Jennie Day Blog

One Upping the New York Times

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I was one of the many who, mid-November 2016, started making more charitable donations and signed up for a digital newspaper subscription for the first time in my life. I opted to subscribe to the New York Times because it was always my first stop for election-related news – until I ran out of free articles for the month, anyway. Also, I have a grudge against the Seattle Times because if I pay for a subscription, I should not have to deal with pop-up ads!

ANYway, though I scroll through the headlines and read a few articles daily, what really justifies the cost of the subscription for me is the cooking section. There are a good variety of recipes that are gluten free, or can easily be adapted by say, making breadcrumbs from the heel slices of my gluten free bread or using cornstarch or whatever gluten free flour I have on hand. I’ve gotten excited about cooking and trying new recipes again because, unlike certain gluten free blogs, the recipes in the Times cooking section are consistently good.

Once every week or two, I try a new recipe. So far, my #1 favorite has been this roasted red pepper and tomato soup – highly recommend! One day this summer, Joel requested shrimp and grits, which I made from this Times recipe, and was also quite good. The only downside was that it left me with a nearly full bag of dry grits that needed to be used up. Obviously, my search engine of choice to find a new recipe to try was the Times cooking section, where I found this butternut squash polenta with sausage and onion.

It’s the only recipe I’ve made from the Times that wasn’t a hit. It was a bit bland, the recipe made WAY too much polenta and not nearly enough sausage and onion, and eating the leftovers was kind of a chore. It was disappointing because butternut squash and sausage and onions are all tasty – I knew the recipe had potential and I wasn’t willing to write it off just yet. So I set out to one-up the NY Times, and I think I succeeded. (I promise, I didn’t read the comments on the recipe until after I’d made it with my modifications and saw that a number of commenters made similar modifications. But I’ll still take credit for it, because I came up with the idea without seeing their comments.)

Jennie’s Butternut Squash Polenta with Sausage and Veggies

Here’s what you’ll need:

1 small butternut squash

2 cups chicken broth

1 cup milk or cream

1 cup dry corn grits or polenta (I used Bob’s Red Mill brand, as it’s manufactured in their gluten free facility)

1 lb ground sausage (I used spicy Italian because pregnancy has made me suddenly like spicy food, weirdly)

1 medium onion

1 bell pepper of any color

1 zucchini

1 tsp fennel seeds

1 generous tsp Italian seasonings

Salt and pepper, to taste.

Here’s what you’ll do:

1. A few hours or even days ahead of time, roast your butternut squash. I poke a few holes in it and stick it whole into a 350 degree oven for about an hour and a half because it’s much easier to cut when it’s already cooked! Allow to cool. If you do this a day or more ahead of time, just wrap it up in tin foil and store in the fridge.

You could skip this (as well as step 3) and use canned butternut squash puree, but this is much more fun and tasty.

2. Bring the chicken broth and milk or cream to a gentle boil. Add the dry polenta and simmer for 25 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3. Meanwhile, peel (if you haven’t already) and roughly chop the butternut squash. Use a food processor or potato masher to puree – a few lumps are okay!

4. Thinly slice the onion, pepper, and zucchini.

5. Cook the sausage in a large skillet. Transfer to a paper towel lined plate.

6. Cook the sliced veggies in the rendered sausage fat (or in some butter or oil, if the sausage doesn’t leave a lot to cook in.) Stir frequently. Add the fennel seeds and Italian seasonings.

7. When the polenta has absorbed all of the liquid, stir in the pureed squash. Salt and pepper to taste.

8. To serve, spoon the polenta onto plates and top with the sausage and veggie medley. Eat. Enjoy.

Thai Cooking Class at West Seattle PCC

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One of my more inspired Christmas presents to Joel last year was a Thai food cooking class. We both adore Thai food, and we both like to cook. But despite numerable attempts to make pad Thai at home, it’s never quite right.

And since our class wasn’t until last week, it’s almost like it’s still Christmas! (Not really.) ANYway, it was at the West Seattle PCC with Prawnee Halvorson, who keeps a blog about Thai cooking, called Prawnee’s Thai Kitchen.

Prawnee is originally from Thailand, and had lots of insights to share, and she was quite funny. She taught us three different recipes, saving the pad Thai for last in order to keep our attention, because as she said, “you’re all just here for the pad Thai sauce recipe.”

Her cooking style was very intuitive – she emphasized using vegetables that were in season, and gave some tips for using up produce you already have (for example, she shredded an entire bunch of kale for the first course, but only ended up using about 2/3 of it; she used the rest in the pad Thai so it wouldn’t go to waste.)

First up was a winter vegetable soup. Joel loved it, mostly because it included five different types of mushrooms that were in it; I ate it but was less enamored, mostly because of the five different types of mushrooms (I’m not a fan!)

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Then, the main course: massaman curry with chicken, potatoes, and onions. Prawnee had cooked the chicken, potatoes, and onions before class started. She demonstrated making the sauce from scratch, and then mixed it all together.

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Lastly, she demonstrated pad Thai, then coached a couple of audience volunteers through making it. Instead of bean sprouts, she added a bunch of shredded kale and purple cabbage.

I’m not posting the recipes as they aren’t mine to share, but here’s a pad Thai recipe from Prawnee’s blog.

Here were my key takeaways:

  1. Apparently, cooking Thai curry in the crock pot is a surefire way to ruin it. (I’ve totally done this before – I always figured that it cooks longer, so the flavors can meld! Guess that’s not the case.)
  2. Bulking up the pad Thai with vegetables is a great way to make it a bit healthier, cut down on the carbs, and eat more greens! Let’s be honest, vegetables that have been stir fried in oil and drenched in delicious pad Thai sauce are way tastier than plain, steamed greens.
  3. Cooking Thai food at home is not unlike cooking any other food – sometimes it turns out better than others, and it never tastes quite like what you’d get from a restaurant. I’m not a professional chef, and I am probably a bit more stingy with fat and salt, so of course it tastes different.

Agrodolce Review

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At Christmastime, Joel participated a couple of online gift exchanges (probably hoping his name would be picked by Bill Gates in the Reddit Secret Santa!) A couple of weeks after Christmas, just when we thought the season was over, a mysterious card addressed to Joel turned up in the mail.

It was the last of Joel’s Secret Santa gifts – a gift card to Agrodolce. Based on the name, I figured it was some kind of gelato shop. Actually, it’s a highly rated Italian restaurant owned by Maria Hines. Hines owns three Seattle restaurants, all of which focus on local, sustainable food, and is an Iron Chef America victor.

We decided to make use it for our Valentine’s date (we went on the 13th instead of Valentine’s Day, mostly because Agrodolce had a fixed, multi-course menu for the holiday that was a bit out of our price range, even with the gift card.)

The best part of our meal was the appetizer. We couldn’t decide between two, so we made the obvious choice to just get one of each! (It was a special occasion, after all.)

My choice was the antipasto platter, which included salami, provolone, pickled vegetables, and baba ghanoush. The pickled vegetables were a medley of onions, zucchini, carrots, and peppers – they were VERY tangy, and the baba ghanoush was a surprisingly good accompaniment, to mellow out the vinegar.

Joel insisted on getting the caramelized broccoli. I’ll admit I was skeptical – we make roasted broccoli at home pretty often, so I saw no need to order broccoli in a restaurant. Once again (no, I mean, for the first time ever) I was proven wrong; we both agreed the broccoli was the highlight of our meal.

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I didn’t remember to take a picture of either appetizer, but you can see the empty antipasto platter in this picture I took of Joel, as proof of how thoroughly we enjoyed it.

I had a hard time choosing what to eat as my entree, but eventually landed on pasta because we’ve been eating low(er) carb lately, and it’s been ages since I had pasta 🙂 I ordered the chestnut cavatelli, but with gluten-free rigatoni. Agrodolce makes their regular pasta in house with locally grown grains; their gluten-free rigatoni is imported from Italy.

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Joel ordered a lamb burger with polenta fries, which you can see in the background.

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The entree was also excellent – the pasta had a nice texture, and the herby sage, creamy butternut squash, and spicy labneh were a nice combination. (Labneh is the pinkish blobs in the picture – it was kind of like a flavored cream cheese.)

That broccoli, tho – I don’t know if I can describe what was so great about it. You’ll just have to take my word. It was amazing.

Five Years Gluten Free

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I have very fond memories of October 2009 – I went on a TERRIBLE first date with a boy with whom I never went on a second date; I went to San Francisco with my mom for a yoga retreat; I closed on my condo; and at the end of the month, I got a phone call from my doctor telling me that I had Celiac disease.

I don’t know how to describe what I felt when I got that phone call: panic, for sure, and also grief. I took myself out for lunch that day to Panera bread where I ate what I knew would be my last bagel and a bowl of tomato soup with croutons.

I thought about the carrot cake cupcake I’d eaten on that terrible date, and wondered if I’d ever eat carrot cake cupcakes again (yes, and at my wedding to a guy with whom I went on a really fun and slightly awkward first date.)

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I thought about that trip to San Francisco, and a Chinese restaurant where my mom and I had stir fry for lunch one day during the retreat and wondered if I’d eat Chinese stir fry again (yes, and I got really good at making it myself.)

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I thought about my first meal in my new condo – I’d walked to the grocery store up the street and bought an orange, root beer, and pasta salad from the deli and then sat on the floor in my new place where I realized I didn’t have a knife to break the orange peel, or a bottle opener to open the root beer, or even a fork, so I ate the pasta salad with my fingers and called it dinner. I wondered if I’d ever eat pasta salad again (yes … but I definitely don’t eat it often and not from the grocery store deli.)

I’m laughing at myself for my naivete, but like I said, these are fond memories. It’s easy to look back, knowing what I know now, and think that I was overreacting, but I know that the struggle I felt with my new way of eating was real.

I sat down today to write a long, thoughtful post about my feelings about eating gluten free and how they’ve changed over the years, but honestly, I think it boils down to this: eating gluten free used to give me huge anxiety, and now it doesn’t.

So instead I thought I’d go through the archives and highlight a few posts about gluten free eating and Celiac Disease.

  • Travel Tips For The Gluten Free – In August 2011, Joel and I went on a weekend getaway to Victoria, B.C., and I shared some of the things I’d learned about eating GF while traveling
  • National Celiac Awareness Day – In September 2011, I recognized Celiac Awareness Day by sharing facts about the disease
  • Restaurants That Get It Right – I started this extensive list of gluten free friendly restaurants in January 2012, and have been updating it since
  • Allergy or Intolerance – In March of 2012, while elbow deep in massage school, I shared some of my learnings about disease processes and explained why Celiac disease is not a food allergy
  • A Good GF Pizza Is Hard to Find – In May of 2012, I responded to Domino’s announcement of their “gluten free” pizzas with a pizza recommendation of my own
  • The Great Gluten Free Survey – In December 2012, I participated in a blog survey with this compendium of my knowledge of gluten free eating and shared some of my favorite meals
  • And of course, there’s my complete list of recipes that I’ve created or adapted to be gluten free.

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Gluten free BLT and sweet potato fries from Blue Moon Burgers, a local restaurant with a huge menu of gluten free options.

Five years ago, the struggle with my new diet was real – I don’t mean to trivialize it. But with the wisdom that comes with being five years older and having adjusted to this new normal, it’s no longer a source of anxiety. This October, my fondest memories aren’t as deeply attached to my food memories.

NuNaturals New Stevia Syrups Review and Giveaway

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Today’s is an exciting post: NuNaturals recently sent me their newest products to try out and they want to share with four readers of my blog!

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NuNaturals is the first company to introduce stevia sweetened syrups, and the new products are zero calorie, sugar free, dairy free, vegan, and gluten free.

In case you need a little refresher, stevia is an herb that’s used as an alternative to sugar. It has no calories and a negligible effect on blood sugar. You can read more on the NuNaturals website.

I ripped open the cocoa syrup the day the package arrived on our doorstep, and tried it on a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Sorry I didn’t take a picture for you – it looks just like any other chocolate sauce on a bowl of ice cream. The real question is – does it taste like the name brand chocolate sauce we know and love?

The answer is yes. Actually, the most ringing endorsement I can give the syrup is this: Joel, who does not like chocolate sauce, has been eating the NuNaturals cocoa syrup on his ice cream all week. Like, voluntarily.

I haven’t tried the simple syrup yet … mostly because I haven’t decided how to use it. I’m thinking cocktails …

One more thing before we get into the giveaway – those of you who’ve been around for a while know that last spring, I swore off dieting and started eating whatever I wanted. Truth: what I want often includes sugar. I eat sugar regularly and unapologetically.

But believe me when I say that I still use stevia (NuNaturals’ stevia, specifically) pretty much every day. I like it so much better than sugar for sweetening beverages. I’ve used it regularly in my coffee and tea, and NuNaturals suggested trying their cherry vanilla flavored drops in sparkling water to make “Dr. NuNaturals Cherry Vanilla soda!” I’ve been drinking this pretty much daily, and – well, it isn’t just like Dr. Pepper – BUT it is very tasty and refreshing.

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Now here’s the fun part – the giveaway!

NuNaturals would like to give a bottle of each of their new syrups, as well as a bottle of the cherry vanilla flavored stevia drops, a 50 count box of stevia packets, plus a bonus product to four readers. You can enter up to three times.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The fine print:
Giveaway is open until Monday, August 11th at midnight (PDST), after which, comments will be closed.
The winners will be selected randomly by Rafflecopter and notified by email, so be sure to leave a valid email address when you enter.
Winners must have a street address (no PO boxes, please.)
NuNaturals sent me these products free of charge and is providing the prizes. All opinions expressed here are my own. My disclosure statement can be found here.

Thanks for entering. Good luck!

In addition: you can use the code BLG1214 to take 15% off of your entire order on the NuNaturals website through December 31. They’re also currently running a promotion to take $5 off every bottle of the new syrups with the code MINT5 through July 31. Discounts cannot be combined. Shipping within the continental U.S. is free on orders of $35 or more.

Gluten Free Teriyaki

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Usually, when I write a post that references something I’ve blogged about before, I link back to old posts. I am not going to do so in this case, because this is something I’ve mentioned SO MANY TIMES, I don’t think I can possibly link to every post in which I’ve said it.

Here it is: I miss teriyaki.

There aren’t many foods I miss since going gluten free, but teriyaki tops the list. It was my favorite food for many years – I remember when I was a kid trying to convince my mom that we should have teriyaki for dinner because then she wouldn’t have to cook, even if we’d had it last week or maybe a few nights before and despite that my sister wouldn’t eat it; walking across the street after my Shakespeare rehearsals when I was a teenager to get teriyaki from the restaurant that was next to … a beer store, if my memory serves; then trying every teriyaki place in a 10 mile radius of the office once I started working.

So teriyaki is the one loss I still grieve.

Sure, there’s such a thing as GF teriyaki sauce and it’s pretty good. I’ve tried making my own teriyaki with it. It was okay.

Most of the time, when I want that teriyaki flavor, I do something like this:

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Salmon burger, brown rice, sautéed veggies, all of which I douse with teriyaki sauce.

And I suppose there are these:

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EVOL and Amy’s teriyaki frozen meals. They’re tasty, but not what you’d get from, you know, an actual restaurant.

But finally, I found this:

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That is gluten free teriyaki from Himitsu Teriyaki in Kent, conveniently located next door to Haley’s Corner Bakery.

They actually started offering gluten free options a few years ago, but I only got around to trying it last week. And it’s exactly what I’d been missing.

It’s probably not something I’ll go out of my way to eat all that often, but the next time I am having a craving for that super-sweet charred teriyaki flavor and watered down ranch dressing that you only get at a teriyaki restaurant, I’m glad to know there’s a place where I can eat.

My Daily Cup

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I’ve been reminiscing about our trip to South Africa a lot lately.

This is in part because this time last year, I was churning out recap posts. Also partly because it’s been gray and rainy in Seattle and I didn’t remove Cape Town from the weather app on my phone so I am often reminded that it’s 90 degrees and sunny there. But mostly, it’s because I found a ziplock baggie full of tea bags in my desk, and it turned out to be rooibos tea from the Kloof.

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The pool outside Koro Lodge, where we stayed at Bushman’s Kloof.

Something strange happened when I came home from South Africa – I was so into drinking tea that I stopped drinking coffee. I say this is strange because I’ve loved coffee for as long as I can remember. My parents are both coffee drinkers, and I remember smell of fresh brewed coffee filling our house every morning. I didn’t start drinking it until I was a teenager, but I got my coffee in the form of ice cream when I was just a kid.

I still like my morning cup of coffee to taste like ice cream, which means cream and sugar (or better yet, vanilla syrup) in no small dose. But in Cape Town, the coffee was so fresh and sweet that I could drink a cup with nothing in it.

When we came home, the coffee from my beloved Starbucks just didn’t hold up. So, I switched to chai tea and rooibos tea at the exclusion of coffee … for a while, anyway.

I’m back on coffee now, because the flavor of the coffee I drank in South Africa has faded from my memory, and because I have a Keurig coffee maker which basically makes coffee for me while I get ready in the mornings.

For Christmas, my parents gave me a box of the new(ish) Starbucks vanilla flavored K-cups, and it’s what I’ve been drinking since. I know that it’s not nearly as fresh and rich and tasty as other coffees, even coffees that I can find here in Seattle. But it’s perfectly drinkable and with just a little cream and sugar, it taste just right, like coffee flavored ice cream. (And bonus – boxes of these K-cups have been on sale at Target recently.)

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I must warn you, though – if you don’t have a Keurig and like your morning cup to taste like a bowl of ice cream, do NOT try the vanilla flavored Starbucks Via. It tastes bad, even when I’m not comparing it to the fresh brewed coffee of South Africa.

Topics for Polite Conversation

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Six months ago, I wrote what became the final post on my former blog and shared some of my struggles with emotional eating. At some point, I thought it would be interesting to check in again six months later to share how successful my experiment was and so I could boast about how I eat now.

Then I remembered that boasting about my eating habits was why I became uncomfortable blogging about food in the first place.

Inspiration struck this weekend, though, when I listened to a (relatively) recent episode of This American Life, “The Seven Things You’re Not Supposed To Talk About.” I’m sure that at least a few of you have heard it, but if you haven’t, you can stream it here.

In seven acts, producer Sarah Koenig hosts alongside her refined French mother, to discuss the seven topics deemed not appropriate for polite conversation. Some are gauche, some are boring, but mostly, Koenig’s mother insists, no one wants to listen to someone talk about these topics. One of those is diet.

In Act Two, Ira Glass talks with Dr. Steven Bratman, who, before he became an alternative doctor, worked as an organic farmer on a commune where he met no end of people who loved to talk at length about the merits and demerits of certain diets. The people he met there were obsessed with the cleanliness, the purity of their diets, and it dawned on him that maybe there’s such a thing as being too concerned with dieting.

In 1997, Bratman published this essay, using for the first time the word “orthorexia.” The perfect term for the condition, Ira points out, as it combines orthodoxy with anorexia.

Listening to the segment, my heart dropped. Obsessed with food and the latest diet fad and talking about it nearly exclusively … that’s me. Or, that was me. Of course, I didn’t think talking about my dietary restrictions was gauche or boring; my fascination with dieting was in earnest.

Chronic dieters, people who restrict their diets calorically or otherwise, are obsessed with food. It’s been pretty well documented – here’s the Wikipedia entry on the Ancel Keys Starvation Study if you want to refresh your memory. It’s that broken, skipping record thing – you start dieting and restricting your food intake and suddenly you’re going around and around in circles, playing the same three seconds of the song over and over.

Something like that, you know what I mean.

Most interesting about Act Two is that when Ira asks Dr. Bratman his feelings when it comes to talking about diet, Dr. Bratman says “I hate it.” And Sarah Koenig’s mother, so steadfast in her belief that talking about diet is boring, concedes that listening to Dr. Bratman talk about orthorexia is very interesting. But, she says, there’s a caveat – he’s an expert.

In other words, it’s when the rest of us, the laymen, talk about diet that it bores her.

Huh.

Six months ago, when I wrote that last post, I knew that I was tired of blogging about food and I wanted to write about other things. What I didn’t realize was that blogging about food was keeping me in a pretty negative place. I spent my spare time reading and commenting on other blogs about food/diets, or “doing research” for whatever food restrictions I should next impose on myself, or cooking and taking photos of my latest creations.

Obviously, I still blog about food, but you’ll notice my latest recipes are complicated ones (gluten free caramel eclairs and a minestrone soup three days in the making.) Those are blog worthy because of their complexity – you can argue that I’m still boasting about food, but this was more about cooking success than diet. Which is (I hope) more interesting. Blogging about the broccoli I steamed to eat at dinner .. not interesting.

While I’ve made an effort to stop reading blogs and magazine articles and such about dieting, I was surprised that this topic was discussed on my favorite podcast, on one of the forums I frequent, and on other blogs I read. When I say “this topic,” I don’t mean the episode of This American Life. I mean specifically the diet segment of the episode.

No one seemed to be up in arms about hearing a refined French woman say it’s impolite to talk about your period. But we live in a world obsessed with dieting, and apparently hearing her say she doesn’t want to hear about your diet really pushes people’s buttons.

Gluten Free In “The Other Washington”

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My only regret about our time in D.C. (and it’s pretty minor) is that we spent so little time in the city and didn’t actually eat at any local restaurants. We didn’t realize it right away, but every single place where we ate was a chain! Now, in our defense, they were all East Coast chains, and not anything we can find in Seattle, but it would have been nice to have tried a D.C. exclusive. But like I said, that’s pretty minor. The restaurants we picked, while all chains, were all terrific. My favorites were …

ZPizza

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Like the pizza places I frequent back home … no, that’s a lie. I don’t go out for pizza that often. So when I do, it’s a special treat. This place had regular and gluten-free pizza, but made and cooked the GF pizzas separately, so they are safe. We split an Italian pizza, which had ham, artichoke hearts, pesto, mozzarella, olives, and tomatoes (on my half only 🙂 )

Oh, and when I said that none of the places where we ate are places we have in Seattle, I was wrong. Turns out there’s a zPizza on the Capitol Hill we have in Seattle.

Chop’t Salad

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I’d been dying to try this place since I read Gluten Free Blondie’s post about it. Chopped salads are apparently all the rage on the East Coast (this particular restaurant has several locations in NYC & D.C.)

I was not expecting it to be a fast food restaurant, which is pretty much what it was, and I wasn’t quite sure how it worked, so I ended up ordering one of the salads with their suggested toppings rather than inventing my own. It had beets, feta, and walnuts. I’m generally pretty picky about the lettuce-to-good stuff ratio on my salads, and this was a little too heavy on the lettuce for my taste … but since it was chopped (I mean, chop’t) every bite had enough good stuff and dressing to be plenty flavorful.

Matchbox Merrifield

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This was in the Mosaic District in Fairfax, VA (near the hotel where we stayed.) We ate here on the very long day that we saw all the monuments – by the time we made it to the restaurant, we would’ve eaten just about anything. But this was really good. In case you can’t tell (the photo’s pretty dark) that’s an entire bulb of roasted garlic. There was also some kind of garlic seasoning on the steak, and, for good measure, more garlic on the roasted potatoes. Joel had the same thing, though, so we had garlic breath together.

CAVA Mezze Grill

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This was the Mediterranean version of Chipotle, but way better – and I love Chipotle! Yeah, similar set-up – I had a base of brown rice, then there was a choice of meat (I had chicken) then – this is where it gets good – you can choose a flavored hummus or tzatziki sauce to go on the bowl, then another choice of salad dressing on top of that so everything was doused in delicious olive oil.

Gluten Free Minestrone

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Let’s go back in time about a month to the night my parents took Joel and me out to dinner as a birthday present for Joel. We went out for Italian food, and while four of us crunched salads, Joel ate a bowl of minestrone soup. Oh, if you could have seen the looks of longing on my dad’s and my faces! That minestrone soup smelled so good.

My dad reminisced about my grandma making minestrone soup when he was growing up – she’d make a big batch every fall, and freeze most of it to eat throughout the winter. I mentioned that I’ve been wanting to make minestrone – it would, of course, be easy to make GF because the only gluteny thing in it is pasta. My dad, maybe to discourage me, said that grandma’s minestrone was no quick cooking soup – it was a process that would take about three days to make.

Challenge accepted.

(Oh, and I should mention, my dad sent me a link to this recipe, which probably wasn’t exactly what my grandma used to make, but close as she was a fan of the chef. I also used the Barefoot Contessa’s recipe for inspiration.)

Jennie’s Three Day Minestrone Soup

Day 1: eat some chicken.

Cook it in your crock pot, roast it, smoke it, whatever. Or just buy a rotisserie chicken from the store – hey, I won’t judge you, that’s what we did. Actually, it’s kind of a funny story: I got an email from theknot.com last Thursday reminding me that it’d been two months since our wedding day.

“Hey, it’s our two month anniversary,” I texted Joel.

“Happy anniversary!” he texted me back. “What is this, the wool anniversary?”

“I think it’s the rotisserie chicken anniversary,” I said.

After our rotisserie chicken dinner, we cleaved the bones and fired up the crock pot to make 10 cups of chicken stock.

Day 2: Finish the stock, start some dried beans soaking.

After about 24 hours in the crock pot, I strained the stock and stuck it in the refrigerator overnight. Meanwhile, I covered a cup of dried beans with water (plus a little salt and apple cider vinegar) and left them out to soak.

Oh, and for dinner, I made a tasty chicken noodle soup from the last of the rotisserie chicken (and some store bought chicken broth.)

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Day 3: Make minestrone soup

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I’ve written out the full recipe (find it here.)

Making minestrone was a two-pot operation – on one burner, the beans boiled (for a couple of hours!), in the opposite corner, I sauteed mirepoix (onion, celery, carrots) and some chopped pork. I used nearly a full pound of pork, rather than the 4 oz the recipe called for, because I was using pretty lean chops (they were on sale last week, and also, I didn’t know what salt pork was. It’s like bacon – next time I think I’ll just use some bacon.)

Speaking of next time, the next time I make this, I’m going to try blending half of the beans and half of the tomatoes to make the soup a bit thicker.

As it was, when I stirred everything together in that gorgeous green Dutch oven, it was a bit chunky and more stew-like than soup-like. I suspect that was in part because of the huge amount of pork I used, and also, turning some of the beans and tomatoes into puree would help to make it soupier.

In this case, soupier is a good thing.

But don’t go thinking we didn’t like it. I made the soup on Sunday, and we’ve already polished off the entire pot. And don’t worry – Dad got a bowl, too 🙂