Spinach Artichoke Parmesan Soup

http://redefinedmom.com/slow-cooker-spinach-artichoke-parmesan-soup-recipe/#_a5y_p=4422862

Photo and recipe by Kelly at www.redefinedmom.com

Soup #7

Ok, in case you haven't noticed, there is constantly something going on in my house. I don't know what the deal is, but we absolutely cannot get it together. This soup is a metaphor for our life right now.

To backtrack, Colby had an allergy shot last week that went crazy. This was actually his second one to go crazy. For some reason all of a sudden he is having reactions to his shots. It takes a few days for the reaction to completely go away. Meanwhile, he takes Benadryl and we keep a positive attitude. And by "we", I mean ME. Colby isn't quite as positive as I am. Ha!!

Well, Friday night, Elizabeth tells me that her head is itching so bad that she is actually going a little crazy. I automatically think "lice" and then I think about the "super lice" that is in the news lately and immediately start thinking about how we are all going to look with shaved heads... I have her sit in front of me and start to go through her hair with a flashlight... it's not lice. She has some weird rash all over her head... and down her neck... and behind her ears.... and she says, "Hmm... that may be why my stomach itches," ... pulls her shirt up... She is broken out in hives. Awesome. We start back tracking on what she ate and where she has been. She convinces me to text a friend of mine that is a nurse, and after texts back and forth, I remember the acne medicine she started taking three weeks ago. Nurse Melanie does some research and finds that 1 out of 100 kids have hives after three weeks of use. I gave her a benedryl, and she just keeps getting more and more hivey... give her another benedryl. She sleeps for 12 hours. Saturday night, breaks out in hives again. Same thing. Sunday morning we go to the grocery store... hives.

Basically I need stock in Benedryl right now.

We get home from the grocery store with our big plans of making this soup and also making chicken salad for lunches this week. I pull out the crock pot and put Elizabeth completely in charge of preparing the soup while I start cutting up and boiling the chicken for the salad, doing a load of laundry, loading the dishwasher, and cleaning out a kitchen drawer that had something spilled inside of it.

In the middle of all my chores, I glance over at the crock pot Elizabeth is working on and notice the flour on top.... I ask her, "Did you read the recipe??" and she says, "Well, I was going to put all the ingredients in first, and then read it."

Oh cooking!!!

I explain (ok....exclaim... loudly) that it is very important to read the recipe before you start cooking because putting the milk in now will result in a curdled mess after 5 hours in the crock pot. Honestly, I got really annoyed, which is NOT the point of this whole fun year of soup. (Sorry Sister. *guilty mom face*) She admits that she has already poured the milk in... and the cream cheese.

I decide that maybe if I put it on the stove top instead of the crock pot it will have less of a chance of curdling... I scooped out what I could of the flour and I also pulled out the cream cheese. Move it all to the stove top.

 Elizabeth is perpetually apologizing. I told her it was fine.

"It's NOT FINE. This soup is going to taste like disease, misfortune, and the tears of the homeless starving children in Africa! It will taste like literal SADNESS." she cries. (My kids are a little dramatic.)

I really don't want this soup to be a fail. So I text my mom. Tell her the whole thing. She recommends pouring off all the liquid and starting over. While this is a great plan, I do not have any more chicken stock or evaporated milk on hand. After a few minutes she calls. "What if you drain all the liquid off, keep it and cook the soup in water. Once it is cooked, pour off the water, replace with the reserved liquid and finish cooking as directed?"

GENIUS.

So that is what we did. A five hour "easy" crock pot soup, turned into a three hour hot mess of a pain in the ass stove top soup. But all in all it wasn't horrible. Certainly not disease and misfortune horrible. The texture was a little weird, but I firmly believe that was our fault.

We served the soup with thinly sliced French bread, toasted very crisp with butter and fresh garlic and fresh parmesan on top.

Scoring:

Mom: 7 - Good flavor, weird texture.

Dad: 6 - The texture is a deal breaker.

Elizabeth: 7.5, but with the bread as a spoon, a firm 8.5. This bread is the BEST. How many slices are a serving?

Colby: 7 - it's pretty good. No tomatoes!

Lasagna Soup

http://damndelicious.net/2013/12/14/lasgana-soup/

Photos and recipe from www.damndelicious.net

Elizabeth has had this soup pinned on Pinterest from day one. She has asked every week if "this" is the week we can make lasagna soup. I have hesitated because as I have gotten older, I don't tolerate pastas and tomato bases as well as I used to, and it's just something I mostly steer clear on... but I finally caved.

I am pretty much going to call this soup a "user error" fail. I followed the recipe to the letter except I did use ground sirloin instead of Italian sausage (remember Marty hates Italian sausage).... What I did NOT do is follow my instincts on the recipe.

I am assuming on the blog where she talks about her herb garden that maybe she meant "2 teaspoons fresh oregano"... because I used 2 teaspoons of dry oregano, as I do not have an Aero Herb Garden... because really. I can't even keep fish alive up in my hizzy. I don't need one more thing to completely fail at doing. The list of my failures is long and wide and I don't need to add "kills tiny, innocent plants with fool-proof grow lights" to the agenda.

Let me tell you.... two teaspoons of oregano in this soup will choke you up. The whole house smelled like an Italian restaurant literally burned to the ground. I think if you could get past it, the soup would have been on the higher end of "meh". We may try this again when the smell of oregano is out of my nostrils... like maybe October.

Scoring:

Mom:  4 - Please God, I have spent an hour and a half in this kitchen. It's fine. Just eat it. It's basically macaroni. Where is my vodka?

Elizabeth: 4 - This is nothing like I expected it to be.

Colby: 2 - It's too spicy. Also, why do all the soups you make have so many tomatoes? Did you know I hate tomatoes? Because I do. And I hate spices.

Marty: 3. Call it what it is -  It's oregano soup with a little bit of pasta.

Mexican Lime Soup

Photo and recipe from Jamie at www.scatteredthoughtsofacraftymom.com.

http://www.scatteredthoughtsofacraftymom.com/2013/11/mexican-lime-soup-w-chicken-recipe.html?m=1

I have tried desperately not to fall behind on this blog, and yet here I am! HAHA!! Looks like we will be making at least two soups this weekend.

I had jury duty one week and that led to an existential crisis in my life. Jury duty is no joke. I really struggled. I also started some volunteer work with CASA. Soccer has started back up, Marty has gone back to work even though the thumb is not really healed, and all the prom dresses in the windows have Elizabeth dreaming of pageant season... which leads me back to my existential crisis... ha!!

Elizabeth is never sick. But seems like this season, she has caught every single bug that goes around. Another sore throat. A little more fever. She wanted more soup.

This wasn't the soup we originally planned on. We wanted to make this one:
http://www.aspicyperspective.com/greek-lemon-chicken-soup/

But none of our local stores carried Israeli pearl couscous. This soup seemed like the next best thing.

I let Elizabeth make this nearly from scratch by herself. She is not a fan of chopping onions because her eyes are so sensitive, and she is REALLY not a fan of raw meat. So I did cut up the chicken for her. She also learned to roll the limes around on the counter before juicing. We did one with rolling and one without so she could see the difference in juice production... see, this is a learning experience! Alton Brown would be so proud.

The final verdict on the soup was pretty blah. If you want to make something like this, I would vote for this recipe instead:

http://www.gimmesomeoven.com/5-ingredient-easy-white-chicken-chili-recipe/

We have made that several times and it has much more flavor, and more depth.

Scoring:

Mom: 5 - It's fine. It needs more solids. Basically chicken and juice.

Elizabeth: 5 - Kind of weird, but you can taste the lime.

Colby: 1 - GROSS. I don't like anything about it.

Marty: 5 - It's ok I guess, but I would rather have something else. Is that okay? Can I make something else?

Cheeseburger Soup

http://therecipecritic.com/2012/12/cheeseburger-soup/

Photo and recipe courtesy of Alyssa at The Recipe Critic

Well, a few weeks ago, Marty had a accident with a saw. Since his Serious Thumb Injury, he has been on medical leave from the fire department. Let me tell you something: I have always "joked" that the reason we have made it to nearly 21 years of marriage is a lot of laughter and love and a whole crap-ton of "My job takes me away for 24 hours of every 72". So his being home 7 days a week was quaint and lovely for about 8 minutes. After a handful of weeks, he is annoyed with me being mean and I am annoyed with his snoring and our house is shrinking like in those weird dreams you have when you are on cold medicine. Truth be told, (if you haven't already guessed) Marty is a whole lot nicer and sweeter than I am. So he decided to stay with a friend on Saturday night and I decided that would be a great time to rest and read and... wait never mind... paint the kitchen. What was I thinking?

Painting your kitchen. It takes more math than I was aware of when I came up with this diabolical plan. Basically, take the amount of paint you think you need and multiply that by 2. Then take the number of hours you think it will take you to paint the kitchen, and you really need to multiply that by 4. Take the number of rolls of paper towels you think you will use to wipe up the spatters and multiply that by a case. Then take the height of your ceiling from the floor and add one foot, and that is how tall you need to be to paint. Also, refrigerators are super heavy. Basically, Marty came home Sunday to one really pretty wall, two that needed another coat, and the walls on top of the cabinets and behind the refrigerator untouched. WELCOME HOME!! I LOVE YOU!

So that project will be finished another day.

Meanwhile, on Sunday we decided to make a soup. We didn't want to go to the store (again) so we looked around on my Pinterest to see what we could make with ingredients we already had. Thus, Cheeseburger Soup.

The whole time we are preparing this, Elizabeth is being negative. "I have never seen a cheeseburger with carrots." "This is going to be the weirdest thing." "Potatoes? In cheeseburger soup?" "Are the potatoes going to turn into fries?" "Should we MAKE fries?"

But once it was finished? It tasted very weirdly like a cheeseburger. I even chopped up pickles in mine, which totally grossed the anti-pickle-children out.

Scoring:

Elizabeth: 8   I love this soup! It's amazing!!

Mom: 6. It does taste like a cheeseburger. But a really bland cheeseburger. The pickles helped, but it needs... something. It's a happy meal burger, in liquid form.

Colby: 8   This is really good! I really like it.

Marty: (unscored) He tried one bite, said, "I'm not really sure about this. I can't even give it a number."

So basically, I am thinking this is a really good soup for the kids, but the parents might need a date night. :)