A New Recipe with a Dash Update

It's 11 F (-11 C) today and light snow is just starting to fall. Oh look, can you see Dash? He's peeking over the fence to see who's coming out to impose on his day and he's not even wearing his blankie. His mama (the big white girl) is letting him nurse now, after two weeks of spitting him off and generally treating him like an annoying stranger after his illness. I don't know if there's any milk left for him to have, but I don't think it matters. He's done so much better than either the vet or I expected, although he's really small and the weight gain is painfully slow. The gray baby is a full two months younger than he is and has had a growth spurt over Christmas. She makes him look like a squirt.

I just have to post a new recipe that I tried out. I found it in a book called "Soup and Bread", by Crescent Dragonwagon. I thought the author's name was a little strange, but the book is marvelous. With it being the frozen days of winter here, I was glad to find a book dedicated to two of my favorite types of winter foods and without a lot of the odd ingredients that are so fashionable, expensive and hard to find like kombu, daikon, kuzu, mahimahi, seitan, among many others--I don't even know what most of these are and doubt that my family would eat them even if I did. This book offers pure home cooking with some healthy and flavorful twists and I just love it.

My current favorite is called Supreme of Chicken and Olive Soup. I had never heard of putting olives in soup before and it sounded intriguing so I took the chance of my family refusing to eat a bite of it and wasting all the good ingredients. Results? Everyone loved it and it's now on our favorite list. I served it with hot baking powder biscuits and cold green salad.

So here is it is for your consideration and use. Enjoy!

Supreme of Chicken and Olive Soup Eureka

4 c. chicken or vegetable stock
1 c. dry white wine
4 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium carrot, peeled and diced
1 rib celery diced
5 tbsp flour
1/2 c. peas
1 1/2 c. milk or half and half
1/2 c. cooked rice
1/4 c. pitted olives cut into fat rounds
1/4 c. pimento stuffed green olives, sliced into fat rounds
3 c. chunked cooked chicken
Salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

1. In a soup pot, combine the chicken stock and wine and boil. Turn down heat and simmer.
2. In a skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion and saute until slightly softened. Add the carrot and and celery and saute, stirring, another 5 or 6 minutes.
3. Sprinkle the veg with flour and lower heat. Cook 2 minutes while stirring in the flour. Gradually stir in some of the stock mixture and then whisk in the thickened pan contents to the remainder of the stock. Simmer over very low heat for 20 minutes.
4. Add milk to soup. Add the peas along with the olives, rice, and chicken. Heat through and season to taste.

Pretty simple and basic--mostly just a home made cream of chicken soup. I used 2% milk and left out the peas (because my oldest son won't touch them) and added nearly three times the amount of olives. I also boiled the chicken and used the stock from that rather than purchasing actual chicken stock. Good luck and I hope you like this as much as we did.

Back to Work

It's been a long Christmas and New Year's season. We turned out reams of gloves, socks and hats in a short amount of time and I've taken a couple of weeks to let my eye sight return to normal. In that short break, my thoughts have turned to weaving.

My mother left a four-harness loom when she passed on. It actually belongs to my sister in Peru, but it's much too bulky to pack off to South America, so here it remains. I'm not a good weaver in any sense, as I think that looms are too complicated, not portable enough and just too time intensive. So why would I think about weaving now? I'm not sure, but it's consuming my thoughts, even in my sleep. I have a rigid heddle loom that I work on sometimes, and I like that for making purses, ponchos and wraps, but invariably, I end up with an odd project that ends up sitting unfinished on the loom for what seems like ages (while I pursue knitting and felting ventures) and I don't really have the heart to cut it off and start something else after all the time it took to warp the silly thing to begin with. It's not just a matter of unraveling and salvaging the yarn for another project, as with knitting. I will lose loads of yarn if I don't finish, so there it sits and what to do?

I'm in the process of making weaving cards. Card weaving is used to weave bands and belts, mostly. That will fit in fine with the knitting and felting that we already do, used as hat bands, purse straps, edgings, embellishments and belts. It's portable, cheap, and suited to small projects if I read the information correctly. I'm making my cards out of an old deck of playing cards that has lost some of its members. I have 44 cards in all and I think that should be enough for my purposes and for the rest of my life. I can make bands on my rigid heddle as well, so I'm hoping my youngest daughter will be interested in the card weaving. She can make friendship bracelets with them and she's very "into" that right now. She received one as a Christmas gift that had flower beads sewn on after the weaving and it's just gorgeous--and possibly inspiring?

The knitting goes on at an even pace. I'm in the process of finding out more about online outlets for our woolens. Places like Etsy, Fiber Finds, and eBay are on the list. I'm not sure why eBay scares me, but it does. I avoid going to that site rather than doing the proper research and getting my pictures and descriptions ready. I'm still looking for more options, and even though eBay seems like a "no brainer" I just don't want to go there. Perhaps it's laziness or just fear of the unknown. I don't know.

In the meantime, I have a rose gray hooded jacket in the works and I'm charting out the designs for an Aran sweater. Along with that, I'm spinning a white lot of alpaca/mohair blend. There's really a lot of it and it looks like it's going to be a long project. I'm spinning the singles at approximately 28-30 wraps per inch with no particular project in mind.

I do have a son who would like to marry his girlfriend and I would just love to make a white handspun lace shawl in the Shetland tradition for her when they finally decide to marry and this yarn would do quite nicely for that. I've read about shawls that were made for the bride and given to her at or just before the wedding. The couple would sleep under it their first night together, the wife would wrap it around her shoulders during pregnancy, she would wrap her babies in it and use it as a cover while nursing them, it would lie as a coverlet on their bed in the warm months, she would wear it on her shoulders in the cold months, and she would be buried in it at her passing. How I would love to provide something so dear, so intimate and so lasting to my children and their spouses. Goodness, I have four children. I have a lot of work ahead of me!