To-Mato, Ta-Mato

I've discovered in the past year that I actually like tomato soup. 34 years I was missing out on this deliciousness. My only experience with tomato soup growing up was Campbells Soup, which I didn't like as a kid. I was all about the vegetable vegetarian Campbells, ABC soup all the way!

My soup epiphany happened at The Yard House, thanks to their Organic Tomato Bisque. Imagine how happy I was when I found Tomato Basil Bisque at Costco. And so I had been happily living my tomato soup eating life. Until I saw this picture on Pinterest.

La Madeleine's Tomato Basil Soup on the girltalk blog seemed like just the thing I needed. It's what's for dinner tonight, along with an oven baked cheesy Canadian bacon sandwich. I did make a couple of minor changes to the soup at the end after I tasted it. I salted it with garlic salt, because -Hello- everything's better with garlic salt, and I added 1 1/2 - 2 TBSP or sugar. It seemed a bit acidic and that fixed it right up, don't worry it didn't make the soup sweet.
I've never been to La Madeleine's, as apparently the closest one is several states away, so I have no idea how this compares, but as far as tomato soup goes it's pretty darn good.

Pizza. Who knew it was so easy?

I've always bought pizza (Hello, Pizza Hut, my good friend), or grabbed some box of pizza flavored cardboard in the freezer section. My parents make there own pizza and it always seemed like a huge all day process. I'm not sure what they were doing but thanks Pinterest for showing me how easy it is to make my own dough and pizza sauce.

I'm not a big baker, measuring and *gasp* weighing ingredients goes against the lackadaisical approach I have to cooking. But, alas, friends were coming over and going to the grocery store with 2 wild children first thing in the morning seemed like a fate worse than death. Pinterest to the rescue!

Annie's Eats showed me how to make Perfect Pizza Dough. And let me tell you it was perfect. It turned out exactly like the picture. The kids, 2 of mine plus two more, all made little individual pizzas and my friend and I each made an adult sized pizza. Just the right amount of dough.

Riding high on my dough success, today I decided to try making my own pizza sauce. Seemed pretty straight forward, and I had everything I needed -score 1 for the pantry. I whipped up a batch of Homemade Pizza Sauce from Cooking for Seven. Holey buckets that was tasty. I'm making pizza tomorrow, and I will be lucky if I have any left, I have "sampled" it a couple of ...a few ...too many times on bread. Yumm!

Two for two on the pizza recipes. Both of these are going in my recipe binder for sure. I'm super excited that I can make a batch of dough and freeze it, I love freezing things.

I have no idea why making pizza at my parents house is such a production. Maybe they have some pizza mojo that I will never have. I am happy with my dough and sauce and store bought pepperoni. I feel like a pizza baking master.

... well, at least an apprentice.

WTF Wednesday

As in Way To Funny.
Wednesday will be devoted to random finds on Pinterest that make me laugh.

Help I'm Stuck in a Bottle Mom
Basically, you photocopy/print a picture onto transparency paper and stick it inside the bottle of soap or sanitizer.

My kids would love this!

Well, It Wasn't Terrible

This lovely picture inspired me to actually cook dinner last night. I've been a bit in a cooking rut lately and needed a kick in the butt to get me back to serving up something that wasn't at least partial store prepared.
The picture from Sweet Paul of his Mushroom and Dill Pasta looked so good I almost licked my screen.
I weighed and chopped my mushrooms, an onion was no match for my handy dandy Pamper Chef manual food processor. I made a special trip back to the store for dill and cream.
I followed all the directions as laid out in the recipe. And it was somewhat successful.

The Pros:
It was easy, ok easy-ish.
I had almost everything I needed.
Nobody flat out refused to eat it. (which is pretty darn successful around these parts!)

The Cons:
The sauce was terribly thin even after simmering, I added a bit of flour to thicken it up.
I don't know what his idea of 4 servings of pasta is but 4 servings as per the spaghetti box (which was 1/2 a box) was not nearly enough for the amount of sauce.
I would recommend one full box of pasta.
While the dill was an interesting combination with the mushrooms that I probably wouldn't have put in on my own, it seemed like it was missing something. The flavors were so so.

Final Verdict:
Probably won't be making this again.

And so I Blog

I have never seen myself as someone who would blog, and yet here I am. What has brought me to this point you ask? Pinterest. Like any new love it has consumed me. It is a relationship that requires far too much time from me, my Pinterest is always there for me, always showing me something new.

What is Pinterest? Have you been living under a rock? An under designed, lacking new recipes, grasping for craft inspiration rock?
Wikipedia defines Pinterest as:

Pinterest (Pin-tũr-ĕst) is a vision board-styled social photo sharing website and app where users can create and manage theme-based image collections. The mission statement of Pinterest is to connect everyone in the world through shared tastes and the “things” they find interesting.

But, it is so much more. If you could turn my head on the side and shake out all the things in there, my Pinterest boards are what would fall out. From fashion to cooking, from craft projects to things I want to do with my kids, organization, shoes, random quotes, it's all there.

This blog will be devoted to things that Pinterest has inspired me to do. You can share in my successes and the, well, not so successful - let's just say it how it is, failures that Pinterest has brought to my home.

Happy pinning,
Jenny