Okay, so this isn’t a real train, and it isn’t wrecked, but it’s the closest I’ve come to finding one. This past week I’ve been posting stories from my mom’s Blandford family reunion 2000, and haven’t posted anything about what’s happening here at home. O boy, what a week. It’s been so dreary outside, and so cold inside. I have this personal policy of never turning my heat on. As soon as I turn it on everyone below me turns theirs up to 5000 degrees, and then I have to not only turn mine off, but also open the windows — and they are not easy to open, in spite of the can of WD40 I spray on them, and then try to find someone to shut the little shutter like thingys on my register openings. That’s too much like work for me these days when I can’t even stand up without hitting the floor. And that’s not much fun any more either.
Sooo, I’ve been in a soup mood lately. The first soup I made was pumpkin and carrot soup. I didn’t have a recipe for it, so kinda winged it, and it turned out to be really good. I wish I had taken some photos of my pumpkin cutting skills. They don’t exist. I ended up taking my rubber mallet and hammering the knife through the pumpkins with it. Not the best way to treat a knife, but desperate times call for desperate measures. The soup was really delicious though, and I even had enough to freeze some for later. I think, however, that from now on my pumpkin will come from a can. Don’t know for sure. Sometimes I have to try things a couple of times before I learn the lesson for sure.
The next soup adventure was potato soup with sausage and kale. 
It only took a couple of these humongous spuds to fill the crock pot. That blue thing is my chef’s knife stuck in the potato. I should have taken the mallet to it also, but that knife is ceramic, so I didn’t know if the mallet would break it or not. Biggest decision here was that from now on I’m getting smaller potatoes. These were all ridiculously huge. BUT, the soup is wonderful. Everything went into the crock pot at night except the kale, which I added when I got up from the floor the next morning. It didn’t need a lot of cooking time, just time to wilt. I have some of that in the freezer as well. I used my potato masher to get it kinda mashed up and soupy looking, and have one serving left for tonight.
Oh, yeah, while I was chopping the onions for the potato soup, I sorta chopped my finger too. 
Nice, huh? So I had to stop and do a little bit of first aid before I could finish chopping the onions. And put on a rubber glove also. Good thing I keep them on hand. I don’t cut myself very often, but when I do, I do a really good job of it.
Then I decided to make some chicken noodle soup. I mean, when you want soup, you need chicken noodle on hand. It’s just that I can’t really eat the chicken part, so I have to pull that part and add some barbecue sauce to it for sandwiches. I can eat it that way. But that will have to go in the freezer, because it’s almost Thanksgiving, and even though I won’t be able to swallow the meat, I’ll be filled up with all of the sides. And Ray is picking mom and me up to take us out to the Mount for Thanksgiving dinner. I gained 20 pounds the year I went to school there, and I went home for Thanksgiving. With all that good food how much will I gain from one meal? I even learned to love liver when I went there. So now I’m getting hungry, and there’s some potato soup patiently waiting for me.
A.
Angie's Place 