Thoughts on a Tuesday evening

I've been busy lately.  Been busy baking, baking, and making use of my pressure cooker!  I'm going to take a break from the book (at least for now), because, essentially, I've been going back and editing stuff more than actually continuing the plot.
At any rate, I've been preparing jackfruit and coconut macaroons with cashew meal (they're really, really good!), making ice cream with oranges from our CSA share, and made up a nice smoothie recipe:

Fruit Smoothie (it's actually a really soft sorbet)

2 bananas, sliced and frozen
several (eight to ten) frozen strawberries, whole
1-1 1/2 cup(s) coconut milk

Put it all into the blender and blend it, a lot (on my blender, I select the preprogrammed "frozen drinks" program three times) to make it very smooth.  Enjoy!

If you use really frozen strawberries and bananas, the coconut milk will get cold enough to start forming ice, while it, in turn, softens the bananas and strawberries just enough...

We've been up to our asses (proverbially, not literally) in strawberries and nectarines, and while I'm enjoying the bounty, I've been popping a lot of them into the freezer to make smoothies and pies later on (I've never used frozen fruit for pies before, but I suppose there's only one way to find out how it'll work!).

Here's what we had for dinner last night and tonight:

Carrot Soup with Coriander

about 3 lbs. carrots, sliced

1 large white onion

1 T ground coriander

1 quart vegetable stock (I use an organic brand that I get from Sprouts)

dash salt

2 T butter (unsalted)

Cut onion into quarters.  Slice quarters of onion thinly.  Heat up your pressure cooker (I love mine!) and set to saute.  Melt butter.  Saute onion in butter until fragrant, just a couple minutes or so.  Add carrots, and stir to coat carrots with butter (this is not scientific, so just mix them around a bit to distribute the onion throughout the carrot chunks).  throw in salt and sprinkle coriander on top.  Pour vegetable stock over all, then secure lid.  Cook at high pressure for 15 minutes.  Use wand blender to get the soup to desired consistency.  Ladle into wide, shallow bowls.  Serve with fresh focaccia (we had tomato and olive).

Of course, I baked some things the other night.  They're something between a really big cookie and a scone.  I'll give you the recipe next time.

Ciao!