Team Lawrence does dinner!

There is a children's book called I Went Walking.  This afternoon, we lived our very own real life version of this book. And in the words of the girls, here is what we saw:

• "pink pig. no real. pretend."
• "black cat. no, gray. no, white cat."
• "three cats."
• "anderson, momma, baby."
• "man. fix door. tool. driver." 
• "truck. dirty. rust."

We saw a pretend pink pig.  We saw three cats; the friendliest of the bunch was white. We ran into our friend Anderson, his momma, and his baby brother. We saw a man fixing his garage door... with a tool... a screwdriver. We saw an old rusty truck.

As you can see, it's hat-making season in our house.
Lucky for me, I have hat-loving ladies.

After our long and very interesting stroll, we came home to feast upon a pot of potato soup made by our very own Chef Daddy! Soup season is upon us - if you've got a pot, some of this, some of that, a little broth... voila! Soup was the probably the number one vehicle for veggies for the girls last fall/winter. They acquired tastes for broccoli, peas, spinach, corn, cauliflower, green beans, onions, peppers... you name it, their little bodies ingested it with a soup spoon. Here's a quick run-down of ingredients:

• 
  About 8 potatoes - yukon golds, medium size
• 4 pieces of bacon
• 2 leeks of average size
• 2 celery stalks
• 2 carrots
• 1 quart chicken broth (homemade chicken stock is the ultimate)
  • + 4 or 5 additional cups of water
• 
  5 pieces of roasted garlic
• 2 Bay leaves
• Fresh oregano
• Fresh rosemary
• Salt & pepper to taste

Tools of the trade:

• Large soup pot - Le Creuset is the champion soup-maker!
• 
  Stick blender (or regular blender)

And here are some snippets of info from John's soup-savvy mind:

"Before we start, you could easily “healthy” this recipe up by simply omitting bacon and using extra-virgin olive oil instead. However, this is not the particular route I chose for this particular soup. In my humble opinion, few things go together so well in life as bac’n ‘n’ taters...

As far as soups go, it does not get much easier than potato. Plus it is healthy, inexpensive, and like most soups, gets even tastier after a day or two in the fridge."


-John "Daddy-doo" Lawrence

We love John for a lot of reasons.  But, his overall love of being in the kitchen is definitely at the top of the list! Time after time, I've said to John "Dear, do you get tired of doing dishes every night?", and his consistent response is "Not if it means that I've had a good home-cooked meal". Thanks, dear, for dirtying dishes in order to replenish us from our walk-about with this hearty soup and then doing dishes so that I can sleep peacefully knowing that the kitchen is clean. 

A slice of warm cornbread and fresh dark chocolate and cherry whole wheat cookies for dessert (recipes for both to come) perfectly accompanied our potato-bacon goodness.