Ummm... Mine Doesn't Look Like That

So I tried a new recipe this weekend.  I had some carrots left over from making oriental stock for hot and sour soup, so I looked for recipes with carrots in them.

I found a recipe in my Vegetarian for One cookbook for Carrot and Rice Soup with Lemon.  Sounded good to me.  And looked good,too.   

I had to google some of the ingredients to find out what they were: shallots, creme fraiche.  And then I had to make some substitutions.  

The soup was supposed to be made with vegetable stock.  I had these packets of dried veggie soup/dip mix, so I decided to use one of those.  It's basically vegetable stock, except for those little pieces of dried veggies floating in there.  I didn't have long grain rice and since I have about half of a 20lb bag of Jasmine rice, I wasn't about to go by some other type of rice.  I thought I had nutmeg, but it turned out nope, so I just left it out.  And after finding out what creme fraiche was on the internet, I was pretty sure I didn't want  to go on a wild goose chase around Nashville trying to find it, so I used Carnation condensed milk, which I already had in my fridge.  While the soup was cooking, it dawned on me that the tofu in the fridge that needed to be used up pretty soon would probably go nicely in the soup, so I threw that in too.

My soup looked quite a bit different, but it was still very tasty. :)