Spaghetti for Christmas... Sort of

We decided to make up a big batch of our spaghetti sauce on Christmas day.  The idea was to have a nice, filling dinner and plenty of leftovers to eat for lunches. 

I spent the bulk of the afternoon making the sauce, but late in the afternoon, Juli realized we didn't have any spaghetti!  When making the list for the previous day's shopping list, we'd made sure to list all of the sauce ingredients we didn't have on stock, but somehow we forgot to add spaghetti.

Thankfully, we did have some macaroni on hand, so we had our spaghetti sauce with macaroni.   This made for a good meal, though perhaps not quite as nice as if we'd had the spaghetti.  We served it up with garlic bread and a side Caesar salad.

All in all, this made for a good first Xmas dinner in our new home.

Soup for Christmas Eve

Yesterday (Christmas Eve), I was really in the mood for my Mom and Dad's Italian Vegetable Supper Soup.  I thought it would be the perfect light dinner to have after playing for the 6 PM service at church.

I went to our new neighborhood HyVee, and man, were people ever grouchy.  Not the clerks, mind you- just the customers!  And every employee I interacted with commented how grinchy people had been all day long.  So, I went out of my way to be pleasant, even when there wasn't garlic bread or Graziano's sausage left.  I just bought some French bread, and we garlicked it ourselves.  I also bought Hyvee's in-house Italian sausage.  Christmas was not ruined.  Heh.

I left Jeffrey cooking as I went to church, but he unintentionally didn't quite follow the recipe.  And now a new classic is born!  It's kind of like Jonas Salk discovering the cure for penicillen by accident.  But in our case, without the mold.  Serendipity!

Jeffrey's Italian Vegetable and Bean Soup
yield = 6-8 servings 

1                package (1 pound) soup bean mix
1                pound lean ground beef
1                tablespoon olive oil
1                large white onion, finely chopped
1                cup peeled, diced carrots
1                cup diced celery
2                cloves garlic, chopped
1/2             teaspoon dried basil
1/2             teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper
1/2             teaspoon dried marjoram
1/2             teaspoon dried oregano
1/2             teaspoon thyme
1/2             teaspoon table salt
1/4             teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes 
8                cups chicken broth or stock
1                medium unpeeled zucchini, chopped
1/2             cup small shell pasta


1.  Bring 6 cups of water to a boil.  Add beans, cook 2 minutes, then cover and remove from heat.  Let the beans sit for 1 hour, then drain.


2.  Brown and drain the ground beef.  Set aside.  Add olive oil to a large skillet over medium heat.  When shimmering, add the onion, carrots and celery and cook until the vegetables have softened and started to lightly brown (about 10 minutes).  Add garlic, spices, and seasonings and cook, stirring, 1 minute.  Remove from heat. 

3.  Add chicken broth or stock to a large pot.  Add drained beans, cooked vegetables, and ground beef.  Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook 1 hour.  Stir in zucchini and pasta and cook an additional 15 minutes.  Serve with warm, crusty bread and enjoy.

Notes:  This is a great, thick, chunky soup.  If you want to make it brothier, we won't tell.  We like it chunky, but to each his own. :)

Christmas Coffee?

We continue to work on the move from small-town Iowa to the Des Moines metro.  I was so pleased that Jeffrey brought me my coffee maker last night- but then this morning I realized there wasn't any sugar!  Kind of.  I had my choice of decorator's sugar in six different shades, or powdered sugar.  I went with the green sprinkles. Heh.

I'm trying to decide if it's worth putting up a Christmas tree when there are still boxes and their contents everywhere.  It would be my first treeless Christmas ever.  My romantic side says it's worth the time/money investment, my practical side says we've had enough expenses and wouldn't it be better to use that time to just put everything away?  Not sure yet which side will win.  I will put up my nativity set no matter what, and really, that's more important to me.

I hope to have pictures for you soon, we don't have internet set up at the Dollhouse yet.

Hoops Have Been Jumped!

And....the house is ours!  Wow, do we have a lot of kitchen stuff to move!  It will take us some time to get everything arranged to our satisfaction, and then we'll be back to blogging.

When my head stops spinning from all the details I have to remember, the bank accounts and mailing addresses to change, the things that we have to buy to make the house functional (like curtains, curtain hardware, towel rods for the bathroom, a mailbox....) I will have a funny story to tell you about prepping for the move.

Juli

An Update/Status Report

Jeffrey here.   I just wanted to let you know that a) we're still around, and b) we haven't forgotten about blogging,  The simple fact is, we've been very busy with our home purchasing - I don't recall it being anywhere near this complicated last time I bought a home - with family matters and with a recent vacation.  We honestly haven't had much time to do any cooking.   We will hopefully be closing on the new home around the end of this month, though, and after that we'll be doing a lot of cooking in our nice, new kitchen, and since we'll then have something to blog about again, my plan is that we'll start blogging again shortly after the move.

So, next time you hear from us we'll hopefully have moved, or at least started the process, and maybe we'll be able to show you our new kitchen.

Home sweet home?

We may have a new home in the Des Moines metro.  Or not.  Depends on how many hoops we can jump through and how fast!


It's cute, though, isn't it? :)

A New Focus to Our Cooking! (For Awhile Anyway)

If you're a faithful reader, you may have noticed that we haven't posted for 3 days, thus breaking our year-plus record of never missing a day of blogging.  There is a reason for this.

Somehow Jeffrey and I haven't adapted to our usual fall routine, wherein we both work late twice a week, and also put in Sunday work hours.  I'm not sure why we're not jumping back into formation, but we *have* been making time to do things we enjoy, so that we're not always slogging away at the grindstone.  After work hours we play cards, I've been going to a knitting class, and we've been busy practically every Thursday for a month with something else (more on that in a bit). Doing this has actually translated into even more late nights in Des Moines, and we've found that our commute has become more burdensome than ever.  And it's not even winter yet!

That brings me to our Thursday jaunts.  We've been house-hunting, in Des Moines (that's the Thursday night activity)  We've seen some really spooky-bad houses, as we've tried to find a home in a neighborhood that's 1: not scary, 2:  is convenient for our jobs, and 3:  is affordable.  It's been kind of fun, looking at all the different kinds of homes people make.  We finally found one that might be workable, although it has its share of problems. 

The biggest problem is scraping up a down payment when our own house isn't ready to sell.  Before you try to convince me what a very bad idea it is to buy a house when you still owe on another, I might tell you that our current house payment is less than a car payment.  Anybody's car payment.  One realtor even suggested that we keep our small-town abode as a weekend home (!!!!), and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud.  But hey, in this market, you never know!

So, we have had to do a rethinking of our budget.  With so many extra hours away from home, it's become very difficult to cook on a regular basis. Yet- we have to start to make better attempts to do this, because we have to save every penny we can, and eating out is expensive (and not very interesting to read about on a cooking blog!).

So, I give you tonight's dinner:  Grilled cheese sandwiches and a Caesar salad.  Neither of which require recipes. 

Our food budget has room for drastic cuts, and now we've got excellent motivation to do so.  I would love to read your suggestions for low cost meals.    Please help?

Thanks!

Juli