Soup in a bread bowl, from scratch

Now I know Ryan and I usually go out to dinner on Friday's, but this week we had a planned dinner out for someone's birthday on Saturday night, so Friday is the stay in night.  Which means, our 'from scratch' meal was tonight, Friday night.  Yes, some of you are probably not even getting to dinner yet, but I am still a few hours ahead of east coast time and now it is getting late...and I am stuffed.

Tonight's plan was soup in a bread bowl.  The original bread bowl recipe called for use to have 6 10-oz custard bowls so shape the dough around, and we didn't have these...so I improvised!

This was the line-up...

and...

I used the French baguette recipe for the bread machine because I knew I could shape the dough andy way I wanted and this meant a big ball so I could cut the middle out and make my bowl.  So in goes all the ingredients...

Love the way dough comes out from the bread machine.  To save on time I started this before Ryan came home from work since the bread takes 1 hr 40 min in the machine and then additional rise time.

Time to rise...ok, this is the hardest part for us since it always says in a warm place.  Umm, no warm here.  So today I pulled the mini gas heater into the kitchen to try and warm things up.  It worked a little bit better than usual.

So we made some round shapes and hoped they would puff up knowing the didn't rise so much on the counter.

On to the cream of broccoli soup.  This recipe came from the Betty Crocker diabetes cookbook.  While neither of us have diabetes, you know you will get healthier recipes and the nutrition information along with it.  We started with onions and carrots.

Cooked those up in some oil.

Oh no, some one chopped these trees bare!

Oh, I guess the tree tops will be put to good use.

And I do call this very good use!

The recipe called for chicken broth, but I went with veggie broth of course.

Then it was blenderize time, baby!

Love the color and it smelled so good.

Last up was to add some sour cream.

Time to take the rolls, I mean bread bowls, out of the oven.  Ok, so not 100% as planned, but I made do with what I had.  Next time I will know what to do differently.  The problem was that they were dense, ok not a problem because it tasted good, but the recipe called for 2 loaves of French bread and I made 4 dense rolls.  I will say that they tasted really really good, but dense.

So here is the finished product.  Not as big as I would have liked, but definitely as TASTY as we had hoped for.

Oh, and some spare soup on the side.  I think the carrots gave it a nice flavor.

So that was it for our 'from scratch weekends' for this week.  I know we got a total jump start on it, but we both have home work this weekend and other engagements.  I am glad we were able to fit in a home cooked, and hearty, meal this weekend.

QUESTIONS:  What is your favorite kind of soup?  Any plans for a 'from scratch' meal this weekend?