Soup

First things first, this post is dedicated to Mi Padre in honor of his birthday!  Happy birthday pops!  Sorry I didn’t send you a card, with school and business at work, it slipped my mind until a couple of days ago.  So, I hope you can forgive my forgetfulness as I wish you the most wonderful of birthdays!

In food news…  It has been a wonderful year it seems for crops.  The majority of the farmers that I know are all exstatic with their yeilds, and the quality has been stellar as well!  In the past week I have had the best sweet corn, watermelon, and tomatoes that I have ever been lucky enough to try.  The six+ months of barren wasteland is negated right around this time of year when the best of the harvests come to fruition.  I have started a new 5 times a week habit of riding my bike down to the Farmer’s Market and buying produce for the restaurant.  For the first couple of weeks of summer I was using primarily the xtracycle to haul produce, that was up until a month ago when I purchased a new cargo trailer for my bike.  Not to knock the xtra or anything, but hauling 30-75# of produce is easier with the trailer vs the long tail.  I try to make it to the market everyday, though M-F are best in my opinion.  Something about the touristic nature of weekends at the market just leaves me frustrated, I go to the market on a mission.  The simple fact of the matter is that I have way more control buying at the market, control over pricing and control over quality.

On that same note, here is a picture of the soup I made tonight with ingredients purchased entirely from the market.

Market Soup

Although to be honest Dancypants purchased everything, I just used what she left me for her weekend reunion with German/Norwegian Camp Peeps.

Not on the food front…

I started classes again, just two this semester.  I am so close to graduating I can taste it!  If I were able to go full time, I could have possibly been done this semester, that is how close I am!  As is, it will be either spring or summer semester, depends on how a few of my transfer credits are treated.  It will be nice to finally finish, the last time I graduated was when I finished 8th grade wearing a black rayon short sleeve shirt and a black tie, I felt quite gangster.

It has been busy with catering at work.  Strangely enough, I have moved on from only cooking to do some catering sales, a bit of a change from my normal experience.  In the past couple of weeks, I have executed a bar mitzvah for 300 people, wedding for 100 and an event for a certain downtown/NE hair college breakfast, lunch and dinner 250-350 people 4 days straight!  That last bit could partially be why I put a 16 hour day in yesterday, either that or because I am a chump, one of the two.

Finally, this happened a couple of months ago, but I almost got my ass kicked and my bike stolen by a group of 14-16 year olds.  Had I not been weighted down with 60#s of Maple Syrup and 20#s of fish I would have been able to sprint away.  Also had I not ridden well over 100 miles to volunteer at a farm the day before, that could have helped my chances too.  Click on the picture for more info.

(Oh and on the biking front, I am pretty much on pace to ride 6k this year!  At least if something else doesn’t hinder my progress (like life.)