Heart on Sleeve: Daily Nourishment- Another Dinner Post

My apartment is in the process of gaining another occupant. She has had her closets purged; almost every shelf and cupboard reorganized and filled again with more stuff. Its always surprising how much stuff tends to gather in the darkness of closets and behind doors that are rarely opened. I didn’t have too much stuff I looked at wondering why I had it or even what exactly it was, but I did find a few things I didn’t mind parting with. This new occupant you may be wondering about is my boyfriend. He has done much more purging then I, taking many trips to the goodwill to donate and has even managed to make a few extra dollars selling some things on Craig’s List. And he did this all willingly, and I think came out of all the purging feeling he had a little less cluttered life. Our past few weekends have consisted of merging our two living spaces into just my one smaller apartment. It has been a very peaceful merging, but each weekend we have been able to accomplish a lot and end up feeling pretty tired. This weekend was no different. By Sunday I think we were both feeling pretty lazy and glad that we are almost done with this, besides moving more of his things in we also had some errands to do related to adjusting to the move and family that was visiting from out of town we made time for. After all was done and our weekend was coming to an end we realized it was 8pm and we still had no dinner plans, while both of us were getting very hungry. Of course thoughts of take out crossed my mind, how easy it would be but we resisted. We drove our tired hungry selves to the store and picked up some things to make a quick salad and soup. Our grand total for the groceries were only $6! We saved so much by not ordering take out, not to mention all the fat and calories we also saved. The dinner actually came together very fast and turned out to be delicious. We kept mentioning how good it was as we filled our empty bodies. It was really so much more satisfying than the take out would have been and with an upcoming vacation around the corner I am really trying to watch what I eat and stay away from bloat producing foods that would have been on the table had we ordered take out. We ended up making a potato leek soup, it was so easy. I just rough chopped and then softened two leeks, two white onions and a clove of garlic in a big pot. Once soft I added about 4 smallish Yukon potatoes, chopped very small and covered in veggie stock to simmer for about 20 minutes. While the soup was simmering away I put our salad together, chopped some lettuce, tomato, carrot and avocado. Added some dried cranberries and whipped up my favorite balsamic dressing. It’s from this book;

It is so easy to make, like most dressings are. You just toss in all the ingredients and blend. It took maybe 3 minutes. By the time the salad was ready the potatoes in the soup were soft and ready for the blender. I poured in the soup with some fresh rosemary, sea salt and pepper and blended it until smooth. That was it, dinner was done. Clean up was easy too since the soup was made in one pot. Below are the photos, sorry they aren’t the best but I was just too hungry to take more. Let me know if anyone wants the full recipes.

The Dressing