Hi there blog readers.

Another weekend in New England, another snow storm in New England – that should be the new saying around here! It started snowing around 4 o’clock Saturday afternoon and it is 6:30 in the evening the following day – and guess what? It is still snowing! I am fine with it, don’t think I am complaining. I just think it’s kind of funny.

This weekend we had planned our menu and meals around soup. I have been back on a Jacques Pepin kick these days, and this weekend I was all about his soups! On Friday A and I met up at Wegman’s after work and we did some pre-snow storm shopping. Wegman’s is a great place to go on a Friday night – usually the Weg (as we call it) is PACKED on the weekend. Sometimes we go on a Saturday, sometimes we go on a Sunday. I can’t decide which day is more crowded. But Friday is a whole different story. It was not crowded at all, and we had a great shopping and dining experience! Not only did we do our shopping for the weekend, we also ate dinner at the Weg and it was pretty good!

The first soup I made this weekend was Jacques’s heart vegetable and bean soup. I just adore this soup in the fall, winter and spring (maybe even in the summer – but not quite as much). I love how Jacques talks about how you can really put any type of vegetable in this soup. On Saturday we cooked a leek, an onion, scallions, carrots, celery, spinach, a white turnip and we garnished everything with Gruyere cheese and parsley.

Sunday was another day for soup. We had two leeks left over from our grocery shopping on Friday night. Even though we had vegetable soup left, I wanted to make a leek and potato soup. I found another Pepin recipe for the soup, and I made a couple of changes…. I sautéed the leek, garlic and onion in a little unsalted butter and olive oil. I did not use peanut oil at all in my recipe. I let the mixture cook for 35 minutes:

After everything had cooked on the stove for a while, I gradually pureed everything (in small batches) in the blender. Normally I would use the Vitamix, a food processor or my immersion blender – but on Sunday night all I had access to was a blender. Thankfully it did the trick! We garnished this soup with the same exact ingredients that we used on Saturday. Gruyere cheese, scallions, and parsley. This soup was SO delicious!

I hope that you had a good weekend, too. My weekend was filled with cooking fantastic cold weather food – I had a great time coking and eating this weekend. (On a side note, I also ran three miles on Saturday and just over five miles on Sunday – so there was definitely exercise happening, too!)

See you soon!