Potato Casserole/Vegetable Soup

Okay, well, I seem to have accidentally deleted all the pictures I took of this month's food. Not sure how that happened. But here we go with the recipes:

1. Grandma's Potato Casserole
Ingredients: Russian banana potatoes, green onions

This is based on a dish my grandma makes a lot (well, you probably could've guessed that from the title). Considering I have never made this casserole, never looked at the recipe for it, and did not call to ask her about any of it, I think it came out remarkably well. (For the record, she uses regular russet potatoes, and peels them. I did not peel my potatoes.)

Quantities of other ingredients will depend on how many potatoes you're using, so adjust as needed. I wound up with about 4 servings.

6-7 Russian banana potatoes, scrubbed and diced - parboil them first. You don't want them too done, since they're going in the oven. (Or 3-4 small russet potatoes.)

After the potatoes are parboiled, combine them with:
1 cup low-fat sour cream
1 cup low-fat cottage cheese
The white parts of 6-7 spring onions, chopped--save the green tops for garnish (or 1/4 cup white onion, diced)
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
Salt and pepper to taste

Stir it all together and bake at 350 for about 25 minutes, or until lightly browned around the edges. Garnish with reserved onion tops.
 

2.  All the Vegetables Soup

Ingredients: Carrots, Broccoli

This will be a cursory step-by-step write-up, since the recipe was really not worth making.Sometimes you have a bunch of vegetables all going soft--not bad, just limp--at once, you know? And sometimes when that happens, you own an immersion blender, and then attempts at "health food" happen. Or something. I mean, this might be great with a different assortment of vegetables.

Roast carrots (I had about seven tiny carrots) and broccoli (I had one head) with other vegetables--in my case, mushrooms (about half a carton) and a quarter of an onion, until soft. Puree with about 25 oz. vegetable broth (I actually used chicken broth as I had a carton open already) until souplike in consistency. At this point, I realized I also had spinach on its way out, so I heated up the soup, added the spinach, and pureed again when the spinach was cooked through. Salt and pepper to taste.

So I guess I was hoping that if I pureed a bunch of random roasted vegetables together, it would be good, but it wasn't. It tasted...exactly like a bunch of random vegetables, pureed with broth. And the color was kind of unfortunate, a sort of murky greenish brown. All in all, very reminiscent of baby food. It didn't taste bad, exactly, just...not really worth making.