Monthly Archives: January 2012

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Sausage and potato soup

Autumn and winter are my favorite seasons, in part because of one word.

Soup.

I adore soup.  A few simple ingredients can be turned into something warm and nourishing and comforting on those dark, cold evenings.  The cooking process is muss-free — depending on the recipe, you might have to saute an item or two (onions, meat) before tossing in the rest of the ingredients, adding water and settling back to bask in the scent.  30 minutes, maybe a bit longer and you have a wonderful meal served with a nice crusty bread.

Our weather in Philadelphia has been all over the map — 40 one day, 20 the next and 60 over the weekend.  Tonight, after hearing about snow flurries in the forecast, I decided, spur of the moment, that I wanted some soup.  Checked out the pantry, and the fridge, and voila!   

Recipe number one in Eating Out the Pantry:  Sausage and potato soup. 

I bought this wonderful sausage mix from Whole Foods around the holidays — pork-base with basil and garlic.  Ingredibly fragrant — even through the freezer bag, you could catch hints of the garlic.  I was going to use it as the base for a bean soup, but the sausage seemed like it could carry a recipe on its own. 

And it did.  I had to remind myself of my eating healthy resolution to keep from pouring out a second bowl.

Sausage and potato soup:

1 & 1/4 pounds pork sausage (garlic and herb)

1 medium onion, chopped fine

2 carrots, peeled, halved and sliced thin

4 cups chicken broth

1-2 cups water

8 small potatoes, washed, quartered and sliced (peeled if you want)

2-3 peppercorns, crushed on a teaspoon

Cook the sausage over a low heat (to prevent burning); drain off any excess renderings from the pot.  Add onion and carrots, saute for a couple of minutes until the onions are translucent.  Pour in the broth and 1 cup of water, lower heat to simmer and then add the potatoes. 

When the potatoes are half-cooked, toss in the peppercorns and continue simmering until the potatoes are done to your desired state of mushiness (some people like the potatoes in their soup to be falling apart; I prefer them more solid).  Since potatoes suck up moisture (broth and water), you may need to add another 1/2 cup or so if you want your soup to have enough broth.  Or you could let the mixture alone and have a stew!

If you had to substitute for the sausage, you could probably use a regular pork sausage, then add in at least 4 minced large cloves of garlic, and probably 2-3 tablespoons of basil. 

No need to add salt; the sausage had enough.  Nicely spicy.  Use a good crusty French or Italian bread to soak up the broth from the bowl. 

 

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Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is definitely not bare!

As you see, Mother Hubbard does not have a bare cupboard.

Which holds a lot more than you'd think

A tiny pantry can hold a lot of food!

Im one of those people who pops into Whole Foods or Target to grab milk or apples and sees something else, like a new type of sausage or a vegetable I’ve never tried, and thinks, “Hey, that looks good.  I don’t have anything at home for dinner, I’ll pick this up.”

The truth is, though, I do have things at home for dinner.  A lot of things.

I have a pantry closet which, at first, looks small.  But the shelves are deep and tall.   You can cram a lot in those shelves.  Same with my freezer.  I could survive for months on this food.  What I haven’t been doing is actually cooking anything!

I have beans (lima, cranberry, kidney, navy, red, turtle, soldier) and rice (arborio, black, red, wild, long-grain brown).  Grains (amaranth, quinoa, oatmeal).  Pasta (orzo, spaghetti, egg and rice noodles).  Chickpeas, dried peas, lentils (French blue, black and common red).   Flour (white, wheat, blue corn, polenta and red corn, rye).   Various vinegars, spices, and lots of olive and sesame oil.  Canned tuna, salmon, chicken and shrimp.  The freezer is packed with steaks, roasts, stewing and ground meats, whole chickens, a wide variety of fish and shellfish and frozen vegies and pierogies.   

Mother Hubbard would probably kill for my pantry. 

So I’m going to use this food.  Starting today, Ive made a vow to only buy 1) staples — milk, eggs, butter; and 2) something unusual ONLY if it’s on sale and ONLY if I use it that day. 

I have a massive collection of recipes, love to cook and can’t wait to start.

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A Week without the Cable — Days 2 and 3

I’m now on Day 3 of no cable, and it’s oddly relaxing.  I didn’t miss the BCS game Monday (from what I understand, it was such a boring game that most people turned it off mid-way through the second quarter).  I definitely didn’t miss the New Hampshire primary coverage — I got just as much info on it from NPR and online tweets without having to listen to the endless speculation of news anchors with airtime to fill. 

Tonight is Wednesday, and usually there’s nothing on that I watch, so the effect of the TV being on would have been for background noise.  And without that noise, I’ve discovered something interesting.  Well, two things.

1.  I get a lot more done.  So far I’ve inventoried my yarn stash, written 10,000 words for a book and braved the first of three boxes of old photos (no one in my family seems to have put actual names on photos; I’m trying to ID some of these people and places). 

2.  I have some noisy neighbors.  The doors keep slamming down the hall when one set of neighbors get into an argument (every hour).  And the — shrieking — that’s the only word I can use to describe it, coming from the unit underneath me is amazing.  Were these people raised in the wild?

Still, it’s both comfortable having the silence — and unnerving.  You can hear every creak of the ceiling (my building is old, old, old and I”m on the top floor).   Every car that passes outside. 

And every scritch as a squirrel runs across the ceiling in the crawl space.  

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A Week Without the Cable — Day 1

I have watched a lot of TV in my life — probably more than is good for me.  From Dark Shadows and Saturday morning cartoons, through weekend horror film fests and Doctor Who and into the series of the Eighties and Nineties, it would take quite a few pages to list all the shows I’ve seen. 

But there’s very little on the tube now that I want to watch, and so, in a grand (for me) experiment, today marks Day 1 of a week without TV. 

I realized a few years ago that I was becoming disenchanted with TV.  My cable network has 200-plus channels and it seemed like there was rarely something I wanted to watch.  Oh the TV was usually on, but it would often be running a repeat of something I’d already seen.  It was there more for background noise than any real entertainment.

I’m not a fan of reality shows; they can call it ‘reality’, but seriously, when you point a camera at someone, human nature will lead that person to ‘act’ out of character, and thus it’s no longer ‘reality’.  Even when it was a show I should theoretically like, I couldn’t get hooked on watching it consistently.  I’m a fan of swords and romance, as you can tell from the name of this page, so logic says a show like Knights of Mayhem would be something I would like.  And I tried, really, but it just didn’t hold my interest.  

The comedies I’ve sampled the last three years don’t resonate with my sense of humor.  The dramas all seemed to run together — let’s be honest, how many crime shows can you watch and still tell them apart?  Thanks to the scandals at the college and professional levels, I’ve abandoned watching most sports.  Even the historical and cultural programs failed me — most of the channels that used to broadcast these shows now have switched over to a steady stream of reality shows, and the few historical or cultural shows that are run are repeats I’ve already seen.

As part of this year of transition in my life, I decided to look honestly at my TV habits.  I found that I was actually watching very few shows, and in fact, would only be watching 2 or 3 in the future.  

Bedlam, Law & Order UK and Being Human either killed off my favorite characters or so decimated the cast that I no longer have any interest in following the shows.  Doctor Who and Torchwood aren’t on now, and who knows when, or if, they’ll return.   Luther is over.  Criminal Minds so screwed up the formula for the show last year that I lost all desire to see it.  Even the movies shown on HBO and the extended cable are either films I’ve seen or things I never wanted to view.

That leaves me with White Collar on USA, and then the second series of Game of Thrones on HBO.  And in a year when I’m aiming for fiscal responsibility and paying off debts — can I really justify $75-80 a month for the cable, plus the electricity from running the TV?  Especially now that Pennsylvania has deregulated the electric companies, and my rates are going up 15-20%?

Which brings me to this week.  I’m going without cable.  To make sure I stick with it, I disconnected the box and left it at the office.  I will reconnect it next week, so I can see the end of the White Collar season, but then, depending on how this week goes, I may just unplug for good. 

Let the fun begin.

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What I forgot about exercise . . .

My New Year restart has two components — getting a new job and getting in shape.  And getting back into shape involves two more things — eating healthy and that dreaded word — exercise. 

I already eat fairly healthy — lots of vegies, lots of fruit and lots and lots of water.  Which means, to lose weight and get back into my ‘skinny jeans’ (in this case, a pair of black suede pants), I have to exercise more.  I had that stereotypical ‘filled with dread’ feeling on that one. 

I just hate the pressure of going to a gym.  

First, there’s trying to actually get to a gym.  I work as a corporate in-house attorney.  I go into work early.  I leave work sometimes at normal hours but more often at oh-dark-hundred.  I will frequently end up in the office on weekends.  Most gyms don’t have classes at ridiculously early or late hours, and if it’s late, there’s a very good chance that I’ll be too tired to even want to drive there.

Then there’s the image thing.  I’m pretty good at blocking out people when I’m doing something, a holdover from my days in journalism, but even so, a gym stocked with model-like people, even if they’re people who are perfectly nice, is a bit disheartening. 

And finally, there’s what I call the pressure factor.  At this point, I know what my body is capable of doing; what stretches, exercises, equipment work for me, and what’s just a waste of my time.  But with one exception, at every gym I’ve ever tried, there’ve been people who insist I need to join a particular class to get back in shape.  And while I like trying new things, my goal at the gym is to get in shape asap, using what time I have.   Given my schedule, odds are I’m not going to make it to that class on anything approaching a regular basis anyway.  

(That one exception?  A Gold’s gym just down the street from my apartment.  I loved that place.  Sadly, it closed.)

Rather than looking for a gym, I decided to try working out at home.  Won’t have to drive like a madwoman to get to the gym before it closes, and I could work out at my own pace.  So I picked up yoga DVDs and weights and planned out a routine.  Last night was the first workout.  And as I moved from stretches to  calisthenics to weights to a full yoga rep, I remembered something very important.

I like working out. 

Without those eyes on me, or interruptions from people wanting to sign me up for a class, I blew through the routines at full speed.  I finished, and I felt wonderful.  I was actually ready to go again.  Being smart, I didn’t — but the fact that I wanted to, that I didn’t look forward to the next workout with dread and stress, bodes well for my getting back in shape.

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Wish I’d thought of it. . .

I wish I’d thought to do this when I registered my car!

The evening rush hour today in the ‘suburbs’ of Philadelphia was an 8 (on a scale of 10).  Between the frigid temperatures, which created random puddles of ice on which cars were slipping, and the suicidal deer (four of them jumped in front of my car in the span of 13 miles), the drivers on my commute home were short-tempered and generally nasty. 

Including the man behind the wheel of an industrial-sized pickup truck, who tailgated me for 8 miles, attempting to keep less than 3 inches of space between our bumpers.  We finally caught a red light, and when we’d stopped (without the truck hitting my car), I glanced at the license plate on the car in front of me.  I’m not joking, the plate read:

“U R 2 C L O Z”

I want that plate.  Wonder if I could buy it from the owner?

 

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Resolutions for 2012

Everyone is making (and posting) their New Year’s Resolutions for 2012.  After reading a number of friends’ blogs, it seems my immediate goals are no different than those listed by 95% of the population:

1.  Get a new job (and get my career on track).

2.  Get back in shape.

Easier said than done, when the economy is moving so slow that a tortoise could beat it to the finish line and my current position involves working massive amounts of overtime.  But as I said yesterday, Everything Is Possible.

Since I don’t have the time to make it to a gym on a regular basis, I spent several hours checking out books and websites to create an exercise program I can do in my home.  Fortunately, I like walking, even in the cold, and have plenty of parks in which to wander.  And I now have yoga programs and a series of preps and stretches to do daily. 

As for the job, I spent the remainder of the day revising my resume and setting up accounts on various sites, including LinkedIn and Monster.  The actual listing will be a task for tomorrow.  But after compiling my accomplishments, and revising the list of my responsibilities (because quite a few have been added in the last two+ years), I realize that I have options for my search.  Not just legal, but tax, regulatory compliance, intellectual property, contracts and HR.  I do a LOT at my company. 

I have some decisions to make on possible career tracks, but at least now I have a clearer picture of what I’d like to do.  And where.  But that’s a post for tomorrow. 

 

 

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Welcome to 2012!

Welcome to my blog!

I’m Michele — perpetually-curious and interested in everything.  Lately though, I’ve found myself feeling — bored.  Stale.  A tad unhappy. 

The year 2012 has been hyped in the media as a year of tremendous change for humankind.   And so, having decided that I wanted to change things in my life, I’ve restarted this blog to chronicle my 2012 journey.  

Over the next 365 days, I intend to test drive some new interests, visit places I’ve been meaning to see and possibly move to a new job, or city, or even a new country.  I’ll be reviving some old dreams, like publishing a book and making jewellry. 

The only rule for me this year is that I will not, absolutely not, rule out anything.  After all, you can’t know if you’ll like, or can do, something unless you try it.  It was true when my mother coaxed me into eating my vegetables as a child, and it’s still try today.

In this year, Everything Is Possible. 

Right now, ‘m a business and tax lawyer in the Philadelphia are — but who knows where and what I’ll be tomorrow!