We've been cookin'

Since my schedule has been fairly unpredictable, I've taken to making LOTS of food on the weekends, and since it's been so cold, it's been a whole lotta soup.  Each time I make one of these, it's about 6-8 servings...my freezer overfloweth with soupy goodness :)

veggie beef

mushroom, beef and barley

 I got the crazy idea to try to make my Grandma's homemade noodles.  These things are VERY finicky, but my hopes were high.

The hardest thing is rolling out the dough so thin.  It's very elastic, so it takes a lot of work to get it this thin.

So the whole point is to let these noodles dry out, cut them into strips and then cook them.  Here's where things went wrong.  I let them get too dry before I tried to cut them, and when they were crumbling instead of cutting, I tried to get them a little damp.  Epic fail.  I have no pictures of the disaster that occurred after.  Needless to say, I learned a lesson.

I've had this ridiculous fascination with Tom Yum soup lately.  I find that there's nothing better for a sore throat, and I've had a few, but the Thai restaurant where I get it is rather unpredictable when it comes to the chili oil they add.  The last time I asked for the most mild soup they could make, yet it was still painful to eat. It was because of this that I decided to learn how to make my own.  It calls for some rather exotic ingredients (kefir lime leaves) but thank goodness you can find nearly everything under the sun on Amazon.com, so that's what I did.

Tom Yum soup WIN!!!

The soup turned out AMAZING.  No, seriously..amazing.  I think I had 6 cups of it yesterday, and 4 today. I'm strangely addicted.

Last night it was fajitas.  I've got a freezer full of meat, and have been slacking when it comes to cooking it.  It seems so much easier in the summertime, but Joacim suggested fajitas, and I was all over it.

the peppers look so pretty in the cast iron skillet

chicken from our meat CSA...a special treat having boneless chicken breasts

and the lovely ensemble, made ever so much more wonderful with pico de gallo (courtesy of The Pioneer Woman)

and one of my favorite dishes...Penthouse Pasta (you can guess where the recipe came from....don't ask)

About 2 months ago, I got about 10 pounds of chicken bones from our meat CSA to make stock with.  I really had no idea what to do with it...it just seemed so intimidating.  But after talking it through with a co-worker, I felt I was armed with enough info to be dangerous (and hopefully to produce a stock that I'd eat).

This process seriously took 2 whole weekends.  With roasting the bones and aromatics, and letting it cook for 5-6 hours, plus time to cool..well, it left little time for anything else.

But I did it, and ended up with about 10 quarts of chicken broth.  And I think it's going to be delicious!!!

Swedish Christmas on Christmas Eve

Our dear friends, Daniel and Caroline, invited us over to their house to celebrate Christmas, Swedish style.  Caroline's family was visiting from Sweden, and we were going over to watch the traditional Swedish cartoons and partake of the lovely julbord :)

but first we had to pretty up our nails and have some girl time

I'm pretty sure that we were watching the typical Swedish cartoons in this photo (Kalle Anka,or Donald Duck as we American's know it).  We didn't do it at 3:00pm (which is tradition), but we DID watch them :)

Caroline and her mother made a huge amount of wonderful food....LOTS of yummy meat :)

And here is Joacim in his sexy ugly sweater :)  He wore this to our neighbor's party the week before.  It's so funny because it totally shrunk after I washed it, and went almost half-way up his back!

Sill (or herring...whatever you want to call it, it's still gross ;)

mmmmmmmmm...meatballs

Izzy essentially redecorated their Christmas tree.  We don't do tinsel on ours due to Lemmy eating it, so she was intrigued, and kept replacing it

Cute little Christmas troll

beautiful angel-wing ornament...not sure if there's any personal value to this for Daniel or Caroline, but it's lovely

Here's the julstjärna (or Christmas Star).  It seems like their in nearly every window in Malmö during the holiday season

We had a lovely time, and want to thank Daniel and Caroline and her family for inviting us to spend Christmas with them.

Little Miss Helpful

Izzy's been quite entertaining lately.  She LOVES to play dress-up, and goes through several wardrobe changes throughout the day.  She's also getting more into her baby dolls, which is fun to watch.  Here's Cinderella getting ready to change Baby Doll (yes, that's it's name)

We're on a mission to clean out the freezer before we move, and so I was trying to figure out what to make with some pie crust and fruit, so I decided to make a mixed-berry galette.  Izzy was very helpful with the egg wash.

Not too bad for a thrown-together dessert :)

Makin' food

And as if we didn't do enough on Saturday, we TOTALLY maxed it out on Sunday. I don't know where the motivation OR the energy came from; it's like I was trying to get 2 weeks worth of work done in 2 days.

After we woke up, had breakfast and walked Rosie, we got to work.  We started out by de-seeding more pomegranates.  After that endless and messy task was done, we started getting ready to make vegetable stock.  I had been saving the veggie extras in a bag in the refrigerator, and I figured I better do something with it before it all went bad.  I'd never made stock before, but it didn't look too hard.  While I was getting that ready, I let Izzy try to peel some carrots to make a carrot salad.  Look at her sticking her tongue out.....THIS is something she gets from Joacim ;)

And yes, you must check out the outfit.  I think this was outfit #2 of that day.  I had taken her shirt of during the poms because it's so damn messy, and she just neer put it back on.

Here's our carrot salad.  Joacim's mom made this when they visited in 2008, and I've made it ever since.  You shred about 5-6 carrots, peel a couple of clementines, mix in a little sugar and lemon juice and voila!  I added pom seeds too because they're just so damn good!  Easy, light and healthy.

Then we made some cheddar broccoli soup using this recipe.  I LOVE the soup from Panera, and this is pretty close.  Making it at home allows me to control the salt content better, because the Panera recipe has a  ridiculous amount of sodium in it.  I used low-sodium broth, and held back on the cheddar cheese a bit.  It's probably not a huge difference, but it's an attempt.

And THEN I made some baked potato soup using this recipe.  I did make a few modifications though.  But I DID cook real bacon...for this sometimes there's just no substitute.

I went ahead and cooked all of the bacon and drained all but a tablespoon of the fat, and then pretty much followed the recipe.  I DID use the vegetable stock that I had made earlier, and it was a nice addition...it made the soup MUCH lower sodium than it normally would have been because I didn't add salt to the stock.

After the potatoes were cooked, I pureed the mixture in a blender.  I think Oprah's recipe was for a smoother soup, but I wanted something a bit chunkier, so I boiled some Yukon gold potatoes in another pot (diced into ~1 inch cubes) and added those to the soup when they were cooked.  The gold potatoes are nice because they've got a firm texture that holds up well to re-heating the soup.  Here's the final product...soup garnished with the bacon pieces, some cheddar cheese and fresh chives that I'm growing.  Oh.  So. Yummy.

And it made a HELL of a lot of soup.

Here's our bounty from the day....a total of 14 cups of veggie stock, 6 bags of potato soup at 1 1/2 cup each and 5 bags of broccoli cheddar soup.  I froze everything.  This makes for a quick, easy go-to meal, especially for lunch.

And along with all of that soup was EXTREMELY CHAPPED HANDS.

And swollen ankles from all of the standing.  Santa, will you bring me one of those rubber mat thingies for my kitchen for Christmas?

I am a domestic diva!

Ok, well....maybe not, but since getting back from Sweden, I've been INSPIRED!  To cook, that is :)

First thing I did was to make some pickles.  This is Joacim's mom's recipe, and it is SOOOOOO GOOOD.  She makes 2 jars of these pickles when we come because she knows that I LOVE them (so much so that we ran out before the vacation was over :)

Then, because of some yummy jam that I had in Sweden (and got back here and couldn't find), I decided to make my own.  I got some rhubarb from my parents and I was set!  I also transferred some to my garden, so hopefully I'll have some of my own next year!

Ok, I didn't know a lot about canning jam...well, really nothing, but it wasn't as hard as I thought.  Got some rhubarb, strawberries and a stupid amount of sugar in a pot...

Got my jars in the boiling water

this is starting to look like a surgical operation :)

But in the end...a LOT of jam!

We haven't tasted it yet because we have so many jars in the refrigerator already, but my mouth starts watering just thinking about how yummy they're going to be...

And then, today, I came home to these beauties!

I technically had 3 ripes ones this weekend, but the birds and then the ants got to them, so those don't count.  Look how BIG these are!  What the heck kind of plants did I buy????

And there are 4 more that'll be ready in a couple of days :)

mmmmmm....homemade pizza

So, I felt the need to be a bit domestic and try my hand at homemade pizza dough. I know you can buy it and all, but I wanted to try to make a thin, artisan-type crust pizza. It was a LOT of work, but I LOVE doing stuff like this when I've got the time. I wish I had more time to cook...there are so many recipes to try! I need volunteer taste testers!!!

Anyway, here's how it turned out

mmmmmmmm.....tasty........