Cousins, Cooking, and Craziness!

Last weekend I had the wonderful privelege of meeting up with my faulous cousin Kelly. I was really excited by this prospect because I have not seen Kelly since I was 14. Yeah, long time. And now we live less than 10 minutes away from each other! Glorious, I know. Kelly is loads of fun. This is her, by the way:

Anyway. After much catching up and many giggles as well as fits of snorting laughter, we jumped into Kelly's car and off to Sunflower Market we went to get some supplies to make dinner. Yummy!

Our menu? Well, whilst giving darling Kelly the tour of my room, she noticed my cookbooks and we started looking at them for inspiration. One cookbook I have is from Princess Cruise Lines. Kelly went on a Princess cruise a little while ago and proceeded to find the recipe for a delicious chilled strawberry soup that she had fallen in love with on her cruising adventure. So strawberries and cream were on our list. The recipe for the strawberry cream soup calls for Frangelico, a hazelnut flavored liquor that really brings out the flavor of berries. But alas, as I am 18 and Kells is just a few months shy of the magical age of 21, we would have to make do with hazlenut extract. Do they make such a thing? Apparently yes. We even found an organic brand.

Groceries in hand, we make our way back to my apartment and bust out some delicious chilled soup. Which took about 7 minutes to make since there is no cooking involved. Just pureeing. Thank goodness for miniature food processors (thank you Mommy!).

So, my strawberry soup as pictured above. In the book they had this really cool strawberry flower that stood vertically in the middle of the soup with really beautiful thin strawberry petals. And then they filled the center with cream. So basically it was gorgeous. But I wasn't sure how to make that, so we ended up with a strawberry fan, some spatterings of cream and a few red peppercorns. Needless to say, the soup was delish!

We had some salmon too, with black bean, corn and mango salsa...also yummy, but I didn't take a picture, so I won't bother going into details about it.

After some tasty food and chatting, we rounded off our evening in the best way imaginable: drooling over Ewan McGregor's lovely feautres and gorgeous voice in Moulin Rouge. Ahhhh. Love that movie. I always feel inclined to stop it before Satine dies so it ends happily. But alas, I never do, so I always see her die and watch poor Ewan cry. Which makes me cry. Oh well! Just a movie.