Adventures in cooking: Madeline attempts a more elaborate recipe
- Jan 25
- 3 min read
It was a dark and stormy night. Perfect for soup! I was inspired to try a new recipe that my sister had shared with me.
After my last recipe post came out, my sister texted me. "You should try these recipes," she said, and she sent me a few Pinterest links. An enneagram 4, Audrey has always been more creative and better at making things than I am, and that extends to food, too. I love food, but I'm not a great cook, and I value convenience over the experience of cooking. But, I'm trying to try new things, and the recipes that she shared looked good. So here is my after-action report. This Cozy Autumn Wild Rice Soup recipe comes from Gimme Some Oven: https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/cozy-autumn-wild-rice-soup/. Come with me as I attempt this recipe - and talk through a few modifications that I made.
Challenge #1 was finding all of the ingredients at the Camp Courtney Commissary. Here in Okinawa, we are lucky to have both the commissary and off-base grocery stores and farmer's markets available. But when I was shopping for this recipe, I didn't have a lot of time, so I had to just stick with the commissary. That led to an issue: they didn't have celery, which appeared to be a pretty big ingredient for this recipe. I decided to compromise with extra carrots and some celery salt, which mostly did the trick, but I'd like to try it again later with celery.
The second ingredient I couldn't find was wild rice (tough situation for a recipe with "wild rice" in the name . . . I settled for brown rice and decided I'd hope for the best. It was mostly fine, but I think that's why my result was thicker and more porridge-like in consistency than the recipe's picture showed; the brown rice absorbed a lot of the moisture whereas wild rice wouldn't have.
The last ingredient I couldn't find was an orange sweet potato, but since I'm not a big sweet potato fan anyway, I decided to just use a white potato. They also didn't have baby bella mushrooms, so I just grabbed a different variety and hoped for the best - they were probably less expensive than baby bellas would have been, anyway.
The rest of the ingredients were available in the commissary, thankfully. And I was glad that I'd brought all of my spices from California! Especially Old Bay, which is featured front-and-center in this recipe.
I prepped the ingredients before officially starting the cooking: dicing the potato and carrots, roughly chopping the mushrooms . . . and keeping the leftover carrots as carrot sticks to snack on later.
This recipe is very vegetable-forward and can be made plant-based if you prefer. I used chicken broth, but you can substitute vegetable broth instead to make it vegetarian.
As I was cooking, I reflected on the fact that soups are pretty forgiving dishes, so they're perfect for a cook who struggles, like me. 😂 It does not take much skill for a soup to smell great on the stove, especially when you start with sautéing diced onion and minced garlic:
But was it going to taste as good as the 5-star reviews promised? Was I going to be able to pull it off?
Even though I had to make some ingredient swaps that impacted the appearance and texture (the extra brown rice and white potato made it a thicker soup than the original recipe produced), the soup was hearty, nutritious (a lot of bright colors and fiber-packed!), and yes, delicious. Especially on a cold winter night. I highly recommend trying this recipe! https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/cozy-autumn-wild-rice-soup/
Thank you for reading!
Have questions or comments? Email me here
References
Martin, A. Cozy Autumn Wild Rice Soup. Gimme Some Oven. November 9, 2020. https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/cozy-autumn-wild-rice-soup/
