Meatball Soup
This week looks like November. Since Sunday it’s been gray, cloudy, and rainy outside and despite the temperatures still remaining in the spring/summer range, I was feeling chilly yesterday. Or at least my mind was in a chilly place, even though the house was sort of warm and stuffy. I had the urge to put on pajamas and fuzzy slippers all day. Which is why soup was on the menu last night.
If it were simply up to me, I would have made a chicken broth, spinach, and tortellini soup. But I know that Louisa doesn’t love tortellini as much as I do, so there needed to be a bit of subterfuge in my recipe. I decided to add a can of diced tomatoes, chopped up carrots, celery, garlic, and mini meatballs to the soup. I figured that I couldn’t go wrong with the meatballs since meat rules as far as Louisa is concerned.
Joe and I enjoyed the soup and the girls didn’t complain, but it still took some oversight to catch Louisa before she raced to the sink with the vegetables left in her bowl. Sometimes I wonder if it’s really worth the trouble to adapt my recipes to a kid’s fickle tastes. Maybe I should have stuck with my original, simple recipe.
Then again, those meatballs were good.
You Can’t Make a Silk Purse…
This was the concluding dinner of a pretty mediocre week of cooking. I’m still trying to get a grip on the new school year schedule, soccer practice driving, other after-school activity driving, and the mom-homework-helpline. Given all of that confusion, my attention to cooking has been pretty minimal. I would like to eat something good, and feed something good to the family, but I’ve been lucky to just feed us something nourishing.
On Saturday we went to an away soccer game that was almost an hour away. That took up a good portion of the day. But to give equal time to Annie’s interests we went apple picking on the way home, and with the spectacular weather it was a good day to choose for it. We returned home on the later side, and tossed around the idea of heading out for dinner, but then fatigue and laziness took over and we decided to stay in. Therefore, it was my job to go freezer diving to see what I could dig out. I offered the girls the choice of fresh pasta fagiole or dumplings, and you see what they picked. So dinner was Trader Joe’s pork dumplings (a freezer staple for just this kind of night), frozen vegetables, and brown rice. Not shown in the picture is that I made a dipping sauce for the dumplings. The dinner filled bellies, but was pretty boring. In my general disgust with the meal, I plated Joe’s in the silly way you see in this picture. But it just goes to prove the old adage that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, or a great dinner out of frozen food.
The Full Moon is Spoiling My Cooking Plans
Not as tasty as I had planned.
Over the past couple of days, my cooking plans have just not gone as planned. Don’t worry, nobody here is in danger of starving, but my plans have just been wrong. I blame it on the harvest moon.
For example, two nights ago I was ready to repeat the successful grilled pizza we had last month. I prepared the dough and was prepping the toppings so that everything would be ready for the grill. I was planning on two varieties – a traditional cheese and gravy pizza with pepperoni (even made a special trip to buy the pepperoni), and a white pizza topped with minced garlic, sauteed mushrooms and hot peppers. As soon as I was ready to light the grill, the rain began. While I might grill meat in a light rain, I really couldn’t cook a pizza in the rain. I baked the pizzas in my oven instead. Sadly, the whole wheat crust was more apparent and I could tell that the girls didn’t enjoy it as much as when I grilled that healthy crust. Fail.
A little light for an at-home night.
Last night I was all prepared to make sandwiches for dinner since I thought we were going out to back-to-school night for Annie. Dinner would be a light chicken salad on baguette with goat cheese, salad, tomatoes, onion and olives. I usually plan sandwiches for the nights we have to eat on the run, or on different schedules. Turns out I was a week ahead of myself and we could have had a nicer dinner. Fail.
Stupid moon.