"Oh no."

Disaster day in the kitchen. I decided to do a bunch of cooking today, because I am terribly bored and I have produce that is about to go bad. So, I made some homemade vegetable stock, sweet potato gnocchi, and butternut squash-coconut soup. Two of those things went awry.

First, the gnocchi. I don't have a potato ricer, so I read somewhere that I could just press the potato through a colander and get the same effect. I don't think I cooked my potatoes enough, because that just did not work. They were still really lumpy. So I ended up mashing them with a hand-held masher, which all the recipes I've read said not to do (or else you'll get gummy gnocchi). I still couldn't get all the lumps out, so as I was making the gnocchi, I ended up with big bits of sweet potato in the middle. I froze them to use later this week. I'm thinking of doing sweet potato gnocchi with collard greens and pecans (I have a bumper crop's worth of pecans in my freezer). They may be awful, but what the hell . . . I'll try them anyway. You only learn by doing, right?

Second, the butternut soup. The recipe called for pureeing the sucker. I only have a blender, so I loaded it up with soup and hit the "puree" button. Cue blender top exploding a la "Hell's Kitchen" and butternut soup flying about my kitchen and all over me. After I managed to hit the "stop" button on the blender, all I could say was, "Oh no." So I'm standing in my kitchen, covered in soup, with turmeric-yellow soup bits on nearly every inch of my (very tiny) kitchen.

Chris was a good husband, and helped me clean it all up. We'd been meaning to get out of the house anyway and, seeing as how the snow/ice had finally melted, we decided to venture out to a local shopping center that has both a Bed Bath & Beyond and Barnes & Noble. I stashed the half-finished soup in the fridge, and off we went. I shelled out $30 for an immersion blender, Chris bought the first season of "Modern Family," and we hit up the Kroger for a few other necessities.

Back at home, I plugged in the immersion blender and finished the soup. And it turned out really well. I don't know how I ever lived without this blender. I am in love with it. Future blender disasters averted!

On a more positive note, I am happy to report that my darling hubby informed me today that, in the two weeks I've been making vegan food for us, he feels like he is being spoiled with delicious things to eat. The only thing he wasn't fond of was sesame bok choy, but he said he just doesn't like the texture of bok choy to begin with. He sure knows how to make a girl blush!