BACK in the Saddle (Kitchen) Again!

Wow, it's been over a month since I posted anything.  I have surely been cooking and baking...I just keep forgetting to take pictures and espouse upon my adventures in the kitchen.

Hmm...let's see...I made an onion soup in the last month- a prolific amount of it, too.  Half of it is hanging out in my freezer right now, despite my valiant efforts of eating it every night for dinner for 4 days or so.  Don't get me wrong, I looked forward to, nay, craved that soup at work everyday.  My onion soup had about 7 different types of onions in it, beef stock AND chicken stock that I had made from a previous roasted chicken (which was used for old-fashioned chicken pot pie; good lord, Marie Calendar, thank you for keeping pot pie in my mind, it was amazing to make) ...do you s

ee how all this stuff gets linked together?  I love it.  In my perfect world all the food I eat would be spawned from a previous meal or something I've also created.  It's like food recycling, or since that doesn't sound appealing, how about Meal Merging?  I'll work on it.   Another example of Meal Merge is this: I bought sugar pumpkins in the fall from an orchard out in Woodstock.  My bf and I went superlatively cheesy and apple-picked and went to a fall festival, where I got the pumpkins.  It was an incredibly fun, brisk day, but ANYway- The pumpkin turned into pumpkin pie and pumpkin soup and a side dish to another dinner.  Later on I made gingersnap cookies.  The few that were

 left rattling around the cookie tin were pounded into crumbs for the crust of my family traditional Black Bottom Pie.  I'm big on making things myself, growing them, caring for them.  If I could have a pumpkin patch, too, it would be like completing the Homemade Derby.  And use my own compost, of course.

God, back to the onion soup!  French Onion or not, I shredded a little Gruyere into the soup, lathered it with pepper, and stuck two squares of the rye bread I had left from my Superbowl cheesy-sausage squares in to the soup.  Rye transforms this kind of soup from good to 'GOD, that was delicious!'  I try not to eat a lot of bread, personally, just for the 'puffy factor' I feel when I do, but there are always exceptions, like rye in soup, buttery pizza crust, San Fran sourdough, and beer bread.  Those last two are for another blog; I have a lot of catching up to do!