Ellie's Kitchen: Crockpot Barley Vegetable Soup and Sweet Potato Knots

It's 39 degrees in my little Massachusetts town: a beautiful crisp, sunny October morning. The trees are glowing in shades of flame and gold, and mist is rising off the river like wraiths. There is no place like New England in the fall. And nothing says 'cozy' like coming in at the end of the day to a warm home smelling of baking bread and hot soup. Thus, while my family is away at work and school, I'm prepping dinner in the slow cooker:

Crockpot Barley Vegetable Soup

  Ingredients

  • 1 cup medium pearl barley
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1/2 tsp. fennel seed
  • 3 carrots, peeled and sliced
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 2 stalks celery, chopped
  • 3 garlic cloves, minced
  • 2 sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
  • 2 cups frozen corn
  • 2 cups frozen green beans
  • 1/4 tsp. salt
  • 1/4 tsp. pepper
  • 3 (14 oz). cans vegetable broth
  • 4 cups water
  • 14-oz. can diced tomatoes with herbs, undrained
  • 2 cups baby spinach
  •  
  • Preparation
    1. Place all ingredients except the can of diced tomatoes and spinach in a 5-6 quart crockpot in the order given. Do not stir.
    2. Cover crockpot and cook on low for 8 hours. Stir soup and add tomatoes and baby spinach; stir again to combine.
    3. Cover crockpot and cook for 20 to 30 minutes longer until soup is hot and spinach is wilted. Remove and discard bay leaf before serving.
     
  •  
  • http://busycooks.about.com/od/hotsouprecipes/r/cpbarleysoup.htm 


  • Easy Sweet Potato Knots.

    Ingredients

    • 1 cup Warm Water
    • 1 envelope (7g Envelope) Active Dry Yeast
    • 2 Tablespoons brown sugar
    • 2 Tablespoons Olive Oil,, Plus More To Oil The Bowl
    • ½ cups Sweet Potato Puree (fresh Or Canned)
    • 3-½ cups Unbleached Bread Flour
    • 1-½ teaspoon Coarse Kosher Salt

    Preparation Instructions

    Note: To make sweet potato puree, microwave sweet potato until soft, place in a paperr bag to cool, then peel. Easy as pie.
    1. Pour warm water into a medium bowl and slowly whisk in yeast. Let sit for 10 minutes, then add honey, olive oil and mashed sweet potato. Whisk until thoroughly combined and smooth.
    2. In a separate bowl, mix flour and salt. Slowly stir in wet ingredients and continue to stir until it becomes impossible to stir more. Then use your hands to continue mixing and slowly start kneading your dough, adding more flour to your hands to keep it from sticking.
    3. Once you’ve created your dough ball, add olive oil to the bottom of your bowl and roll the dough ball in it until it is coated. Cover with Saran wrap or a damp towel and store in a dry place (I use my microwave) for two hours.
    4. Around the last 15-minute mark, preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Divide your dough into pieces you can easily hold in your fist and roll them into long strips around 8 or 9-inches long. Don’t worry if they’re skinny, they’ll still get fat when they bake. Tie each into a knot, tuck the edges under each side, then place each on the baking pan.
    5. Brush with melted butter. Bake until golden, around 10-15 minutes.  Allow to cool 3-5 minutes.
      
  •  
  • (I forget which cookbook I got this recipe out of. I copied it years ago...) 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ellie@Home 2020 Summer Reading List

   Good Evening and Happy Memorial Day! This post is far later than I planned thanks to technical difficulties (sob, sob) but here it is, better late than never! The earlier version of this post was wry, witty, and weird, and I don’t recall any of it now on my THIRD attempt. So without further ado (or headaches) I’m going to dive in. I have 34 books for this summer’s list. Because I can’t order from my library, I scoured my shelves for books that I haven’t read or have not finished. I managed to come up with 28. I grabbed one of Josh’s books, and two of Liam’s, then on a whim treated myself to a copy of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and Angel of Darkness for my Kindle. Then, just when I thought I had enough (plenty!) Henry Roi from HellBound Books kindly sent me a review copy of The Horror Writer: A Study of Craft and Identity in the Horror Genre compiled and edited by Joe Mynhardt. This is at the top of my reading list, partly because it sounds really interesting and informative, a
Read more

Beauty for Your September Morning...

Image
To the Light of September By W. S. Merwin When you are already here you appear to be only a name that tells of you whether you are present or not and for now it seems as though you are still summer still the high familiar endless summer yet with a glint of bronze in the chill mornings and the late yellow petals of the mullein fluttering on the stalks that lean over their broken shadows across the cracked ground but they all know that you have come the seed heads of the sage the whispering birds with nowhere to hide you to keep you for later you who fly with them you who are neither before nor after you who arrive with blue plums that have fallen through the night perfect in the dew
Read more

Carrying On

Image
I hope this finds you and your loved ones well. My family has been fine during this stressful time, anxiety a little high but nothing debilitating, and certainly nothing we haven't been able to work through. Still, each day is an exercise in uncertainty, wondering if we are doing enough to keep ourselves and others safe, wondering if our luck will change, and what we will do if that does happen. We recently learned that our boy will not be going back to school next month (we weren't going to send him anyway), and now my husband and I are trying to figure out how we are going to oversee our son's virtual schooling while both of us are working full time. My husband has said that is the main topic of canversation in his workplace, as many of his coworkers are parents to school-age children and both parents are working. It is less of a conversation at my workplace; not so many of us have school-age children, though a handful have school-age grandchildren. Because I work
Read more