Comfort food from scratch – Learning project week 4

For the fourth week of my learning project, I decided to make two dishes that are my comfort food.  These two dishes are everyday foods that serve as staples for any home cook. The dishes I made are homemade broccoli cauliflower soup and fresh apple pie.

First comes the soup. I decided to challenge myself by making a cream-based soup, which is something I have never made completely from scratch before. I didn’t really know how to go about this, so I started by doing dome research.  I found this very useful site that explained that most cream-based soups are made with a roux. For those of you who may not know, the roux serves as a thickener for the soup. To my surprise, a roux is actually very easy to make. All it is is butter, flour and chicken stock brought to a boil.  Once I had this all figured out my next step was to find a recipe that I could follow.  I ended up finding a video that led me step-by-step to make any kind of creamy vegetable soup that I want. I found this video very helpful because it explained absolutely everything and I could simply follow along while I was cooking. I have come to realize that I prefer videos to written recipes because they are easier for me to understand. In the video, they are making cream of spinach soup but I decided to go for broccoli and cauliflower because that’s what I had.

This is my final product.

All in all the soup was simple to make and only consisted of three easy steps; making the roux, cooking the vegetables and then blending them together and adding some heavy cream. The soup was delicious and full of flavour. My dad has requested cream of mushroom next time!

Next up; DESSERT!

Who doesn’t love apple pie? I know I do! So this week was my first ever attempt at making a pie.  The first step was to figure out what kind of apples to use. I found a site that lists the 10 best apples to use in a pie and then I went to the grocery store to see what was available. I went with Granny Smith apples. I then found a simple recipe to follow, got all of my ingredients together and I was good to go!

The tricky part of making pie is the crust. I followed along with this video to help me out. The crust I made uses sour cream which I found very interesting!

Once the crust is done its time for the apples!

Once again, the video and the recipe that I used led me through this process step-by-step so it was really easy to follow along.

Here it is, freshly baked apple pie!

For my first attempt, I think I did really well and I am proud of how my pie turned out. Being someone who loves to bake, I really enjoyed making this pie.  With the completion of this project, I am hoping to enjoy cooking as much as I do baking. The more that I practise, the more I enjoy cooking. Stay tuned for my next post where I will make a new dish!