Soup...mmm.mmm..good

Crappy weekend. Zeb was out of town which meant I slept terribly. The animals were going nuts and, to top it all off, I got a migrane. When Zeb's gone, I eat crap. While he was gone, I had a box of Kraft mac & cheese, way too many Nugget chocolate chip cookies and a ball of fresh mozzarella. It's embarrassing how little I care about what I eat when I'm by myself. Bless his heart, Zeb is always on my case about this. He's going to be heading to DC for a week next month and I'm going to have to really think if Kraft and Nugget cookies can sustain me for that long.

Anyway, tonight I made Southwestern chicken soup in the crockpot. This is one chunky soup! Corn, chicken slices, bell pepper, onion, tomatoes... I was a bit worried because the picture in the article makes the soup look quite tomatoey and red but, with only one can of diced tomatoes, there's not much in the way of red. The broth is more milky in color. I think that's from the corn and chicken. It's very mild until you add the cumin. I just love cumin. It's smoky without being spicy. We actually ran out of ground cumin a few days ago but luckily, I had some cumin seed left so I gave it a whirl in the spice grinder (formerly Zeb's coffee grinder). Oh, the smell is just divine! In eating the soup, it felt like there were too separate dishes: chunky bits and broth. The broth was too thin to really cling to the bits. Not that it didn't taste good but it was different. The taste was fantastic. I think next time, I might add a can of tomato paste to see about intensifying the tomato flavor. Also, I might add rice as well. I liked this one alot! (oh, I didn't put in the green bell pepper, I'm just not a fan.).

One thing I did accomplish this weekend was to finally go through my new crockpot cookbook, Mabel Hoffman's Crockery Cookery. I have high hopes for this one! This is where the Flank Steak in Currant Wine Sauce came from. I pulled out about 50 recipes so we'll be trying new crockpot recipes for at least a year!