Off-Topic With Tammy!

Good Morning, friends! It's Thursday, so we're going "Off-Topic" today, and I'm going to bring you another one of my personal favorite recipes again this week. (I sense a theme going here, but I am assuming that cooking is something that we all have in common - whether it is a chore, a hobby or a passion, we all have to do it, right? So, I just want to share a few of my own personal tried-and-trusted favorites to give you a few more things to try in your own cooking arsenals.)

First, let me preface this by telling you that I do not consider myself super-creative in the kitchen (or anywhere else, for that matter). I like to have a plan, and I like to follow that said plan, but I am not extremely rigid either - more of a "loose-plan" kind of a girl. I'll take a recipe or a scrapbooking sketch or an itinerary and tweak it as I go along to fit my tastes and needs. I seem to do this in all areas of my life. When it comes to cooking, which I love to do, by the way, I generally always start with a recipe, and I seem to find recipes all over the place.

Take this Gourmet Spinach Soup, for example. It is my new favorite soup, and I found the recipe in a mystery novel that I read last year, Dying For Chocolate by Diane Mott Davidson. This book is book #2 in a series about a small-town caterer turned part-time sleuth. These books are great for light bedtime reading, and the recipes that I've tried have been really good - so double my fun!

This soup uses common easy-to-find ingredients and is super easy to whip together for a weeknight meal. Eating this soup means that my boys eat fresh spinach, so it's a win-win for everyone. I did, of course, tweak this recipe for my tastes. I added sausage, and I use baby spinach instead of that full-grown-bitter-tasting-nastiness known as regular spinach. Bacon bits or ham would be really good in this soup too, as the flavors would blend beautifully with the swiss cheese, but I almost always have sausage on hand, so that is what I usually use. In fact, it's on my menu for tomorrow night, and I can hardly wait!

GOURMET SPINACH SOUP

5 T. butter

1/4 lb. mushrooms, cleaned and diced

1 scallion, chopped

5 T. flour

2 c. chicken broth

2 c. milk (I use more at the end if I want to thin the soup a bit)

1/2 t. salt

black pepper, to taste

1/4 lb. cream cheese, softened and cubed

1 c. grated swiss cheese

3/4 lb. fresh baby spinach (washed and chopped)

1 lb. ground sausage (cooked and drained)

Melt butter in a large saucepan. Saute onions and mushrooms until tender. Add flour and stir just until flour is cooked (2 minutes). Whisk in first chicken broth and then milk, stirring until thickened. Add salt, pepper, cream cheese, swiss cheese and a big of ground nutmeg (optional); stir until melted. Stir in spinach. Heat and stir very gently. Add cooked sausage. Season to taste; serve hot. (I add another cup of milk to thin the soup a bit.)