Heating Up the Blender

I often write about blender cookbooks in the summer because they have so many chilled recipes, but rather than using the *delightful* cold snap as an excuse to check out a soup or baking cookbook, I decided to showcase some hot foods from the blender. The Blender Way to Better Cooking (edited by Betty Sullivan, 1965) is back to warm us up rather than cool us down!

Good, hot soup is a cold-weather staple, though, so I won't skip it. Let's start the meal with something hot and creamy. Cream of mushroom or cream of chicken are so overdone, though.

So how about Hot Cream of Avocado Soup? (Hot avocados just seem weird to me, but your mileage may vary.)

For the main course, here's something that calls for running so much meat through a blender that I'm reminded of my first job... working as a cook in a nursing home.

Of course, our old people didn't get blender-chopped liver-and-onion burgers wrapped in bacon. They just got Salisbury steak liquified with a little milk. (I'm not sure which is worse, but it's probably the Salisbury steak since it didn't have any bacon.)

Of course, we should have a salad to go with the burgers, but it's hard to get too excited about chilled salad greens on a frigid day. A warm salad is just the thing...

Of course, maybe those cold, raw salad greens will seem more exciting if the alternative is iceberg lettuce chopped up in the blender, sautéed for ten minutes, and then soaked in a chicken broth-bread-sour cream sauce and topped with more bread crumbs.

A nice, old-fashioned steamed pudding should finish the meal off in a cozy way.

This looks like a pretty standard carrot-cakish type deal at first. Then I realized that in place of the can of crushed pineapple, this calls for two medium potatoes, cut in pieces and then blender-grated after the carrots. Potatoes are pretty awesome in most applications, so who knows? Maybe they belong in carrot cake too. A weird surprise can help make a cold snap a little more bearable, and I am waaay more willing to make this claim for potatoes in dessert than for hot lettuce with liver burgers. Stay warm, everyone!