At long last

I've been feeling like we aren't eating well...too much comfort food and not enough salad. So I tried to plan some light meals that include raw vegetables this week. On Monday we had warm chickpea and arugula salad (for a picture see this blog dedicated to Mark Bittman). This salad comes from my mother-in-law's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian cookbook. The recipe came very highly recommended, and it didn't disappoint. I served it with a white bean soup from How to Cook Everything. The white bean soup was fabulous...just my style...really simple and cheap and good.

White Bean Soup

1/2 c dried white beans (navy or great northern), rinse and picked over

6 c water or broth

1 medium onion, chopped

chopped parsley for garnish (optional...I liked it better without the parsley)

salt and pepper

I have found that beans don't get really soft when you cook them with salt, and you need to them to be really soft in this recipe. So, I cooked the beans and onions in 6 c water for about an hour. Then I added a couple of teaspoons Better than Boulion chicken broth base. Better than Boulion is very saltly, so I didn't add extra salt. Once the beans are soft, puree the soup and serve. That's it! I love soup!

After dinner my father-in-law came over to watch Monday night football. Shortly after he arrived, he and my sexy husband went downstairs to grab a beer. They were gone for a long time, and I heard lots of banging around. I assumed that they were checking out my sexy husband's basement project. Wrong. I walked into the dining room to grab my checkbook so we could pay our condo fee, and I caught them with the oven pulled out and tools everywhere. An hour later, my oven was fixed!!!

Out of gratitude I made them apple crisp with homemade icecream.

I thought it might be fun to make little individual apple crisps. It wasn't worth it. We ate two individual crisps per serving anyway.:)

Oh yeah. Now the fun starts.