Sour cream dip (p. 72) and Roasted red pepper soup (p. 132)

I decided to whip out an easy recipe and the perfect choice was Sour Cream Dip (p. 72). The recipe is spectacularly easy. Mix sour cream, mayonnaise, chives, onion, dill, salt, and pepper, and there you go! Finished.



So how was it? Extremely tasty--if you like dill (which I do). Much better than store-bought dip and a great use of sour cream (which we never completely use before it goes bad). The one problem--watch out, before you know it, you've eaten all the dip and an entire bag of chips.

I have surgery on the 23rd (relatively minor, don't worry!) and my mom was coming out to help me while I recovered. Because she was being so helpful, I made a recipe that I knew she would really like--Roasted red pepper soup (p. 132).

As you can imagine, the first step of the recipe is to roast six red peppers. I explained roasting in a previous blog entry and I did it the exact same way--easy!




The red peppers were then peeled, seeded, and cut into strips. This produced a LOT of roasted pepper!



Next step--saute onions, carrots, and celery in some olive oil. Then add the red pepper, along with poultry stock, basil, rosemary, fennel seeds, and red peppers flakes, as well as 3 tablespoons of white rice. Does that seem like a strange amount of rice to anyone else? And look at all that fennel!



The soup was cooked for a while (quite a while) and pureed (using the wonderful immersion blender). Pretty!




The last step was too stir in some heavy cream, a few drops of balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper.




So what was the point of the rice? To thicken the soup? And the vinegar really rounded the flavor out.

Much like the Cream of spinach soup I made earlier in January the red pepper soup was beautiful. I think these colorful soups would be amazing in a dinner party. Mom loved the soup and said it was great both hot and cold. It had a STRONG pepper flavor, so if you love peppers (like mom) you will love the soup, but if you hate peppers (like me) it might not be a huge hit. Am I the only person who despises peppers?