A Texas Winter Innovation

*Well, I'm making a habit of writing time-specific posts and not posting them. Here is a post I wrote yesterday in regards to the crazy weather.
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Today was a snow day! The office was closed, so I had a day off, and Jon's work is also closed this evening! What a great day!

I was especially excited because I had a new recipe I was going to try today, and it was perfect for such a cold day. I invited my neighbor over for lunch, then busied myself with preparations. I put in Garlic and Herb bread into our bread machine (yummy!) and then proceeded to cut the items necessary for my new recipe: Golden Potato Soup. Then I realized I had no potatoes.

Well, that would not do. I needed potatoes. I had forgotten I told Jon to throw out the ones we had before we left for our trip. They were getting a little questionable, and who knows how they would have fared over our week away. However, I had forgotten all that, and in my mind, there were six perfect potatoes in the fridge. In reality, there were none.

Jon, my knight in shining armor, volunteered to brave the roads to Kroger. Elated, I set out to ready the car for his mission. I opened the house door, and was met with a sea of snow. Hm...I've never needed a snow shovel before, but it sure would be handy.

*light bulb!*

Ah ha! I could use a cutting board! I have several flexible cutting boards from IKEA. I use two for food, and two are for craft projects. I grabbed one from my craft pile, snatched my hat from my closet, pulled on my mittens, and was ready to go...still in my pyjamas and robe, but quite toasty warm.

So there I was, bent over at the waist, scooping a path out of the snow from our door to the car door, and to my neighbor's house, since she would need to walk over for lunch. Then I scooped all the snow off the car, which was pretty exciting. That was a lot of snow. And it turns out my car doesn't look very white next to snow. More of a grey. Kinda sad, really.

With that accomplished (quite quickly, I might add), I dropped my hat, mittens, and house shoes, all now quite soaked with melting snow, into the washing machine and proceeded to get ready for the day. By the time I was done, Jon was back with my potatoes! On with the soup-making!

My friend, Teresa, recently posted about allrecipes.com. My recipe today is from there. One of the greatest things about the site is all the reviews. If you're ever interested in a certain recipe, be sure and read the reviews. Because of them, I adjusted the original soup recipe to use 1/2 and 1/2, and chicken broth, as many others had done. I also didn't use any meat, when it calls for ham.

Teresa's blog also brought up a conversation of protecting recipe cards. Some people use page protectors, some have special recipe holders with guards on them. I use a clothes pin. I simply take my recipe page and pin it up to my cabinet. It's at eye-level, well above all the action, and easy to read. Anyway, it works if you don't have protectors handy, and you're more of a spontaneous, not-so-organized person like me. (If you look closely at the picture, you'll get my mom's recipe for roast!)

Anyway, the soup recipe turned out great. I would highly recommend it. I doubled the recipe, and I'm glad I did. Now we have leftovers for tonight! It took about an hour to prepare and cook (not counting the trip to Kroger), and was very simple. Paired with the herb bread, lunch was excellent.

Then Holly and I spent the rest of the afternoon playing Phase 10. What a great game.

All in all, a wonderful snow day! The sun's going down now, and it's starting to get really chilly again. We'll see what tomorrow brings us!