Pasta e Fagioli - Yum!

I found a copycat recipe for Olive Garden's Pasta e Fagioli soup years ago and have made it several times since then. I got a bit of a hankering for it and decided it was time to make it again. I doubled the recipe for the most part, but didn't have everything that I needed. So, I kind of tweaked it this time. I'm so glad I did. It turned out to be the best I had ever made.


Pasta e Fagioli (doubled, exactly how I made it this time)
This makes a HUGE pot of soup, you'll need at least a 5 quart pot to make the full recipe.

2 lbs ground beef
1 large or 2 medium onions, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 lb carrots, peeled and julienned
1/2 tsp celery salt
1 bay leaf
2 (14oz) cans tomato sauce
1 (5.5oz) can V8 juice
2 (15oz) cans petite diced tomatoes
2 (15oz) cans fire-roasted diced tomatoes
2 cans kidney beans with liquid
2 cans great northern beans with liquid
2 tsp white wine vinegar
2 tsp basil
2 tsp oregano
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp pepper
salt to taste
1 lb ditalini pasta

Brown the ground beef. Drain fat.
Add carrots and onions and saute for 10 minutes.
Add rest of ingredients except pasta and bring to boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 1 hour.
In a separate pot, boil pasta for 10 minutes and drain.
To serve, place pasta in bowl and ladle soup over pasta. Top with Parmesan cheese.

It's really best the next day. I know it's tempting to put the pasta into the soup before serving, but the pasta will soak up all the moisture from the soup and get mushy and unappetizing that way. Store them separately.

Another Not-So-Successful Attempt At Making Thai Food

Try as I might, I cannot get a Thai curry to turn out right in my kitchen. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but there has to be something amiss. I've tried multiple different recipes, a couple different curry pastes, light coconut milk and regular coconut milk. I've tried a couple recipes from America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated recipes and even they didn't turn out quite right. What I'm looking for in a good curry is bright, complex flavor and mine keep falling flat. My most recent attempt was no exception.

I was really craving some good curry, so I bothered the internet with my problems and searched for a Thai red curry recipe. This is the one I tried. When my sisters and I went out for Thai food in Pittsburgh, we had an amazing red chicken curry with pineapple and red peppers. I was hoping that this one might come close to that one. Terribly disappointing. There was no flavor. At all. One would think that with all those different flavors combined, there would be some kind of complex flavor to it. There wasn't.

So I tried to doctor it a bit. I added a jalapeno to try to increase the heat to no avail. It was a fairly mild pepper. Therefore, I added a good bit of sriracha and that really kicked up the heat. I added more cilantro and a bit of mint hoping to brighten the flavor. That helped a bit, but not enough to make it as delicious as I wanted it. I added salt and pepper. Still really flat. By this time, I was pretty hungry so I decided to let it wait for another day. I served myself some of the flat curry over jasmine rice and lamented my bad culinary luck while I ate my late lunch. Perhaps I'll mess with it some more tomorrow.

Eric, my husband and guinea pig, suggested that I try a yellow curry. He didn't have the traumatic experiences (I may be exaggerating just a bit) with yellow curry that I had as a young child and he actually likes that stuff. (gross!!) I will never and I mean NEVER make yellow curry. I can't even handle the smell of it. So as much as I love my husband, he'll have to get his yellow curry from someone else.

So, if anyone out there in Internet Land has a wonderful Thai curry recipe, please, Please, PLEASE send it my way.

Life Can Be So Crazy Sometimes

Seriously, can't everything just slow down every once in a while? Apparently not around my house. We've been sick and then better and then sick again. We finally have renters in our house. HOORAY and FINALLY! It only took 9 months of the house sitting vacant and having to pay our mortgage in addition to rent for our new house. I'll tell you, that'll stretch your finances pretty thin. Now it's time to do all the things that we've had to put off until there was money available.

I took a day off last week to de-stress a bit. It was nice, but not really a relaxing day. I dropped the kids off at school and then went shopping pretty much all day. I went to Borders here in Boulder. It's one of the many locations that is closing, so everything is on sale. I couldn't pass it up. Then I went to the local yarn store to buy yarn for a scarf I wanted to make for my mom for Mother's Day. It was my first time going to this particular store and it was a bit overwhelming. They had so many beautiful yarns. There was one hank of gorgeous yarn that I really wanted, but alas, it was about $65 for less than 200 yards. So rather than blow all my money on enough of that yarn to make something for myself, I eyed it longingly while I paid for the yarn for my mom's scarf. The yarn I bought was pretty great to though.

I spent the rest of the day shopping for a dining table. Our current table is awful. The kids have thoroughly destroyed it to the point of embarrassment. I have been putting off inviting the neighbors over for dinner because I'm ashamed of our horrible table. And the chairs aren't any better. If I'm ever going to feel comfortable having company over again, we are going to have to get a new dining set first. I didn't find anything that was quite what we have had in mind. My search will continue another day.

Sucks to be Sick

I have been sick for a while now. I didn't realize how long it'd been since I'd blogged. I've had two boys (my husband and son) sick with congestion and bronchitis. Then I ended up heading to the doctor as well because I've been sick for over a month and can't seem to get well. All three of us sickies were put on the same medication, Zithromax. It is awful stuff. The package says that about 5% of people get upset stomachs from it, but all three of us did. I'm talking doubled over, cramping, so nauseated that you can't drink water and painful upset stomach. It lasted for about 20 hours after taking each dose of the antibiotics. Not fun at all. I took mine at night, so by dinner time each day, I could eat a little something. However, since it dries up all the congestion, it also made me quite dehydrated which prompted a pounding headache in the afternoons. And I couldn't drink much because even water would cause my stomach to cramp up more.

I took my last dose last night before bed. My doctor said that the nausea may last up to 48 hours after taking the last dose, so hopefully I'll be feeling better on Tuesday. I really hate being sick and a medication is supposed to help you feel better, not worse. In this case, the cure is definitely worse than the disease. Next time I'm just going to load up on Mucinex and Sudafed. Seriously, I feel like I've had a hangover for a week without the euphoric feeling of even a slight buzz. Sucks big time.

Now that I've gotten all that ranting out of my system, I'm going to crawl back into bed and pick up another knitting project. I'll blog about those when I can stand to look at my computer monitor for more than 10 minutes at a time.

Hope no one out there has to suffer through Zithromax. It's evil, pure and simple.

If I'm feeling better Tuesday, I'm going on strike and taking the day off. No dishes, no laundry, no cleaning, no cooking, no kids. I'm gonna take a long hot bath, get dolled up and head out. I'm taking the whole day for just me. No one relying on me for anything. Tuesday is going to be Shelly's Day of Me Time!

Shut the Front Door! This Curried Pumpkin and Chicken Soup is So Good!

I had my first good experience with Thai food this past September. My sisters and I had our annual get-together in Washington, DC and Pittsburgh this year and we went out for Thai food for lunch one day. The only Thai food I'd had before that was yellow curry that my mom used to make us eat. Now, my mom is a great cook, I always ate well when I lived with my parents. But yellow curry is by far the nastiest thing I've ever eaten and I refuse to ever eat it again. So when my sisters suggested curry, I was not excited. (Neither of my sisters would consider eating yellow curry either, by the way.) They assured me if I stayed away from the yellow nasty stuff (which my husband actually likes, gag!), I would like it. And I did, in fact I fell in love with it and have been craving more ever since. So every time I get the chance to make something with Thai flavors, I jump at it.

I've been sick for the last week and so has half my family. I made chicken noodle soup last Saturday, from scratch, even though I didn't want to do anything more than crawl into bed and sleep for a week. But if I hadn't made it, we'd have ended up eating toast and mac & cheese for 3 days. Not appealing.  Every time I ate my soup, I was wishing that my kids would have been interested in this soup. Like most kids, mine are very hesitant to try new things, especially anything with complex flavors. My sister posted this recipe on our shared blog after she made it and raved about it. I was so jealous.

Well, today I finally gave in and made some. My fever broke yesterday, so I was feeling a bit better. But I was still feeling a little under the weather today. Then, instead of being about to go out to lunch with my wonderful husband for our weekly lunch date, my son Jacob got sick at school and I had to bring him home. I needed more chicken soup to deal with the sickness coming back, but my chicken noodle soup was gone. Today was the day to make some Thai chicken soup. And it was delicious. I'm hoping no one else will like it so I can have it all to myself.

I followed the recipe as closely as I could with what I had on hand. I didn't have the ingredients to make panang curry paste, so I used my red curry paste. I had chicken breasts in the fridge, so I used them instead of shrimp (although I love shrimp and think they would be wonderful in this recipe). I left out the lime leaves and the bird's eye chile too because I didn't have them. But everything else went into the pot and turned into quite a tasty creation. I ladled it into my bowl over some jasmine rice and savored every bite. I burned my tongue pretty badly because I wasn't willing to wait for it to cool down. So yummy. I would definitely recommend trying this recipe.

I think I'll add a bit of chile sauce to the leftovers for a little extra kick of heat. I like my asian food spicy and this wasn't spicy enough. All the other flavors were there, just not enough heat.

Potato Gnocchi with Pear and Gorgonzola Cream Sauce

 I went out to dinner with my family for my daughter's birthday last night. She chose to go to Olive Garden. (She always chooses Olive Garden.) Eric and I weren't very hungry, so we decided to split the Pear and Gorgonzola Ravioli. We substituted chicken for the shrimp because Eric doesn't like shrimp. It was good. I loved the flavors of the pear and the Gorgonzola cheese. I figured, I've got some ripe pears and a tub of Gorgonzola cheese in the fridge, I could make something like it at home. I've been meaning to try my hand at making gnocchi too. So, when I started getting hungry for lunch today, I knew exactly what I wanted to make.

I was surprised at how easy it was to make the gnocchi. I baked some potatoes, pulled off the skins, mashed them and added flour and salt. I kneaded it until it was a soft, smooth dough. Then, working with 1/4 of it at a time, I rolled it into a 1/2" log and cut it into 1/2" pieces. Once they were all cut, I gently rolled them down the tines of a fork and they were ready for the pot. You only boil them until they float, which took about 2 minutes. Super easy and it only took about 15 minutes once the potatoes were done baking.

Over-Cooked Oatmeal....Or Not

Today was a busy day. It started at about 6:30 and I was going about 5 different directions at once. I got the kids ready, took them to school, came home, started my oatmeal, looked up the current grocery ads, made a menu and shopping list. Then I remembered my oatmeal on the stove and freaked out. How could I have so completely forgotten about my breakfast simmering away on the stove?! For an hour and a half?! I was sure that my oatmeal would be ruined, burned to the bottom of the pot if not on fire. But I was wrong. It was just fine. How odd.

I tried steel-cut oats about 6 months back and decided that I enjoy them much more than old-fashioned or quick-cooking oats. Steel-cut oats take longer to cook and still have a bit of chewiness to them. The other two varieties, in my mind, produce inedible, mushy slop. But that's just my opinion. My family doesn't like the steel-cut oats (I guess they prefer mushy slop), so I only make them when I'm the only one eating oatmeal. I think my choice of steel-cut oats today saved my breakfast. If I had chosen old-fashioned or quick-cooking oats, I'm sure I would have found a disaster and possibly a ruined pot.

Except for needing a bit extra milk in it this time, my oatmeal was perfect. The oats still had a bit of  chew to them and the starches thicken things up nicely. I think next time, I'll try cooking them longer and see if I can get them even softer, maybe overnight in the crock pot. I believe that's how Alton Brown does his. Maybe it's time to try it out.

Every once in a while, it's nice to have a happy accident in the kitchen.