Soup's on...

It was very cold here on Tuesday morning. It's a 20-30 mile an hour north wind straight from Canada that's causing all the fuss. It certainly did make taking the garbage out to the road a real "wake-up" experience.

I stopped at Kroger's on the way home to do my belated weekend grocery shopping. It was still pretty cold (windy and I don't think we even broke 50 degrees F. as our high today). I was pleased with my purchases as I wanted to spend no more that $100 and the total bill came to $100.35.

Once home, I unloaded the car and put everything away. I called my daughter Melissa to wish her a happy birthday. They had no big plans as Dave is sick with a bad cold. So, she spent her birthday making two kinds of soup to nurse him back to health and (in her words) avoiding Dave as much as possible.

I changed my shoes and went outside to gather all the remaining tomatoes. It's supposed to be a hard freeze tonight. I noticed a lot of puddles from yesterday's rain on the way into work so I checked the rain gauge. I got just over 1/2 inch of rain yesterday!

Back inside and the tomatoes in two paper bags, I moved on to my soup. I got out the Dutch oven and heated up some olive oil and butter. I added one large yellow onion (diced), about a cup of diced celery and three peeled carrots that I sliced. I saut�ed everything until tender, added four cloves of minced garlic and cooked it about two minutes more.

I added all the remaining chicken stock (about two quarts) after I strained it yet again (but this time to get the chicken out). While that was heading to a boil, I rough chopped the chicken. Once it was boiling I added 1/2 pound of wide egg noodles (I was too lazy to make my own this time). When the noodles were done, I re-introduced the chicken, let it warm up and then taste-tested it. Perfect! I didn't need to add a thing!

I let that cool down while I heated the last of the beef stew in the microwave. I ate that for dinner with two slices of Pepperidge Farm sourdough bread (good enough, but a poor substitute for that Italian bread from last week).

I watched TV until I fell asleep. I woke up in the middle of the night, turned the lights and TV off and then went to bed for real.