Archive | September, 2008

Baked Potato Soup

by on September 6, 2008 in Recipes

This is my favorite soup recipe ever. We haven’t made it in months for some dumb reason but it used to be a weekly staple. It’s on the menu with potato rolls tonight!

Baked Potato Soup

Ingredients:

  • ½ – 1 lb bacon
  • ½ medium onion, diced
  • 1 clove garlic, chopped
  • ½ c. celery, chopped
  • 5 lbs potatoes, peeled and diced
  • 8 c. water
  • 6 bouillon cubes
  • 8 ounces cheddar cheese, shredded

Directions:

Fry bacon in Dutch oven until crisp, remove bacon from pot, drain fat reserving about 2 tablespoons. Fry onion, garlic, and celery in bacon fat until tender, not browned. Add water, potatoes, and bouillon and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to simmer, and cover, simmering until potatoes are tender. Use a potato masher or immersion blender to smooth out the soup some if desired. Stir in cheese until melted into soup. Stir in crumbled bacon, and serve. We like to top it with IMO/sour cream too. Serves 8 “real” servings.

Painfully obvious lessons

by on September 3, 2008 in The Growing Garden

More lessons, con’t from this post…

Tomato cages. Just suck it up and buy them. Stakes do no good when they have 6 “main” stalks coming up from the ground! It’s like trying to stop a monkey from flinging poo. Or trying to contain a 2 year old. Not gonna happen.

Zucchini and squash need a lot more room then the 2′ circle this boneheaded blog author gave them. 4′ all around. Or more.

Weed control. Don’t think because you start out good that you can slack off. Or your garden will look like this after a futile 2 hour weeding session:

That really is almost ALL WEEDS – the taters and corn are all harvested, so all the green you see, except the far right tomatoes and the far left squash, is weeds. :dizzy And that really is after I spent 2 hours taming some of the worst!

Tomatoes & the inevitable salsa

by on September 3, 2008 in Harvesting & Preserving

I really did mess up with the tomatoes :lol They’re all falling all over the place and planted so close together that a lot are falling into the middle of the whole mess and ripening and I can’t see them. There’s hundreds of tomatoes. It’s insanity.

Here’s the first group of tomatoes. About half were on the vines, ready to pick and the other half were on the ground. Most are Romas, but there’s a few Early Girl and a small Beefsteak or two in there. I made salsa and froze it today with the ripest ones :bounce