Peanut Soup

Good news: I'm not dead.  Just too busy to blog.

Mediocre news: Peanut soup is sort of weird.

I actually am not overloaded with plans or homework today, so I decided I should cook something (after sleeping in till 11:30.  Lovely!)  I love thai food, so when I found a peanut soup recipe in one of my cookbooks, I was excited.  One of the roommates and I took a trip to Tops, which is a decent store, but still makes me miss home/Wegmans.

While trying to find all the stuff we needed, we learned (maybe relearned.  I feel like I've gotten confused by this every time I enter a grocery store) that canned tomatoes are not with canned fruits and vegetables.  I wanted to get some sauce, too, because I eat noodles like 800 times a week.  We were trying to figure out which was the best deal when this lady came up to us and not only recommended a type of sauce (Prego) but also told us an entire recipe for homemade sauce.  So a future foodblog project might be making the Tops lady's sauce.  It was cool and weird.

Anyways, peanut soup.

You need a bell pepper...

I forgot to take photos until I was already chopping.

...and an onion.  Chop 'em up!

Fun fact: I don't actually like the abbreviation "'em."
"Them" is a one syllable word.   No abbreviations necessary.

Then you sauté them with margarine in a saucepan for about 5 minutes with a little garlic powder (or a clove of chopped garlic.)

My garlic powder burned onto the pan a little.  It was weird looking.

Then, add a 24 oz can of chopped or crushed tomatoes with the liquid, a can of water, a few sprinkles of chili powder, and 24 oz of vegetable broth.  Bring it to a boil, then cook uncovered on low for half an hour.

As is often the case, it will look better soon.

After half an hour, add 1/2 cup instant brown rice and cook covered for 15 minutes.  When the rice is done, turn off the heat and stir in 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter until it dissolves.

Okay maybe not much better.

Overall, it was decent.  I really failed when I was trying to get the seal off the chili powder container, then I ended up adding too much and it kind of made my tongue numb.  But it tasted nice, if unfamiliar, and will probably be good with some grilled cheese later this week.  And I'm proud of myself for trying something new.

Wow.  This looked way cooler on my camera.
Like a magazine or something.   Now I'm disappointed.