soup is seasoned with lots of paprika and cayenne, and not much else. It was simple and good.

I made some croutons for my salad. I cut up bread ends and sprinkled them with olive oil and garlic salt, and baked them at 400 for about half an hour.

The croutons were really good, but they took away the freshness of the salad. Turns out they were much better in the soup!

The salad dressing was really good. It was just rice vinegar, mustard, a sprinkle of sugar, and basil olive oil. We have a store here that sells all different flavors of olive oil and balsamic vinegars. They are all in big urns and you can pour them into tiny paper cups for tasting. I love the basil oil best - it adds so much to a salad.

Of course there was macaroni, too!