May 2013 – Page 2 – Loving Food, Fashion, & Life

Soups Du Jour

Posted on May 12, 2013 by LFFL

Made with whole wheat small shell pasta, cannellini & navy beans, carrots, celery, onion, garlic cloves, crushed tomatoes, kale, chicken broth, Italian seasoning, salt & pepper, and topped with parmesan cheese.

Are soups just yummy or what? I could eat soup all day—but, then again, what can’t I eat all day? All these soups were so easy to make. It’s very rare that you should be able to screw up making a soup.

Every soup I’ve made so far has been A-okay. All you really gotta do is just heat up some type of broth of some sort and just throw in a bunch of different veggies and whatnot that you can find lying around the house.

Now if you’re actually finding veggies in every room of your home ‘lying around’, then that’s a completely different topic that needs to addressed separately altogether.

Recipe for—Classic Minestrone Soup

Made with chopped skinless boneless chicken breasts, celery, onion, Yukon gold potatoes, frozen mixed vegetables, flour, chicken broth, half-and-half, butter, poultry seasoning, and pepper.

This Chicken Potpie Soup was just as divine as the Minestrone Soup. I just loved chowing down on this creamy soupiness.

Recipe for—Chicken Potpie Soup

Made with onions, carrots, zucchini, Roma tomatoes, squash, potatoes, garlic cloves, fresh thyme leaves, fresh flat-leaf Italian parsley, polenta, low-sodium chicken broth, butter, salt & pepper.

This was really good, too. As you add more polenta, it gets thicker to your liking.

Recipe for—Rustic Vegetable & Polenta Soup

Made with cauliflower, shallots, chopped garlic cloves, celery, fresh thyme, chicken broth, butter, salt & pepper, and crispy baked turkey bacon; croutons made with sourdough bread drizzled with olive oil, fresh thyme, and salt.

So good for the tummy. The recipe calls for it to be a cold dish, but I ate mine warmed. And I love making homemade croutons. They are SO good and tasty straight from the oven. Love it, love it, love it.

Recipe for—Cauliflower Soup With Bacon & Croutons

Sauteed Leeks & Onions

Leek & Potato Soup

So—I got to use an immersion blender for the first time with this recipe. A new toy = a barrel of fun for me. If it has a button on it and it does something fast—I gotta be a part of it.

This Leek & Potato Soup was made with:

Leeks
Yukon gold potatoes
Yellow onions
Garlic cloves
Extra-virgin olive oil
Chicken stock
Bouillon cubes
Salt & pepper

Where my recipe disappeared to for this—I couldn’t begin to tell you. Just pick any Leek and Potato Soup recipe out online and you should be just fine.

Soup Veggies

Vegetable Soup

As far as this concoction goes, I just made up my own recipe here. Tossed whatever I wanted to in the pot and called it soup. Just like that!

So, if you have nothing else to do today, try making your very own concoction of a soup recipe and enjoy how tasty it is. And if it’s not as tasty as you like—that’s what salt and Mrs. Dash are for.

Take-Away Life Lesson: Apparently if you take an immersion blender out of the pan too soon while it’s still whirring the veggies to bits and pieces, you’ll soon find yourself covered in soup creaminess.

My Fun Outing At Whole Foods Market

Posted on May 10, 2013 by LFFL

Whole Foods Market Bulk Bins — Bulk Bins

So, I absolutely LOVE my Whole Foods Market health food store. I love the layout of the store and how everything is so neat and pretty when you walk inside. It makes you want to buy everything.

Fresh Seafood

This is part of the fun of trying new recipes all the time. It exposes me to ingredients that I’ve either never heard of before or never used before—weird spice names, cheeses I’ve never heard of, produce that sounds like it came from another planet, and more.

Whole Foods Market White Meat — Fresh White Meat

What I’ve found though is that when you can’t find most of these ‘weird’ items in an average grocery store—you can always find them in the Whole Foods health food store. Boy, they carry EVERYTHING!

So here I am walking through the store doing my usual shopping thinking what nice things I could say about this store on my blog. I took pictures here and there (over the course of 3 different days that I did my shopping over a 2-week time period) of how neatly everything was arranged and how nice the store looked—and no one ever said anything to me.

Fresh Red Meat

Now, the meat guys looked at me weird at one point—but that was about it. I just assumed they thought I was a meat inspector or something—but dressed how I was that day, I don’t know how they could have confused me.

And I’m thinking it’s no big deal to do this considering how everyone has cell phone cameras all over the world now. I mean, what do I know? How can you police everyone?

Whole Foods Market Meat Patties — Fresh Meat Patties

Well, I didn’t have a problem until I got to the cheese department. There is apparently a cheese department manager/policeman who had an in-depth conversation with me about what I was doing, you can’t do that, who are you, why are you here, etc., etc., etc. It went on and on and on.

Whole Foods Market Cheeses — Fresh Cheeses

What I didn’t like was that he told me I “couldn’t take pictures at all.” But when I asked him why, he just gave me a blank stare and didn’t have an answer. Then he said it was their store policy. Well, I asked him why it was their policy—what was the reason. He still couldn’t/wouldn’t tell me. He didn’t have an answer right off the bat.

Soooooo……………………..

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Homemade Spaghetti

Posted on May 6, 2013 by LFFL

When I’m in the mood, I just love cooking in the kitchen. And it just so happened to be a spaghetti day. I didn’t really have a recipe to follow on this one—I just kind of put together anything I wanted to inside the pot. It’s my dinner, after all. Needless to say, it turned out just fine—a big batch of homemade goodness to last the next few days.

Ingredients I tossed together:

Organic durum wheat Capellini noodles
Ground turkey breast
Vidalia onions
Green bell peppers
Tomatoes
Mushrooms
Tomato Basil pasta sauce

I try to get most of my ingredients fresh from the City Market as a first resort and the Whole Foods Market health food store as a second resort. The farmers only bring and sell a limited variety from the farm, you know.

But you can’t get much fresher than getting your vegetables from farmers who just plucked them from the ground a few hours earlier. I just LOVE it! Healthy, fresh, ripe vegetables are the best and make your dinner taste so divine, dahling.

So, if you have nothing else to do today, try making your own spaghetti dinner without a recipe and just toss together any and everything you want to into the pot. It’s your spaghetti dinner, after all, so who cares?

Take-Away Life Lesson: When you use fresh produce just plucked from the ground, your dinner tastes so much better and fresher than using store-bought produce that had to travel country miles and sit a few days just to get to the local grocery store where you are. Eww. You deserve better.

Hangin' With My Peeps

Posted on May 1, 2013 by LFFL

Celebrity Friends

The Styx – Tommy Shaw

The Styx – Ricky Phillips

Chuck Panozzo, Lawrence Gowan, Todd Sucherman of the Styx

The Styx – Chuck Panozzo, Lawrence Gowan, Todd Sucherman

I didn’t really know who these guys were when I first saw them and when somebody said the ‘Styx’, it really didn’t ring much of a bell. So I texted one of my sisters and a few friends and they were all WIGGING OUT like psychos! Woah, dude. I was asked, “Are you crazy?!” and told I ‘better’ take pictures of them. I didn’t realize it was that big a deal, but, okay whatever.

The Styx were SO nice that they didn’t just take one picture with me—they did an entire photo shoot. I mean, these are only 3 of about 10 pictures I took with them. We were on a roll with the picture-taking and posing but they didn’t mind at all and they were easy to talk to. Sweet as pie. SO cool of them! Mainly did it for my sister and some friends going to their concert the next night—which I knew nothing about, obviously.

Thanks, guys! You rock!

Wes Brown & Alan Smith of Manchester United

How this happened:

As terrified as I am of flying, I was so desperate to see Manchester United play soccer in person when they came to the States that I went and flew by myself.

Landed, went to the hotel, hotel room was not ready, left my bags there and decided to walk down the street for a bit of window shopping until my room was ready. Browsing, browsing, I stopped inside La Perla and was inside the store all of two minutes when I happened to look up at the people walking down the street and saw two faces that looked SO familiar.

Oh-my-freaking-word!!! WHAT! I know a Wes Brown and an Alan Smith when I see one!! SHUT UP! I couldn’t fly out the door fast enough. I darted out the door like a maniac. They kept walking with their shopping bags—and me, the lunatic, walking a ways behind them trying to keep up with them while thinking of an approach to get them to chat with me and not scare them off.

They kept walking and walking and I was desperate to come up with something quick because I didn’t know where they were headed. What’s a girl to do?! Ahhh!! So the first thing that comes to mind—jump on their backs. Good goin’, girl. That’s the way everyone obviously wants to be approached.

I mean, I had watched these guys play soccer/football every week on the telly for so long and they live clear over across the pond in England—what did you expect me to do?! I had no other approach that sprang to mind. I couldn’t think fast enough. It was just a spur of the moment decision. Don’t judge me!

They turned around, I jumped down, and they started chatting me up. AWESOME!! Talk about a grin from ear-to-ear. I couldn’t stop smiling. And we never once talked about soccer/football really. We just talked about mundane things like how long their flight was vs. mine and the fact that I flew by myself terrified of my really short flight compared to their 8-hour flight, how they liked America, etc., etc.

All we did was talk and walk, talk and walk all the way back to their hotel where they had to be for, what they called, ‘dinner’—though it was really early afternoon. Before they went back inside, they were gracious enough to take pictures with me. YES! I just died right there!

And that’s all she wrote, folks. I was a very happy girl, if only for a moment!

Well, I was minding my own business sitting in my seat during an intermission at a concert between an opening act that had just performed and Hall & Oates coming onto stage. My sister had just asked me to hold a really, really old Hall & Oates album for her that she found from way back in the day that she brought with her. She asked me to hold it while she went ‘to the bathroom’ during the intermission.

Then it happened—a guy 3 rows behind me saw me holding this really old album and thought I might like to go meet Hall & Oates before they went onto the stage to perform. I guess the album I was holding for my sister made him think I was a super die-hard fan because if anybody’s holding something THAT old……….well.

So he came up to me and asked if I wanted to go meet them and to follow him. Woah! Of course, I thought it must be some joke. I couldn’t understand how someone could just appear out-of-the-blue and say something like that—like he had simple access to them. PLEASE! But…….I figured I could always go back to my seat if he was lying and, if he really had another agenda in mind, surely he wouldn’t kill me in front of all these people. So I followed him to humor myself.

And…………….

Continue reading “Hangin' With My Peeps” →