I've been a cooking...

Lately I've been on a soup kick.  Yesterday I made two soups, one for dinner and the other for lunch today.  The first was a French onion soup.  It was pretty darn good and super simple to make.  I cut up one white and one red onion and sauteed them with a little olive oil in a big pot. Quick side note: I love onion - I actually think it is the greatest edible thing there is.  There are so many yummy options in the onion family and my favorite is caramlized onions.  The smell, aroma, flavor...just freakin' fantastic in my opinion. Once they got a little brown I added two cans of beef consume soup, one packet onion soup mix (Lipton makes a good one) and roughly two cans of beef stock.  I let this concoction simmer for quite a while - nearly two hours.  I think you could probably let it sit in a crock pot for longer, but we were working on a time limit.  To serve the soup, I had purchased two bread bowls from Panera earlier in the day.  They are about $1.30 each, so that was cheap.  I also stopped into the cheese shop and got some fantastic Guyrier cheese.  I lined a pan with foil, ladled in some soup into the bread bowls and topped them with the cheese.  I stuck them under the broiler until the cheese melted.  It was a great dinner. Salty...but heck, isn't that what's so scrumptiously fantastic about French onion soup?

The second soup I made was chili. I had some zesty sausage (I love Bob Evan's brand) leftover from Sunday so I dumped that, a can of fire roasted tomatoes, and a can of drained/rinsed pinto beans into a small pot.  I added a little bit of water, some beef and chicken broth (I had some containers that needed used in the fridge so I dumped what was left - about a half cup each) and a whole bunch of spices.  Now what spices, I'm really not sure.  I basically pulled out any spice that I thought would taste good with this concoction.  I do recall dashes of paprika, chipotle red pepper, cayenne pepper, onion powder, garlic and pepper salt, ground mustard, a hint of curry, a dash of cinnamon and about ten splashes of Cholula hot sauce.  Yeah, I know, way strange combination but I love the heat and I like a lot of flavor.  I let it cool then dumped it in a pyrex container to save in the fridge until today.  We heated it up and served with with some jalpeno cheddar cheese curds that I melted into the soup while I was re-heating it on the stove.  Made for a filling lunch, perfect for such a cold day (and day off from work, may I add!!).

Tonight for dinner we're eating leftovers...from my dad.  Sounds weird, but he made a big jerk pork roast and shredded a bunch of the leftovers for me.  Tonight, we are going to make jerk pork tacos with onion, cilantro and lime.  I also plan to make some black bean and corn side dish from a recipe I ripped out of a magazine and shoved in my pot holder/recipe drawer.  That drawer is a mess but it's an important one!  I love that Sofia loves beans...so she'll love the black bean and corn concoction and although she's not a fan of meat not in nugget form, she does enjoy a quesadilla.

Now if you want to really read a yummy food blog, check out this one: Feast with Friends  It's a girl we know from Chicago and she can cook (and pick out some great dishes at some fantastic restaurants back north).