Soupy Saturdays

Once the weather cooled off here, Chris and I instituted Soup on Saturdays.  We're all home together so we have some time to cook up a big pot of warmy goodness.  We make it a point to buy some crusty bread and we end up with an enormous bowl of soup in the fridge to eat on all week long.

So far we've made:

• Pioneer Woman's Corn Chowder
• Mushroom Barley soup (and oh my HECK this one was GOOD)
• Russian Borscht
• Roasted Tomato Soup (this one is a gold standard in Burnstopia)

We've got a lovely cottage-pie stew on deck, a creamy baked potato chowder and I'm starting to think about attempting a fish chowder--but I need a decent recipe...I'm not shelling out a ton of money for 3 or more different kinds of fish if it's just going to be meh.

The mushroom-barely was from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and I futzed with it until I came up with this super thick, rich lovely stew like meal.  With some toasted rosemary bread it was heaven itself.

I've never actually had borscht before so it was fun to make.  I love the technicolor beets and you know, anything with sour cream as a condiment is delicious.  I started saying numbers in Russian to my Boy just to mess with his head and he's become addicted to them.  He comes up to me and shouts, "DVA-PYAT!"  Which is "TWO-FIVE!"  and I know it's my job to recite them and he chants them after me.  I know he has no idea what they mean but it just makes me laugh to hear him speaking Russian.  I've started doing the same with French and he loves them too, but doesn't know them quite as well as the Russian ones.  If I get him started he can say all of the numbers in order from 2-10...1 is still hard for him.  Mostly, I'm just sowing seeds, hoping that in the years to come as we sit down to work on foreign languages it will come a little easier to him than it otherwise would.

I also found this recipe for grilled cheese sandwiches using pesto and fresh mozzarella (which the Boy says, "RELLA!") so one afternoon we made up some grilled cheese sandwiches with pesto and moz and finished off the soup.  It was warm and delicious.

The Corn Chowder was good, but Chris made it really spicey!  So I poured it over plain baked potatoes and topped it with a little cheese (feta or cheddar, both were good) and that mellowed the spicey quite a bit.

So tell me, how are you enjoying the cooler weather?