Suzanna's Superior Soup and Salad

Faithful readers will recall that Suzanna last summer (when she was 11 years old) started making meals for our family occasionally. And not just peanut butter sandwiches and canned pasta, either: homemade entrées and appetizers and desserts--the whole shebang. There's no set schedule for her taking over the kitchen; sometimes she's inspired to prepare breakfast, and other times it's Sunday supper. She may refer to some children's cookbooks that the girls have received over the years, or she may remember a tasty recipe that she saw on a cooking show (one of the few types of programming that we can safely watch together as a family) and ask Susan to find it online and print it out for her.

That was the case for tonight's meal. She selected a couple recipes from Ten-Dollar Dinners, a show whose host makes tasty meals for a family of four for $10 or less. Suzanna made us orange-scented carrot soup and tuna/bread salad . . . with no help from either Susan or me! For the soup, she sautéed the vegetables and aromatics, deglazed the pan, simmered everything in the chicken stock, and then transferred it to a blender to make the soup smooth and velvety before dishing it up and swirling a spoonful of sour cream into each bowl.

For the salad, she baked and cubed the bread, chopped the tomatoes and calamata olives and shallots, whisked together the dressing ingredients, and tossed everything with the tuna, beans, and basil for a fresh, fragrant, flavorful salad that went perfectly with the soup. Both recipes are keepers. I'm telling you, we do not go hungry in this household!