There’s a lot of tomato sauce in our future

01/21/2013 Nichole 1 Comment

Pete thoroughly enjoyed playing in his first basketball game and Poppy had a full schedule of playdates — one of which involved a zip line — over the weekend. Rockford and I had a nice weekend as well. He watched a lot of football and cleaned the kitchen, and I went to the mall, watched “Downton Abbey,” chose some new photos for the walls and polished all of our bouillon spoons.

(Only one of those things didn’t actually happen.)

Monday: Chicken Parmigiana: I’ve been making some variation of “chicken and a pan sauce” every week for the last several. This recipe — from Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” — isn’t quite that, but it starts with sautéing the chicken so it’s close. Rockford loves chicken parm, so I’m hoping this is really great.
Tuesday: Chili: Tuesdays have turned into The Night When We Have Lot Going On, which also translates to CrockPot Night. I’m slowly but surely building a small arsenal of slow cooker soup recipes.
Wednesday: Pizza subs: It’s Poppy’s week to make the call for kids’ choice night. Seems she’s discovered that a pizza sub is a pretty much the same thing as pizza. Clever kid.
Thursday: Leftover night!: This will be our third week of Leftover Thursday, and I’ve been pretty pleased with it. I don’t normally like leftovers all that much, but I do enjoy not cooking one night a week.
Friday: Pizza: This will also be the third week of DIY pizza, which is doing nicely for the budget.

Homeschool

We’re gonna need a better toothpaste

01/18/2013 Nichole 1 Comment

JJ T. Cat was in a deep, deep sleep next to me just now. Then he woke up and yawned, and my olfactory receptors immediately submitted a petition to the White House to put an end to such actions. The cat’s breath stinks, is what I’m saying. Which doesn’t have anything to do with homeschooling, unless we decide to do a unit study on feline halitosis — we’ll read “How Kitty’s Breath Made All The Flowers Wilt”; we’ll learn how to spell “halitosis,” olfactory” and “please stop yawning, JJ”; we’ll do a lab wherein we brush his teeth every day with a different toothpaste to see if any of them make a lick of difference; and at the end of the week we’ll take a field trip to the vet to make sure he doesn’t have sinusitis or something — but his breath was so distractingly awful that I completely forgot what I was going to write about.

But anyway, here’s a little of what we did this week:

Extracurricular

Pete’s first basketball game is tomorrow. His team is made up of 5- and 6-year-olds, and I think he’s one of the youngest on his team. You can read into that what you will. He’s beyond excited about the game, and he’s been practicing his game face all week.

Poppy’s piano teacher told her she’d dance the polka if Poppy practiced this week, so as you might imagine there’s been a lot of piano practice happening around here this week. Miss Kari tells me she did indeed dance the polka for Poppy yesterday, and by all accounts it was exhausting.

Reading

Poppy has been going through a free-reading draught lately. She’s usually very hesitant to read a book that I pick out for her, and yesterday was the first day in awhile that I hadn’t been solo at the library. She picked up two Magic Tree House books — “Civil War on Sunday” and “Revolutionary War on Wednesday” — yesterday, though, and she finished the first and is halfway through the second already. So I guess maybe I need to stop making suggestions? I don’t know. I’m not sure what to do on that front.

Pete, meanwhile, really wants to read some Star Wars chapter books, so he’s ramped it up on the Bob books front. He knocked out another one this week (it was about someone who tries to give a bunch of cats a bath). I haven’t had any luck convincing him to try to read anything outside of the Bob oeuvre, though.

History

I had every intention of doing All The Crafts with our Story of the World studies this year, but I couldn’t bring myself to do this week’s. We studied Charlemagne, and the craft was to make a crown and glue jewels to it. I don’t have any jewels on hand for that sort of thing (or any other sort of thing), so we skipped it. I believe next week is Vikings, though, so we’ll almost definitely be building a ship and setting it on fire or something.

How was your week?

Eating, recipes

It’s the best bean soup, and of course there’s bacon in it

01/15/2013 Nichole 3 Comments

OK, so I’ll admit that I wasn’t thrilled when Pete asked if we could have bean soup for dinner one night this week. I mean, I do love that he loves beans so much. But I wasn’t looking forward to boring ol’ bean soup. But then last night I made Dave Lieberman’s Black Bean Soup.

And you guys. My stars. That is good soup.

Rockford would’ve given it two thumbs up if his thumbs hadn’t been busy with the soup-eating. Instead he just ate two bowls of it silently, with that slightly-crazed gleam in his eye that he gets when he’s eating something really, really good.

I altered the recipe a little bit, giving the bacon a little extra attention to make sure it was crispy; adding broth because a lot of reviewers suggested it; cutting back on the garlic because I didn’t have the six cloves called for in the original recipe; blending some of the soup to make it a little bit creamy; and adding tortilla chips because I like ’em.

Here’s the recipe with my revisions. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Dave’s Bacontastic Black Bean Soup

Recipe Type: Soup

Ingredients

10 slices really good smoked bacon, chopped
2 medium onions, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
32 ounces reduced-sodium chicken broth
1 can diced tomatoes with garlic
2 tablespoons ketchup
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon chili powder
4 (15 1/2-ounce) cans black beans, drained and rinsed
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
juice of 1/2 lime
Sour cream
Grated cheddar
Tortilla chips

Instructions

Put the bacon into a large heavy pot and place it over medium heat. Cook until it starts to give up its fat, about 4 minutes. Leaving the grease in the pot, move the bacon to a baking sheet and put it in the oven. Turn the oven to 400 degrees and move the bacon around occasionally while the soup cooks.
Stir the onions into the grease in the pot and cook, stirring, until they start to turn translucent. Stir in the garlic and cook until you can smell it, about 1 minute. Add the broth, tomatoes, ketchup, Worcestershire and chili powder. Stir in the beans, then turn the heat to high and bring to a boil. Simmer 10 minutes, then season the soup with salt and pepper.
(Check your bacon every now and again. When it’s <i>just-this-side</i> of very crispy, take it out and set it on some paper towels to drain.)
Put about 3 cups of soup in a bowl and blend it with a hand-blender. Stir the pureed mixture back into the rest of the soup, then stir in the lime juice. Serve with crispy bacon, cheese, sour cream and crumbled tortilla chips.

A final note: I’m not normally a proponent of spending extra money on things, but for this soup you’ll want to go ahead and splurge on the bacon. Because let’s be honest: It’s pretty much a bacon-delivery vehicle.