Category: Blitherings

Kitchen Sink Soup

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Toward the end of the month, and with $0.02 left in the food budget, we have to get creative.   Hence, Kitchen Sink Soup!

In the freezer, I found a cut-up chicken. I put it in a stew pot, added water, celery, onion, tomato slices, bay leaves, peppercorns, a carrot, and some herbs. I brought it to a boil, turned it down to a low simmer, covered, and cooked the chicken. I pulled out the chicken, and set it aside for a pot pie or something else for tomorrow (after all the soup is gone). I ran the broth through a sieve, set it aside, discarded the cooked veggies (put them into your compost if you have it), and washed out the kettle. From there, I did this:

Kitchen Sink Soup

2-3 T. olive oil
1 andouille or other sausage or leftover meat (or none), chopped
4-6 cloves grated garlic
1 onion, diced
2 carrots, diced
2 ribs celery, diced,
1 zucchini, diced
1 28-oz can plum tomatoes (I used Cento’s San Marzano Plum Tomatoes)
1 15-oz can Great Northern Beans
1/2 c. pasta (I used orecchiette)
broth from the chicken I just stewed (you can use regular broth, about 6-8 cups)
salt, pepper, etc.
Romano or Parmesan cheese, grated

Heat stew pot, add olive oil. Place chopped onion in pan, saute over low heat until clear and golden. Add meat (if using) and saute a bit. Stir in grated garlic. Add remaining diced vegetables, saute until cooked. Once the vegetables are at the desired degree of being done, pour in the can of tomatoes. Mash up the tomatoes (I used my potato masher), and cook a bit more. Put in the chicken broth or whatever stock you are using. Bring to a boil, add pasta and beans. Drop to a simmer and cover pot. Watch to make sure the pot does not boil over from the cooking pasta. Check pasta for al dente. Ready to serve!

Ladle into bowls, sprinkle grated cheese on top, and eat with good bread. (We used our homemade sourdough.)

Enjoy!

Projects, or, Wonder Woman Does Not Live Here

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We have been enjoying rain for the past several weeks, and it shows.  Colors are more intense as the winter grasses emerge, the cold is shaking the leaves into color, and the subdued light intensifies the beauty of the trails nearby.  Of course, post-production helps, too.  I’ve enjoyed the weather – wind, rain, clouds, sunshine, cold.

The variety of weather has really helped, too, as this past week I’ve been dealing with dental problems and dental pain.  I didn’t know my teeth could be so annoying!!  However, things are calming down, and thank goodness for dental insurance, and good dentists.

Around here, there are a lot of things afoot, and not enough time to do them all.  I have been doing the following:

I thought I would be able to do it all, and still work my silly schedule, but it may be that I will need to scale back a bit.  I really want to do all these things, but find that an 11-hour day is so long that by the time I get home, I can just function.  This means eat dinner, do the dishes, and either fall asleep or watch a bit of TV, and then fall asleep.  How dull, eh?

What I am finding useful, though, is to actually schedule my creative time.   This means sit down and decide what I want to do on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  If I don’t, I get distracted, and other things just won’t happen.  And trust me, there are lots of things to distract me (besides aching teeth).  If I stay focused on my projects, I become a recluse and don’t get out of the house.  Friends and family help to keep me human, not a raving, obsessed something.

Rainy Day Walk

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I’ve been rather housebound for the last few days, busy with this and that, and just plain lazy.  This morning, though, with the prediction of a whole day of rain, the allure of a walk in the damp was too much.  Our rain has dwindled into a slow drizzle, but it is so welcomed here in our parched California landscape.  The sky was a blue-grey, hinting at moisture to come, and it did soon after I started out, more like a misty rain than drops, which is fine when you want to go hiking.  The trails were all sticky – my boots sucked into the mud and made a rhythmic noise with each step.  Areas of the trail had not yet dried, but when they do, the trail will be lumpy and bumpy for a long time.

When I got to the area I wanted to explore – it’s always new, no matter how many times you go! – the parking area was closed for repairs.  I skirted around to where the oaks and cacti and stream and sycamore hang out, just in case it did get wetter.  It turns out that the recent rains have caused soil slippage, and some trees have toppled a bit.  One oak had fallen and split, so the work crew was waiting for the oak tree specialist (the city has one, as oak trees are protected where I live) to determine whether it needed anything or just a bit of a trim.

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Here, a little bit of rain goes a long way, and soon enough the grasses begin to sprout for the upcoming spring.  Beige and brown give way to the delicate greens.  The cold temperatures have pushed the autumn leaves to golds and reds, so suddenly a dull grey-brown landscape pops into life.  The smell of the damp earth, the creeks with running water, and the occasional bird song or insect was all that could be heard.  A bit of bliss for a couple of hours!  Click a picture below to scroll through them.

Toyon Berries
Sycamore Seed Pods
Sycamore Leaves
Prickly Love
Fallen Oak
Across the Canyon
Muddy
Orange, Gold & Green

Junking the Junk

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How many of us really do clean up and clean out after the holiday season?  I know I never have because I’m lazy and really do not have the time.  To declutter means I have to have the time to do it.  When I was a kid, my mother made us clean our rooms by throwing everything into the middle of the floor, dumping drawers out, and so on.  It was pretty traumatic and valuable (to me) things would get broken.  The sound of a vacuum cleaner forewarned that hell was ready to break loose.  So, for me, getting rid of things takes a long, long time because that is what cleaning up meant:  throw it all in the middle of the room and spend 20 hours doing the task.  I’ve done that for years.

2016 has been different.  For a variety of reasons, the DH and I have been cleaning up and cleaning out.  In the past two months we have rearranged the garage for better usage, and to consolidate stuff so it can be more easily accessed and sorted out by subject matter (yarn, books, toys, tools, etc.), so that future decluttering tasks are easier to do.  We also managed to install new mirrors in the bathroom, clean out the cookbook shelf, empty the bathroom vanity drawers, throw away all the stuff lurking under the kitchen and bathroom sinks.  DH has cleaned up his office and I have cleaned up the studio and bedroom closet.  The picture above is not what we took to the Goodwill drop-off corner, but yesterday, just from the closet, I brought over bags of purses, shoes, clothes, material, and other goodies.  The bags were the 15-gallon trash can variety.  Now the closet looks like a closet!  I can find my clothes, my shoes, my sewing machine(s).  Wow!

I get holding on to things.  Some things are too costly to replace, such as paints or spinning wheels or chain saws.  Hobby items are tools that can take up space and may not be used all the time, but are necessary when needed.  However – HOWEVER! –  too much is just too much.  Freeing up space means there is actual space – physical, mental, and emotional – for new things (hopefully not physical unless they are the product of one’s productivity).  Organizing makes life cleaner and easier.  We still have a long, long way to go, though.

So, with that thought in mind, I leave you with a link to a jolly good cartoon:  http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/a20188