November 15, 2006

ind! Lots of wind since early last night. I am going to ban people from asking me if we ever have our electricity go out, as sure enough, someone asked me in chat last night and the power went out sometime after 2 am. My boyfriend woke up with a start as he was late to work for the second time ever in 20-some years due to the alarm not going off. The good news he is working out this way, so he may not have fallen too far behind.

With the wind, we have alot of sideways snow coming down. I am not looking forward to going out to the chores as I have to walk to the back 40 and kick the horses out of the round pen for most of the day as they were in there eating all night.

I do not have alot of indoor chores to do, since we did most of them last Monday, so perhaps I will have a huge baking day and make the boys more waffles to freeze and snacky things.

t must be soup week. The cold, the woodstove and the leftovers all combined to make it the perfect food for many dinners. A loaf of nice hot bread and some fruit or salad on the side make soup a perfect meal.

Blue Tortilla Soup
(I am just guessing at amounts as I never measure when I am  cooking like this)

2 quarts Chicken broth
2 cups or so of whole kernel corn, fresh or frozen
3/4 cup Salsa
1/2 tablespoon white vinegar
1-2  green bell pepper chopped
1-2 red bell peppers chopped
1 cup onions, chopped
1 tablespoon Montreal Chicken Spice
Leftover boneless, cooked chicken
You may want to add in some flour, cornstarch or cornmeal to thicken this soup. I used cornstarch as it was closest to me.

Cheese, grated
Blue corn tortilla chips

Combine the first 8 ingredients in a stockpot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a low simmer and cook for 30 minutes or until vegetables are tender but firm. Place a nice little pile of grated jack cheese in bottom of each persons bowl, then crumble 5 blue corn tortilla chips over
the top of the cheese. When you are ready to serve, pour 6-8 ounces of hot soup over the cheese and tortilla chips. Serve at once.

I liked this recipe as I had everyone as leftovers or in my pantry. One of the spare teenagers was drooling when I said I was making it. Our guys had never heard of it before, so it was great when the spare claimed it was good.

When dinner was simmering and doing its thing, one of the kids went up to get the turkeys some water and haul feed to the barns for me and he comes in and tells me the chimney to the woodstove fell off. I bail outside barefoot in the monsoon thing we have going and look up at the dark roof wondering how he even saw it. Sure enough.. the top part of the woodstove pipe is laying upside down and almost off the roof. Since I have a fire going in the woodstove, I see 2" sticking up above the roofline, so I go and damper the woodstove down and wait until my hun gets home to see what we should do. Other than going and getting the ladder down from the shoppe, we are on standby until he gets home.