Weekending- Super cold plus three soup recipes one of which is soup(er)!

Linking up with Holly and Sarah for Hello Monday:

Well, it was a cold one! I stayed indoors most of the weekend. I did run outside on Friday evening (I don’t remember the temperature but it was very cold). I didn’t run outside on Saturday or Sunday. I’m doing a fitness challenge that is supposed to incorporate outdoor exercise every day. That did not happen on Saturday or Sunday and I don’t feel guilty about exercising solely indoors on those two days.

Saturday morn

Alyssa and I made banana bread on Saturday. We used a sugar substitute and for the oil, we used 1/2 of the oil that it called for and for the other 1/2, used applesauce. I had just made some of this bread on Tuesday so I remembered what it tasted like; I don’t think that using half of the oil impacted the taste or texture at all. Look at us making healthier choices! I used my mom’s banana bread recipe which I love.

We met Donnie’s Uncle Doug at a local movie theater to watch The Boys in the Boat later on Saturday. We all enjoyed the movie (and popcorn!) quite a bit. 

Would have loved a Coke Zero with my popcorn but I´m not drinking pop right now :(.

Sunday we only went out to go to church. On the way home, we did make a stop. With the Starbucks app, throughout the month of January, drinks are BOGO from 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm. Donnie and Alyssa took advantage of this on Saturday and then on Sunday, on the way home from church, we stopped at Kroger (that has a Starbucks in it) for them to get Starbs and then I bought just one grocery item and then we went home.

This may have been the high for the day... at 6:30 AM

This was after church. It was four degrees colder than it had been earlier.

Jacob came over to watch the Cowboys/ Packers game. The boys like the Cowboys quite a bit (they like the Bengals and the Cowboys) and were super hopeful with the Cowboys having a such a good record and home field advantage against a team that had the same record as the Bengals (who didn’t make the play offs). It was not a good game for Cowboys fans and the boys were disappointed. 

With not a lot to report here re the weekend, I thought I’d talk about three soups that I’ve tried for the first time this soup season. Only one of them made it to the rotation round of dishes that I make but maybe the other two will inspire someone to try them. 

The first one that I made is called cowboy stew and I know that I’ve mentioned it here before.  I got the recipe from here. In case you don’t want to click over to the recipe (yet, anyway!) is a list of the ingredients:

It has three kinds of meat, all sorts of veggies, and lots of flavor from various spices. Donnie and I have really liked it every time that I’ve made it- I think three times now.  La Petite Fussy One does not care for it much but she will have a small bowl of it. (Goodness, I will miss her when she’s in college but dinner time is going to be shockingly easy as Donnie is not fussy at all.) I think we (Donnie and I) like it because it’s so hearty- it’s almost like meat and veggies with a little broth thrown it. I guess that’s why they call it a stew??

The next one I tried was crock pot lasagna soup. I had heard of this before and knew I wanted to try it. I used this recipe. Here is a list of the ingredients:

It doesn’t have many ingredients which made it very easy to put together in the crock pot. Overall, we all liked it Ok but none of us were blown away by it. The recipe says to place some ricotta cheese in your bowl. I don’t know- there’s something about placing semi soft to mostly soft cheese like ricotta in a bowl of hot soup that seems off. Like, I will add normal shredded cheese until the cows come home in a bowl of hot soup but a cheese like ricotta? We all passed on adding ricotta. Alyssa said the soup kind of reminded her of a soup that I make, pasta e fagioli, that we all really like. One big difference is that the pasta e fagioli soup that I make has numerous vegetables in it. If I’m going make a soup, I prefer it to have veggies in it. With this soup being reminiscent of paste e fagioli, I will chose to make it (pef) over  lasagna soup just because it is healthier than this lasagna soup. 

The most recent soup that I made was a soup called crock pot chicken crack- I liked the alliteration in the name and was hoping that we’d love the soup. The recipe can be found here.

Aside from spices, the only ingredients are chicken breasts, bacon, bacon grease and cream cheese. That’s it. It does call for kale or baby spinach as optional. No veggies to speak of besides the optional ones and we do not care for kale or baby spinach. I served it with a side salad so that we’d consume some veggies. And the soup? It was... ok. The flavor was good but it wasn’t outstanding. One member of the family referred to it as runny, water chicken. It hardly rose to the level of its “crack” moniker for us anyway. 

Liking one out three recipes enough to make it again isn’t bad, I don’t think. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, right? So, I will keep on trying to find recipes that I think we may like and try them.