New Year of Cooking

My attempt at the soup.  It actually looks like the picture!

Every year I try to improve my cooking.  I'm still learning and experimenting in the kitchen.  A big help to my cooking has been our weekly trips to the Farmer's Market.  A few weeks back we saw Nathan Lyon at the Torrance Farmer's market.  He had his cookbook with him.  I didn't buy it that day (I know I should have) but luckily he was back at the market during Steve's vacation and he picked up the book for me.  The cool thing is that the book is organized seasonally.  I started looking through the different winter recipes and decided to try the Sweet Potato-Carrot Soup with Candied Pecans (well, we switched out walnuts for pecans but everything else was as it should be).

My biggest frustration with cooking from cookbooks has always been that my food never really looks like the picture.  Image my surprise and delight at my soup ACTUALLY looking like the soup in the book.  Pretty cool.  The soup was tasty too!  The only set back was the fact that my co-workers said that it looked like I was eating baby food :-P. I was happy and am now looking forward to trying the tomato soup in the Winter section.  Yeah, Cooking!