Chicken soup for my soul

I eat soup all year long, but it is especially nice in winter to be able to reach into the freezer and grab a handy portion of homemade soup. They are good for taking to work for lunch. They are great when you get home and don't want to cook but cannot face another takeout meal.

And, for me anyway, making a big pot of soup is the same as making a small pot of soup.

So I stocked up a bit a couple days ago by making a shortcut chicken and rice soup.

It looks and tastes like you were cooking all day. But I had this done in just over an hour, including the time to take the chicken off the bones.

And I swear, I have been doing stuff besides cooking. I'm just lazy about the blogging. It goes in cycles. I will recycle myself soon!

One last bite of the holidays

Here it is, the last of the cookie recipes.

That only took a week.

These have white chocolate instead of real chocolate. But they were still quite popular with the work crowd, the family crowd and the friend crowd.

They were tiny, but packed with lots of flavor.

I may just have to break out this recipe for cookies with white chocolate, cranberries and macadamias even when it is not Christmas.

Going green

I am still catching up with recipes from the past week or so.

There is still another cookie recipe to post, but I wanted to get some real food posts done.

So here is a great recipe for chile verde that I made on Christmas Eve. I wanted chile and usually make a red chili with beans and ground beef. But this version with green chiles, tomatillos, pork and potatoes sounded like a nice change.

Wrap some up in a tortilla with some rice and cheese and you have a delicious burrito. Or just eat it from the bowl like a stew.

It was perfect for the cold snap we had last week, and it makes great leftovers to go in the freezer for later.

So I made a huge pot of it!

No tough cookies here

Monday was a very busy and productive day for me.
I think I did in one day what usually takes me three or four days to accomplish.

I cleaned house and made "Sunday dinner" and baked cookies. Four kinds of cookies.

It was an excellent day for it, cold and rainy and gray.

Once my cleaning was done I went to the market to stock up on the essentials: butter, flour, brown sugar, nuts and chocolate.

I have two of the cookie selections posted already over at the food blog. These are both pretty easy, but tasty and definite crowd-pleasers:

Oatmeal-pecan shortbread with chocolate

Oatmeal-fruit bars

Huh. I just realized the oatmeal-oatmeal thing.

But the shortbread does not seem like an oatmeal cookie. The oats just give it a nice texture and a little nuttier flavor.

And I have posted the shortbread recipe here and on the food blog before, but since I fancied them up with chocolate, I figured they deserve another mention here.

The oatmeal fruit bars? Those are all about the oats. My favorite part of those is the crumbly oaty part. Yum. Maybe the butter in there has something to do with that.

OK. I have some chores and errands today. But at some point I will post the other cookies on the food blog and flag them here.

Bacon, eggs and pasta. Perfect!

I have recently taken a liking to spaghetti carbonara.

Why had I never had this before?

I am not sure. But now that I know how good it is, and really pretty easy, I will make it a lot.

My version of spaghetti carbonara is made up of small bits of several other recipes. And it is awesome: rich and creamy and so satisfying.

Enjoy!

Happy, happy birthday...

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Sissy
Happy birthday to you!!!!!

That's for my awesome sister.

I hope you have a great day. See you Sunday!

Last year at this time

I decided to see if I posted on this date last year.

I did.

It was a happy post about doing adopt a family for the holidays.

I am a little sad that I did not do adopt a family this year. I decided that with the unstable job situation, the economy and all that I needed to scale back on stuff.

The shopping for specific people was fun, but I tended to get carried away and spend more than I planned.

Instead, I am just doing a few small things this year:

--I put a big bag of food in the food bank donation bin at work.
--I bought a couple pounds of coffee to at Starbucks to be sent to the troops in Iraq
--I have not yet done this, but have plans to go buy $50 worth of toys Monday to donate to Toys for Tots.

It is not much in the grand scheme of things. But it is something, I think.

Because I know that even with my own worries, I am pretty darned lucky.