Soup – Rosemary and the Goat

My Favorite Gumbo

What more is there to say than — GUMBO

I did not grow up eating gumbo. In fact, the only gumbo I ever heard of was Campbell’s Chicken GUMBO soup that my mother used to make her Sloppy Joes. (recipe)

There are so many different kinds of gumbo with different ingredients and ways of preparing it. I like a really dark roux which I make in the microwave. Some use a lighter roux. Some use tomatoes (I do) which is creole version and no tomatoes would be cajun recipes. I love okra in my gumbo and I still use a little file powder at the end of cooking.

Do you put your rice on top or on the bottom? I personally like a shallow pasta type bowl with the rice in the middle and ladle the hot steaming gumbo around the rice. Do you like cornbread (me)? Or, do you like French bread? If it were homemade French bread I’d go for that but not the soft tasteless French breads from the grocery. I don’t think you can beat a good cornbread.

November 20, 2024 By Sherry

Soup

Chicken, Asparagus and Pasta Soup

Soups on!

A good soup recipe is something I’m always up for trying. Growing up I remember delicious stews and chilis but those are really the only soups I remember. My grandmothers chili was great and I always loved how small she could get her ground beef chopped up. She must have stood for an hour making it. My mothers chili started with Chili-O seasoning pack and then she added her own ingredients. Now when it comes to my chili my husband use to say it never tasted the same twice. Over the years the only chili I have been able to make and like is using Wick Fowler’s 2 Alarm Chili seasoning; and of course I like beans and a bunch of other add ons to my chili.

What’s good about making a good chicken soup is that you can add just about any vegetable to it and it will be delicious. Even though we are having a cold front here in my part of Texas right now, Spring isn’t far away and asparagus will be plentiful in the grocery. Of course we can get asparagus years around but something about Spring makes me start thinking of asparagus recipes.

January 22, 2023 By Sherry

Soup

Winter Worthy Clam Chowder

The cold weather is here! Time for soup.

I love cold weather better than hot weather and the reason is I love making soups. After living in Texas for over 30 years now I decided long ago that you can’t wait for it to turn cold to have a reason to make a good belly warming soup; you just have to go for it and if you have to, turn your AC really cold and you will think its one of those winter months that’s begging you to make soup.

There are almost thirty soup recipes posted to this blog so when you are wanting a one pot dinner, take a look at my archives. I’ve been making clam chowder for years. My sister, Terry, and I have always used the same recipe that was suppose to be from a Noah’s Ark restaurant in St. Charles, Missouri. We thought it was easy and a no-brainer of a recipe; all Cambell’s canned soups that we would add clams and a bottle of clam juice. We would use a can of clam chowder, cream of celery, cream of onion, and cream of potato soups and then add some milk and the clams and bottle of juice. Well, it was/is easy but you have all those “canned” not homemade soups. Try it sometime. If you have all these soups in your pantry and you are rushed for dinner some night you can throw this together in a matter of minutes. I also use to add half a stick of butter to the soup pot. It’s good but nothing like a nice homemade pot of soup.

November 25, 2022 By Sherry

Soup

Potato and Leek Soup with Pancetta

Nothing better on a cold winter night.

There’s nothing better on a cold winter night than a warm bowl of soup. Curl up in a blanket and by the time you finish this soup you will feel nice and toasty. Light a fire in the fireplace and you will get there even quicker.

We’ve had some pretty cold days so far this winter in our part of Texas; (we were in the 30’s this morning) and we have not lost any of our plants to a freeze. Usually we lose maybe a fourth of our yard if we have more than 3 days of freezing temperatures in a roll. When the temperatures start to drop, and this time of the year they will go from the 70’s to the 40’s and back every few days, I start looking for a soup to make.

This soup only needs some good saltine crackers. You could do a crusty French or Italian bread; which would be wonderful. But if it is just me and my hub then I will probably throw out a sleeve of saltines and we are happy campers.

My mother use to make potato soup using Coffee Mate as the milk part of the soup. I always loved that soup but when I started making my own I wanted to use something a little healthier than the Coffee Mate. My mother always used potatoes and onions but I think the leeks have a much milder taste than an onion.

January 14, 2019 By Sherry

Soup

Turkey Soup with Rice and Kale

SOUP’S ON!

It’s time to get out those soup pots out, dust them off (if you haven’t already done that) and and start thinking of some delicious, comforting, belly warming soups to eat by a roaring fire. It’s finally cold here in Texas and I’m sure a lot of you have had snow and cold weather for weeks.

Well, here in Texas even in January I might have to turn the air conditioner down to 60 and pretend it is winter outside before I get that comforting feeling from a warm bowl of anything. Not always though, sometimes we do get a few really chili days where I might put on a coat and long pants — just kidding, well, maybe not; my husband seems to wear shorts year around until it is so cold playing golf he has to put on his zip on legs to his shorts to take the chill off. And, just as soon as I wrote this, we started getting freezing temperatures and in just a few days have lost many plants in our back yard. Baby, it’s cold out side fits our neck of the woods right now.

January 13, 2018 By Sherry

Soup

Chicken Egg Drop Soup

Why did the chicken not cross the road?

Why did the chicken not cross the road? Because she knew if she got on the other side, she would be in this pot of soup. Ok, that’s a pretty corny joke.

This may look like the first egg drop soup I posted last January but it isn’t. Recently I made Egg Roll In A Bowl for dinner one night and I did not want to dump the extra ingredients I had left over. I have to look hard to find bean sprouts and when I find them I have to use them within a couple of days so they don’t go bad. So after making that other dish I still had some ground chicken and pork and half a bag of bean sprouts left over and since egg drop soup is my favorite Chinese soup I decided to mess with the other recipe and be a little thrifty.

September 14, 2017 By Sherry

Soup

Tuscan Tortellini Soup

Feel better with some soup!

I love making soup and cool weather or not, if I feel the urge, there may be a pot of something on my stove.

It’s a wonder we don’t stay sick all the time here in Texas. I just took a look at the weather channel for a 30 day plus outlook. Well, our temperatures may be 60’s, 70’s and 80’s for the next three months. We were 80 here just a couple of weeks ago and next week it’s up and down all week. The freezes we had this winter killed about 1/4 of our plants outside even though they were covered. We aren’t used to more than one night below freezing in a row and if we get that the plants start to droop and say “bye bye, make a better choice next time.”

February 27, 2017 By Sherry

Soup

Lobster and Shrimp Bisque

Creamy and delicious with lobster and shrimp.

Don’t you just love creamy soups? I do and until I really started cooking my favorite soup was “canned” Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. Believe it or not I still eat that soup; and one day I’m going to make some homemade cream of mushroom soup and may never eat it from a can again.

I don’t know why some recipes refer to a creamy soup as a bisque instead of just a cream soup because the definition of a bisque is that it’s a smooth, creamy, highly seasoned soup of French origin, classically based on a strained broth of crustaceans.

My friend, Peggy, has been trying to get me to try this recipe for a few years. She got the recipe from her daughter who found it at asweetpeachef.com. I can’t believe it took me so long to try it. I didn’t have the three lobster tails it called for so I used some shrimp in place of the third tail.

January 20, 2017 By Sherry

Soup

Egg Flower Soup

This is such a delicate soup and so pretty.

I’ve told you before how food memories stick in my head and I can recall them years later even decades later. Well, that is the case for this recipe

Back when the kids were all still at home we went skiing in Park City, Utah one year. I don’t know about you but when we have gone skiing everyone is so exhausted when they get off the slopes no one wants to go any place for dinner. After falling my first time out back in the late 80’s and I ended up having to have knee surgery, I gave up on the sport. So I was the bring-along chef on all of our ski trips. I would even pack stuff to make homemade cookies and snow cream for everyone to enjoy. But one night in Park City we decided to go out for Chinese food and we went to this little restaurant and the soup I ordered was called Egg Flower Soup. (Amazing, I just Googled it and the restaurant Park City Chinese and Thai is still in business and serves Egg Flower Soup.)

Over the years I’ve change the recipe I came up with because their soup only had the corn. I added some fresh spinach and carrot threads for color and some finely chopped chicken for added flavor but the thing that makes this soup so cute (if you can possibly call a soup cute) is the sliced baby corn and when they float in the soup they looked like a field of tiny flowers. (I have left out the chicken in this recipe because I like it plain and simple and I think the chicken muddles it up a little too much.)

January 9, 2017 By Sherry

Soup

Tomato and Cauliflower Soup

A delicious combination of vegetables.

I said years ago that after moving to Texas I was tired of waiting for it to turn cold to make soup and decided that whenever the cravings for soup arose (they do often) I would make it whatever the temperature may be outside. Now that our temperatures are edging close to 80° (I hope we still have some cool temperatures left for the Spring.) I’m still trying out some soup recipes that I find interesting.

Last weekend our grandson Thomas came to visit. He won’t be two until May but he is developing some pretty good cooking skills. Recently I saw a video of him at the Kitchen Aid mixer helping mom make some banana bread. The fingers almost got pinched by the paddle but he survived to eat some of that bread. It’s kind of hard watching some of those videos cause I’m saying “watch out he’s getting ready to reach into the mixing bowl with the motor on”. He knows how to make the blade turn slower or faster so I think he is on his way to earning an apron in my kitchen. Of course I would never turn down help from a grandson. We had a pot of gumbo while they were here which was really good on a coolish day.

March 5, 2016 By Sherry

Entree/ Soup

Slow-cooked Chicken Tortilla Soup

Slow down your moving too fast…..

Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones
Looking for fun and feeling groovy
Ba da-da da-da da-da, feeling groovy…..

–Simon and Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feeling’ Groovy)

I woke up one morning before Christmas thinking “why does time seem to go by so fast”. After a little internet search (I knew there had to be an answer there) I came up with two article from Huffington Post.

It’s always bothered me that with a wink of an eye the day is gone, then the week, month, and before you know it, it’s Christmas again. At my age I want to put the brakes on things and enjoy and remember all the things that tend to flash by the window while we are driving/sailing/flying through life.

My goals this year are to slow things down, read a little each day (I don’t read nearly enough) and make a point to not just watch the days drift by. Read these two articles (Why Life Goes By Faster As We Get Older and Simple Mental Trick Can Slow Down Time) and I think it may help you to slow things down a bit.

My word for the year is going to be “slow” or in two words “slow down”. Cooking in a crockpot isn’t exactly what Slow Food Movement had in mind but if you have something simmering away in a crockpot/slow cooker, you will definitely be enjoying those smells and the excitement of anticipating what’s coming out of that pot at the end of the day.

January 25, 2016 By Sherry

Soup

Four Bean Chili

Is it cold enough at your place for chili?

This was going to be my last post of the year but my Asparagus and Shiitake mushroom dish nosed it out and besides it is just now cold enough to make chili here. Christmas day was 80° in our part of Texas but now it’s down in the 40’s (what a difference a couple of week make.).

Thanks Katherine Heigl for your Chili recipe. I love Katherine Heigl. She seems like the most down to earth movie star (do people still say movie star?**) and I have watched every movie she’s been in since she left Grey’s Anatomy. I’ve seen her cooking on several shows recently and this particular day she was on the Today Show making her chili.

Now chili is something I have never been good at making. My family use to say that my chili never tasted the same from one time to the next. In fact, if I want chili now I use Wick Fowler’s Two Alarm Chili mix. My mother always used the little package of Chili-O and I thought her chili was wonderful.

When we lived in Louisville, KY and you were served chili you were asked if you wanted beans or no beans and that’s the first time I had macaroni in my chili — chili-mac and then learned to put out toppings like cooked spaghetti, chopped onions, cheese and chopped fresh tomatoes. Recently I had some chili at a local bar in The Woodlands, no beans; what do you mean NO beans! To me chili without beans just taste like meat and chili sauce. Ya gotta have beans in chili if you ask me.

January 10, 2016 By Sherry

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