Mushroom Soup

It rained allllll day today, meaning it was a perfect day for comfort food: mushroom soup served with fresh bread. I used this recipe:

Naturally, I screwed something up: in Step 3, when instructed to add the FRESH mushrooms to the pan, I added the reconstituted dried ones instead, and didn't realize my mistake till I'd also added the stock. So I chucked the fresh ones in belatedly and hoped for the best. And as usual, it tasted good. Cooking is not always as exacting as one might think, which is lucky for me, since I mess up daily - and after so many years of practice!

Shallot, garlic, and leeks. In deference to my onion-averse backup dancers, I actually pureed all the soup, not just 3/4 of it as instructed by the recipe.

"Wild" mushrooms? Afraid not. Stop-and-Shop is not exactly a hotbed of gourmet ingredients. I'm sure the soup would be better with legit wild mushrooms, but these provincial baby bellas did the trick.

I served the soup with French bread I'd made from Mark Bittman's recipe in "How To Cook Everything," still slightly warm from the oven. My backup dancers described this bread as "chewy," which doesn't sound overwhelmingly positive, but they claimed to like it.

I didn't take a photo of the plated meal because it wasn't much to look at: brown soup (described by Emma as muddy-looking, thanks for that); brown and whitish bread. Upon reflection, I wished I'd served "Carrots d'Amour" with this meal - it would have been a nice flavor and color complement.

But here's a gem: Emma felt that the pattern of remaining soup in her bowl at this point looked like "a crying baby rhinoceros going down a slide." You can totally see it, right?