Life continues to be rich and fall here and enough still. Because of my job, and because we're in the middle of September, my life is full of food. Food, food, and so much food.
It's partly that, because my husband is off in Europe, I have a whole box of CSA vegetables to myself -- and I get a new box every week. It's hard to keep up with those even when there are two of us, and even when we were mostly eating at home. But now there is one of us, and my job comes with lots of meals. Once a week, everybody in the college house where I work gets bagels for breakfast. Other days, we had a lunchtime panel discussion (I brought homemade soup and homemade bread for the assembled gathering; this was strategic vegetable use on my part, but everybody else there was amazed that I made food myself instead of ordering from a restaurant.) Another night I had students over for dinner to talk about research funding and research projects. I "made" lasagnas that I had bought from the grocery store, and of course homemade bread, and also salads that were yet another strategic vegetable ploy. Looking ahead, I'm preparing for next week's Pirate Dinner and also for a giant Cultural Heritage Festival, for which I will be ordering food from multiple restaurants. I am such a stranger to ordering food from restaurants that I find it much more relaxing to cook for a dozen or so people at my home, so the Cultural Heritage Festival is something that is consuming me, rather than the other way around, right now. Wish me luck with that!
Early this week, I attended the meeting of the student Congress within my college house. One of the main agenda items was to organize an arts-and-crafts evening for residents in the house. (Wouldn't it be lovely if that were also one of the main focuses of our state or federal governments?) At any rate, the students were delightful to work with. During the course of the meeting, I mentioned that we had craft supplies in the storeroom. One of the Congress people shuddered and declared that the storeroom was a scary place to enter. This is the very same storeroom that I had spent two hours every single day in July organizing, so we had a brief congressional recess, and we took a junket tour to the storeroom which was no longer junky at all. People who had been on the Congress last year were utterly amazed and impressed at how good the room looks now, and of course that made me feel awesome. I may not be any good at figuring out DoorDash that brings food and other things into our building, but I know how to create zones and labels that allow people to find what they need, once we happen to have the things already.
Ofsnough is still enjoying his European adventures. He writes,
I am attaching photos from a royal garden in Darmstadt. Palm trees and plants at 50 degrees north latitude. Most are potted, but a few are in the ground!
Nelson sends his regards. He is . . .
- still dealing with a bump on the back of his neck,
- attending a talk that his sister Sizzling will give at AA tonight,
- volunteering three times a week with a middle school basketball team, and
- delighted with his girlfriend. He specifically asked me to share her picture, and after verifying that she agrees to this, I of course said yes.
And Kinderling (to return to the food theme) has been enjoying an awesome local farmer's market (which is so, so much more than that -- it's where we got our Amish-made dining room table many years ago, for example). She says,
We went to Roots [Market] for the first time! Total success! Alanna did great, and prices are awesome! I'm also thankful to have reduced the amount of trash we brought into our home, even if it's just a little bit. I think I'm going to have to make a few more cloth bags for the smaller items like green beans and tomatoes and such, and bring another large cloth bag. Overall a great experience, even though I was slightly nervous about taking her with, it ended on a really great note!
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| Picture of Alanna and the wagon. |
Would you be willing to share your soup recipe? And any other good go to recipes you may have?
ReplyDeleteI seem to have lost my touch with vegetable soips and can't figure out where I've gone wrong.
Oh, man! My recipe is mostly a "throw everything in the instant pot" recipe. I try to make sure I have something acidic (e.g., tomatoes, fruit), something protein-y (e.g., turkey stock, oil), somethings thick (rice, or puréed vegetables), a bit of salt and some kind of seasoning (homemade taco seasoning, curry). And in addition to that, I just throw in what my family calls "stuff": veggies of whatever variety, scraps of meat if they happen to be leftover, etc. The soup I served last Thursday -- that everyone raved about -- was actually a combo of "cream of fennel" and "chili", both of which I'd frozen a couple of months ago for future use.
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