6 Ingredients Including the Spoon

The new Haagen-Dazs add campaign is one that I can appreciate. So, as I was making a soup recently, I realized that the formula was perfect. I could translate my ingredients to that slogan and save myself some effort!

Carrots, leeks, broth, pepper, and dairy – just add your spoon. Ok, it isn’t really fair to say that broth is an ingredient since it’s obviously tons of vegetables and seasonings in one flavorful addition. The dairy isn’t too accurate, either. I did use about ½ C of cream and then 1 ½ C milk. I guess that if they’d been incorporated to some version of Half and Half then I could claim that. But they didn’t, and I don’t.

Another complication, when you get to the table, it’s completely fair to season one’s soup with more salt and pepper, but I’ve never added salt to ice cream once it’s spun and in my bowl. And Haagen-Dazs doesn’t mention salt. How do they make an ice cream I like without a touch of salt? I'm not sure, for when I look at the absolute most phenomenal ice creams their ingredients are: milk, cream, egg yolks, sugar, salt, and a flavor, such as vanilla.

When I shift my attention to the most amazing soups, don’t they need a combination of vegetables sautéed in butter, water, herbs, seasoning, and maybe a wine reduction and cream brought in at the end? That’s just a vegetable soup, but I love soups with beans, and meat, and broth soups, too.

I have come away deciding that five ingredients aren’t that many. But they do make quite an impression on me, even if my style is a bit of a cheat. I haven’t put a spoon to the new Haagen-Dazs ice cream, but I’ve begun to revolutionize my meals by cutting myself off after pulling five things from the fridge and cupboards. With fall at my door, and broths and heaps of vegetables in a pot, I’ve been eating as well as ever!

Savory Recipes

When I decide to make something that I haven’t made before, or at least not recently, I pull out three different cookbooks and start comparing recipes. That sounds normal, right? But then, what if I look in the fridge and see a lot of spinach? Well, I take down my favorite cookbook and search for spinach in the index. Boy, do I love indexes.

Say I see spinach dip and decide that’s what I want; next I branch out finding multiple recipes for spinach dip. Here’s the catch. I never choose one. Usually I’m combining two recipes and adding the bell pepper I found behind the spinach which wasn’t even put with spinach on the spinach side dish recipes.

So, I use approximately 30% of a recipe at any given time and am always amazed at how well those crazy vegetables go together, which, according to my books, have never been combined before! When I am wildly successful I admit to wishing I’d measured more closely, remembered each spice and written it immediately. But I suppose my current system leaves me space to stumble once again into marvelous spinach dip my own way. Plus, we know I’d only use 30% of what I wrote, anyhow!