Cookie Night #1, Part 2

Grandma snuck back in the kitchen while I was watching Brothers & Sisters and made cookie #5-- Linzer cookies with orange in the dough, raspberry jam filling and powdered sugar on top. Yum. I think they're my new favorites.

Cookie Night #1

I'm still not sure what EaMoSuMo will turn into, but for now there are cookies. We'll have to have another cookie night because we only got four done... my pale peanut brittle...very pale, but still tasty and crunchy... my mother's famous Pretzel/Rolo/Pecan thingys, my oreo truffles and Mom's Award Winning Swedish Creme Wafers.

More another day. Maybe.

I hope all your preparations are going well.
Love you. Mean it.

The final soup

For the final day of Eat More Soup Month, I ended up at Mimi's Cafe for some Vegetarian Vegetable. It was one of the prettiest little setups and you get a bread basket at the table... very nice.

The soup comes loaded with vegetables-- more vegetables than Jason's and a different variety. There was corn, potatoes and pieces of tomato in this soup-- which was all very nice-- but I missed the barley and that subtle celery flavor. So Jason's Deli Vegetarian Vegetable remains my find of the month.

So it's been a great month. I ate a lot more restaurant soup than I expected. That relates to my biggest "aha"-- that eating out can be very cheap but still filling-- and lots of fun-- if you focus on the soup.

I'm not sure what comes next, but I think I may take a few days off from soup. Maybe. I'll be interested to see how soon I crave it again.

Thanks to everyone who followed along. I'm thinking this blog may morph into something else, but I haven't figured out what yet. But for now, for soup, that's the end of the last one.

The stock market may be my ticket to success

That's what the fortune cookie that came after the penultimate EaMoSuMo bowl of soup said. Emma and I went to Red Bowl .

Well, we sort of snuck there. Ron had to work hockey. Don't tell him we went without him!

I had chicken Tom Ka Kai soup-- a coconut ginger soup. It doesn't photograph well because both the chicken and coconut milk are white. It has the same problem the potato soups have that way, but this is a lighter and more flavorful soup.

Besides the coconut and ginger, there's another flavor there-- something tangy like vinegar. I'll have to research recipes and find out what that is. Whatever it is, I loved it. There were also some very lightly cooked slivers of red pepper and onion in there that were delicious.

I'll give it three spoons for love and comfort. I enjoyed it a lot. I'll say two spoons for nutrition. It had a lot of lean chicken in it-- so it gets points for protein, but coconut milk is a high fat ingredient-- and a little googling tells me that the nutritional value of coconut milk is up for debate. It didn't taste as rich as whole milk in this soup, but apparently some coconut milk is. This bowl of soup cost me $3.25.

Emma had the sesame chicken and I only stole a little. Seriously. Just a little. It was also something special. We'll be back-- they have six more soups to try!

Wherein Mary plays with her food and makes embarrassing noises at Hibernian.

Emma and I stopped by Hibernian for what was supposed to be a late-lunch/mid-afternoon snack, but it was so peaceful there and the food was so yummy that we ended up hanging out until after dark and so it became dinner.

She had a codwich and I had a cup of Potato Leek soup. The soup was creamy and full of leeks and cubed potatoes, topped with cheese and bits of bacon. It was lovely and nicely presented with a slice of rustic bread.

Then we tried the curry chips.
A generous plate of "chips" came with a cup of yellow curry. The curry tasted a lot like Massaman Curry, which is just about my favorite thing in the whole wide world. So I was making the yummy noise with every bite. Emma would have been embarrassed if anyone had been around, but they let us sit at a big private table in the back. Thank goodness.
I ended up cutting the chips into pieces and filling the curry sauce-- Potato Curry Soup!

I give both soups 4 spoons for comfort. I don't think they bring much to recommend them nutritionally, but sometimes you've just got to have the comfort. Hey, the cups were small! And the setting is just-- wonderful-- good for the soul. The soup was $4 and the curry chips were $6.

Sorry for the phone pictures-- my camera died.

With three days to go, I decide to stick with a classic

Today it was time for the other new tomato soup-- the Harvest Orange Tomato. To me this soup tastes closer to regular Campbell's Tomato.

I ate the entire bowl and enjoyed it-- I didn't make it through the entire bowl of Sun-Ripened Yellow.


It's slightly sweeter than plain tomato soup, but not distractingly so. I didn't taste the herbs that the label says are in there-- garlic, rosemary and sage.

I think the labels are very pretty and they're low calorie, low sodium (relative to other soups), low fat soups, so you can't really lose.

I had just hoped to find something new and exciting for tomato soup lovers like me. Given the choice between traditional tomato soup and these, I'd stick with the old dependable.

Four days to go and it's back to Jason's Deli

I was the only one at work today and so I got all caught up with the stuff I needed to do to close out period 11 on Monday. ALL caught up. And I was way behind. November has been kinda nuts really.

So I rewarded myself with another sampling from Jason's Deli-- Southwestern Chicken Chili this time. It's not a green chili, but was heavily flavored with green chile. Also cilantro and jalapeno. And it's chock full of chicken. It's a tasty soup, but I'm afraid I prefer my chili beefy.

Those are blue corn tortillas crumbled on top. It came like that, which struck me as odd. It tasted good, but just seems like it should be a do-it-yourself topping-- particularly for carryout soup.

Their website reports that this cup of soup has 116 calories with 4 grams of fat, 12 grams of carbs and 11 grams of protein. If you do the math, that clocks in at 128 calories, but either way-- it has the best nutritional profile of any soup I've had so far. And I was full. It also comes very close to the target "zone" on the Zone Diet.

So I'm going to give it five spoons for nutrition-- because I've given lesser soups four-- it gets an A+. And two spoons for comfort and love. It's highly flavored and very filling, but it just doesn't say chili to me. I'm probably being narrow minded :) but there you have it.

I paid $3.59 for this cup of soup. It's under the premium soups with their beef chili, gumbo, beef stew, and chicken pot pie (soup?). I think it's worth it.