Peter's Cooking Diary #14

Well I haven't written about cooking the past few weeks, not because I didn't do any cooking, but because I was underwhelmed by what I made. Sometimes I get ideas of things to cook and they just don't work out too well, the last 2 weeks I have been working with lentils a lot and neither dish worked that well for me, but I have kept on pushing and added some meat back into the situation. I also just don't like putting things out there that I didn't enjoy, although it would be interesting to see where I messed up. I know in one of the recipes I used bagged precut broccoli that had turned or something, it was a little sour. I never buy precut veggies, but for some reason I did for that recipe and it came back to bite me.

The first thing to mention is that I finally bought my own copy of The Joy of Cooking, I didn't have a specific need for another cookbook, but I just thought it was the time

The usual for me of starting the day with making some bacon, the bacon got used as well as some of the grease in my other items which is my MO after all.

Just the finished bacon cooling, I can almost taste it from the picture. I had to let it cool down before I could eat it.

Onions, leeks and garlic cooking in some bacon grease. Cooking veggies in bacon grease always smells so good!

After the veggies had been cooking for a little bit and got a little bit of color to them.

I added some sliced mushrooms to the mixture and cooked it all together, I also added a little red pepper flake and some soy sauce for seasoning.

After everything had a chance to cook together for long enough this is what it looks like.

Some of the vegetables heated with a little bit of butter, with some of the cooked bacon on top and some scrambled eggs on it.

This is the final product of my scramble, it was really good and the flavor really got distributed through the eggs and the mixture.

Today's recipe starts with some ground beef which I cooked through in the pan and drained as much of the grease as I could, but my issue with cooking beef into things is that they always seem too greasy, as much as I work to drain the beef it still leaves a large amount of fat in stuff.

Cooked beef in the crock pot with some crushed tomatoes, bay leaves and some soy sauce.

Onions, garlic, leeks, and celery cooking down in some bacon grease to start the base of my soup to o along with the beef and tomatoes already in the pot.

Paprika, oregano, red pepper flake, and some Italian seasoning were the spices of choice for this recipe.

I added some carrots to the vegetables that were softening some. I was giving them a good sweat to get a lot of the flavor going.

I added the seasoning to the veggies and cooked them a big more to get the flavors going.

Stirred everything together in the crock pot, and added some stock to the pot to loosen everything up. I cooked it all together on high for about 4 hours. I added a few teaspoons of instant tapioca to help everything tighten up in the crock pot.

The finished soup I added a few drained cans of corn and cup of thawed peas. The soup worked out really well, I have never made a veggie beef soup, and I had actually come up with this one on my own, I liked the flavors I was able to create, I should really start using leeks more in my cooking.