Southwest Veggie Soup of Get Wellness

Well, my poor sweetie has the plague, which I could normally cure with my Magic Chicken Noodle Soup of Get Wellness, but he is insisting on sticking to his no meat, no fowl diet. I personally would cave in the face of an ebola-level flu, but he is certainly a better person than I. So I had to improvise. Here is the Southwest Veggie Soup of Get Wellness.

2 Tablespoons olive oil

3 scallions, chopped 

1 bag southwestern style veggies (I think they were Flavor-Pak, but whatever brand, the bag contained corn, black beans, red bell pepper, poblano pepper, and onions)

2 quarts veggie stock

1 large can of fire roasted crushed tomatoes

1 Tablespoon salt

2 Tablespoon Penzy's Adobo Seasoning

8 ounces Amish-style extra thick egg noodles (if you make your own, think parpadelle width and just slightly thicker, so they stand up to being boiled in the soup)

Heat oil in a large soup pan and then add scallions. Once a delicious oniony smell starts to come off (a couple of minutes), throw in the bag of veggies.  Add the stock, tomatoes, salt, and Adobo. Bring to a boil. Add the egg noodles and cook until done (about 15 minutes).

This soup has a touch of heat, due to the poblano, but if you want a greater kick, feel free to add some crushed hot pepper or spicy pepper of your choice, I would not add chili powder, however, as that would change the flavor profile quite a bit.

Today's Episode, in which We Melt the Stove

Yes, I know it has been a long time since I posted. I have been battling illness again; first Boxer and then Mia Madre brought to the household various chest cold type illnesses and I got nailed. Such is life. We have also been busy preserving the harvest (tm).

First, I did a lot of dehydrating of green beans, yellow beans, carrots, and sweet peppers of various extractions. The hot peppers are strung up, as I very much learned never to dehydrate them on my dehydrator a couple of years, when I did so and suffered from the self-induced equivalent of pepper spray to the face for over a week from the volatile oils released into the air.

We also canned. And canned. And canned some more. Our primary focus of canning was maters and salsa. We had three bushels of maters, most of which we got from a local organic farmer who specializes in heirlooms. Mia madre also brought her maters for the making of her salsa.

Here is Boxer washing the maters so that I could scald them.


And here is mia madre skinning and cutting the maters, and getting in a quick taste. Yum!


And here is the finished result of our first batch of yellow mater salsa, made with our homegrown hot lemon peppers. Which are really hot. Like go to the hospital hot.


We also made lots and lots of jam: forest fruits (mixed wild blueberries and raspberries), raspberry, and blueberry. We ended up doing a batch of salsa for mia madre and were going to do apple butter and pickled beets, too. Only one major problem though.

We melted the stove.

When we started doing major canned maters, apparently everything just got too hot (hell, you gotta vigrously boil that stuff for at least 20 mins). The electronics that control the oven and everything appear to have melted. We got the dreaded F11 code, which means a short. And yeah, we can reset it, but it keeps going off and the buttons all work intermittently, and we were afraid to even try to turn on the oven in case it exploded. Unfortunately, it would have cost more to fix it than it would to get a new stove. And so we have ordered a new stove, which was supposed to be delivered today, but Sears called at the end of our delivery time window to inform us that they actually don't have it. Bastards.

So, our basement is filled with goodness and we anxiously await the new stove. And we all hope that all illness will go away soon!

Very Sick

Update: The triage nurse, after some new symptoms deevloped yesterday, is fairly certain I have salmonella. Joy! Boxer stopped at Walgreen's on the way home from work and got me some Pedialyte, which is surprisingly not horrid. And it seems to be working some. Pains in stomach is not as bad. And I am not living on the toilet, but, man, this is terrible. If this is a mild case, I can't imagine what a bad case is like. Must be like death!

Yours Truly is very sick. So sick that I called the triage nurse yesterday to see if I should go to the ER. Diarrhea, extreme bloating in my stomach, a killer headache, lack of appetite, and such pain in my entire abdomen - pain like I have never felt before, except for maybe after my gastric bypass when they, you know, cut my guts into multiple pieces. The pain was so bad I was thinking not stomach flu or anything mundane like that. I was thinking gall bladder attack, stomach rupture, ovarian cyst rupture, bowel obstruction, stomach stricture, appedicitis, something awful requiring surgery.

Well, the triage nurse, after making some snide comments about my medical knowledge ("Not many people know terms like "abdominal rigidty. Do you spend a lot of time at the doctor's office?"), seemed fairly certain I wasn't having any of those serious problems but she was worried about me becoming dehydrated and recommended I go home, have some flat ginger ale and perhaps some chickie soup, and rest, calling back if I spiked a temp or had any other symptoms indicating that I was, essentially, dying.

So, I managed to get home at 5:30 and went right to the store, thinking I would be home by 6, and so I didn;t leave a message for Boxer as to where I was.

Well, I didn't get home until almost 7 and Boxer was understandably worried, as he knew I was feeling really awful and didn;t think I should have gone into work at all yesterday.

I will admit to being a bad girlfriend, and I made sure to bring my cell with me to work today.

And yes, I am working today. Which is probably stupid. I am feeling better, although I am running a temp of 100.5 (my regular body temp is 97.8), but I can at least walk upright today without hunching over and my stomach doesn't hurt when touched gently. But I have a meeting this morning and 70 letters to get out and a letter of support to write, and then I can go home and rest. Maybe.