My Week In Chow (Chow)

Today was soup week in our household.First I decided to make a split pea soup in the crock pot. It was really easy and delicious, despite my failure to put pieces of pig in it. A bag of split peas, a few carrots thickly sliced, a stalk of celery treated the same, three peeled and diced pearl onions, a handful of coarsely chopped cabbage left over from last week, some minced garlic, thyme, salt, and pepper all went into the crock pot and were covered with 7 cups of water boiled in our kettle. I let it cook on high for four hours (slow for the whole day would have worked as well if I'd figured out what I wanted to do before lunch time), then used a sieve to push most of the chunky carrot bits out of the way and immersion blended the remainder for a few minutes.
My other soup was blue cheese and cauliflower. I boiled a head of cauliflower for 5 minutes, reserving two cups of the water. Then I briefly cooked a roux of 3T butter & 3T flour before throwing in two diced pearl onions. After a good five minutes of softening the onions, I slooowly added first the cauliflower water and then an two cups of milk while whisking away to make sure there weren't any lumps. Half the florets went into the proto-soup and I hit it with the immersion blender. Then in with about four ounces of crumbled blue cheese along with a little salt and pepper. Once the cheese was nicely melted I threw in the rest of the cauliflower and quickly whipped up some thyme croutons.

Note the crazy use of onions in recipe! I'm a madman!

I was going to use my remaining pearl onions to make a French onion soup for NDM, but although she can't comprehend how I don't like her trying to cook meat for me that she can't eat, she was aghast that I would consider making a soup that I would not be willing to consume. So the onions still languish awaiting an idea.
Then of course I realized I'd been marinating some firm tofu in a reconstituted black bean marinade for almost a week, so my last meal was a quick tofu and bok choy stirfy with a bit of shredded carrot and some quickly stirfried noodles. I wish I could take credit for the bao, but it is so cheap and easy to steam the frozen bao from our local Asian grocery...