Frog Wine and Cream of Broccoli Soup

I mentioned that we did some tadpole sitting for a friend who is the delightful and highly intelligent eight year old daughter of friends in town. Kiki is a pretty cool girl!! Anyway, I have never tadpole sat before, and found it to be a pretty exhilarating experience. :-) Tadpoles are not particularly chatty critters, and these are only just starting to show the very slightest little peek of leggies coming on. They were quite well behaved.

This morning Kiki arrived at the doorstep (well, the sliding glass doorstep) with a bottle of wine in hand. The wine was a surprise but most wondrous of all was the superb drawing of the frog on the bottle. This little drawing is a keeper. I really get a kick and a half out of kids pictures, and this one is going in the save file. He's a very handsomely drawn frog. Who ever knew that a tadpole could be so polite?! Plus, it's exciting to see what these tadpoles will look like when they pass through their entire transformation.
Also in the photo are the fixings for a cream of broccoli soup I made tonight for dinner. I've been craving it, which is odd since I've never once made cream of broccoli soup and can't even recall ever eating it before. I made a vegan rendition of the soup. It was very simple. I started with making a veg stock. I save onion ends, carrot ends, mushroom stalks, etc. in a bag in the freezer so I can make quick stocks any old time. I made a quick stock and baked an acorn squash from Chuck and Itoko's garden while waiting. In the meantime I cut up two big Washington State onions, 6 cloves of one of our last garlics from Maine (Awwwwww), trimmed, peeled and sliced the broccoli stalks I've been saving, and cut up into florets a big bunch of organic broccoli that the co-op had on sale this week. I also cut up one big potato from a friend's garden as well to thicken it. Once the stock was finished, I strained it into a bowl and started sauteeing the onions and garlic. I added the potato once they had turned translucent, tossed in the tater, continued to sautee a bit longer, then added the broccoli stems (not the florets) and the veg stock. From here, I allowed the soup to simmer along till the squash was within ten minutes of being done. At that point I put some chapeau rolls in the oven to warm and put the florets in the soup. They cooked about ten minutes and then I pureed them with the immersion blender (which is a great tool that I'm so happy to be culinarily reunited with!!) Great dinner! The soup turned out wonderfully, and very nice with the good hearty rolls and candy sweet acorn squash. Yummmy!
Tomorrow it's time to go to our fourth beekeeping class!!!!!!! We're taking leftover lasagna for dinner in our little lunch can. :-)