BOOKS, WRITING, LIFE
I love to make people their favorite foods at home. Often it’s not as hard as we think it might be. Imagine how pleasantly surprised I was that this is true for mussels as much as anything else.
The tricky part in doing a mussels dish is to make sure you leave enough time for them to “breathe” which is how they pop open. Scrubbing them of the exterior grit was a strange experience.
But tender mussels over pasta? All yum!
What’s the most surprising ingredient you’ve used?
New Year’s Day 2014, while driving to the first lunch of the year, I debated in the backseat of my sister’s mini-van. Meat or soda? Which would be easier to give up? Sitting at the table, waiting to order, I still couldn’t decide. I had identified a healthy lifestyle as high on my list of priorities. I love New Year’s Resolutions, since I follow them through with the gusto of someone with OCD. Meat seemed the easier choice, since a world without soda was as foreign as life without the Internet. 
December 2014, I ‘m happy to say that I’ve been meat free for 12 months. What began as an experiment, has become a lifestyle.
The strange thing about becoming vegetarian is that it triggers an interest in food: my passing fancy for cooking grew into an experimental passion which you have been following through the Sunday Supper posts.
The results will soon be shared, as a cookbook. Stay tuned!
What changes have you had this year?
Cooler weather has found us, even in the desert. This time of year, I find the urge to eat soup every day and no room in the cupboard. That calls for an inventive soup in the slow cooker. I love crock pots because you can toss everything in with fairly little effort, leave it alone for hours (I went out to a reading event with our four year old) and the house smells like you’ve been laboring all day.
I began with wanting to use up a long stored can of red kidney beans in this recipe and then improvising with whatever veggies I had in the fridge which included carrots. After a few hours, when I tasted the broth and found it had quite a kick (and there were some yellowing potatoes on the counter) I threw those and a can of diced tomatoes in add more flavor. So delicious we will be fighting over leftovers !