all “stir”-ed up

Saturday night, post-chocolate, the weather was rawther beastly. Well, eventually it turned into pretty-ish snow being pelted at our faces, rather than snow/ice, but still. It merited comfort food. And what could be better than…

Tomater soup!

*sigh* that is a gas stove. The boy has a great great great kitchen. I am jealous.

Background: the boy, being the ridiculously great guy he is, generally spends Wednesday nights after work waiting for me to get out of night class (so nice!). Of late, he’s been going to Barnes and Noble and reading and rereading cook books. Yes, we both read cookbooks for fun. And he fell in love with Stir, the new cookbook by Barbara Lynch, who owns a string of ridiculously successful and ridiculously delicious Italian restaurants in Boston. And his mama bought it for him as a Thanksgiving surprise!

So our first recipe was her killlllllllller spicy tomato soup.

Oh. Em. Gee. This recipe has five ingredients (olive oil, onion, crushed red pepper flakes, canned tomatoes, basil), and we accidentally burnt the onions because during that phase of the recipe we were trying to get the cans open with his crazy can opener and ended up running to his neighbors to grab theirs… and we didn’t have fresh basil, only dry… and we didn’t have a blender to puree it so we used pre-pureed tomatoes instead of whole… AND IT STILL TASTED RIDICULOUSLY AMAZING.

For your amusement, the cookbook picture:

  

And our soup:

Not too shabby! Rather than using her grilled cheese recipe (which I’m sure is a fantastic topper too) we made this bad boy:

The boy is obsessed with it, and justifiably. Pour mix into bowl. Dump in a beer. Stir. Top with melted butter. Bake. Mannnnnnnnnnn it is good.

We also threw together a stew ish thing. Veg prep:

Garlic, potatoes, asparagus.

Sauteed in olive oil.

Added bay scallops, the rest of the veg, slightly ridiculous quantities of spinach (the boy kept dumping it in, and I was all “FINE, YOU STIR IT!” so this is an action shot of his hand hahahah)

… and some more beer. The boy loves his beer.

Ze final product:

 

And dinner, laid out and looking lovely.

What’s that? You want a closeup of my elegant wine glass?

Hahaha great night.