Homemade Chicken Soup (Allie never posts!)

So since this blog is titled "allinny" Ginny reminded me that I'm expected to contribute, despite my lack of blogging skills and experience (Ginny, check it out, I'm blogging!). So here's my first contribution, a very delicious chicken soup. I'm a big fan of making soups because they're easy and don't take a lot of time, and you can usually get a lot of meals out of them, as well as a pretty balanced meal all in one dish. I've been wanting to make a chicken soup for a while that involved more than just opening a box of chicken stock and adding vegetables, and I finally did last week. I made a chicken soup with carrots, celery, and onion (a lot of onion, actually). The result was pretty good, although there were some kinks I want to work out the next time. This is what I did:

1) first I made the chicken stock. I'd never done this before and I wasn't following a recipe, but I figured it couldn't be that hard. It wasn't, but it took a long time. So I just boiled two chicken legs (with skin) in a big pot of water, along with half a large spanish onion, sliced into big pieces. Before boiling I cooked the chicken and onions a little bit over medium heat just to get them going. Once the water was boiling, I added 2 stalks of diced celery to it, as well as 1 large bay leaf, although really I think 2 would have been better. Then I boiled the broth covered for about 2 hours.

Once the chicken was falling off the bone, I took it out and removed the meat, discarding the skin and bones. Then I strained the broth and chilled it overnight, and removed the fat solids from the top of the broth the next day.

2) The next part was easy. I heated the broth, adding 1/2 a spanish onion, two celery stalks, and 2 carrots to the soup. The onion was really big, so I ended up with a lot of it in the soup, but I like it that way. Once the vegetables were almost tender I added matzo balls and simmered for about 15-20 minutes before adding the chicken back in. Once the chicken was heated through, I deemed it ready to serve.

The soup was really quite good, although I did have to add some storebought broth to get a better flavor to it. This was probably due to an error in my stock-making proccess, but I'm not sure what that was. I'm going to fiddle around with it and see what happens next time.

Other serving suggestions:
I used matzo balls from a mix, which you can find pretty easily in any grocery store. Leaving the soup plain, without the matzo balls was good too, and I'm sure noodles would be excellent as well. Also, making the soup with chicken breast instead of the legs is a healthier option. I didn't add a lot of spices to the soup, just some salt and pepper during the second cooking time.

Our first bread (and serving suggestion!)

Woohoo, yesterday allie and i made bread for the first time! Again, we used my Martha Stewart book to get the recipe (Olive Oil Loaf) but we had to make a few adjustments because we couldnt find the exact ingredients.

As is pretty typical with our baking, we didnt have all the exact ingredients or equipment, so we just improvise and do our best. The recipe called for bread flour and fresh yeast, but we couldnt find either at the grocery store around the corner so we used whole wheat flour and dry yeast instead. I think that we both prefer it with the whole wheat flour anyway, its nice and brown. Also, we don't have a bread stone to bake on, so we just had to use a regular baking sheet which the bread kind of baked onto and we lost the bottom most layer of our loaf...


making bread is a really long process because you have to mix it, let it rise, fiddle with it, let it rise, etc etc. until its finally ready to bake. Fortunately we had Kings Quest 6 to play (and beat of course) in the waiting periods.

then allll morning i kept dreaming about eating our new bread with some goat cheese and sun dried tomatoes, so i picked some up on my way home from class and it was all i had hoped! first i just had the goat cheese and tomatoes, but then i put a little basil pesto and mixed greens on top too and that was even better!

¡Que rico!

i originally intended for this blog to be a mix of cooking, baking, and knitting but of course once i started it allie and i didnt bake for a week and barely cooked anything interesting. But we've redeemed ourselves in the last two days. woohoo!

Last night for dinner we made "burritos" for dinner and they were delicious. however, i say burritos because i am quite the burrito snob, and i much prefer the Southwest mexican food style, but you really just cant get refried beans, mexican rice, and cheese in a burrito in Boston, at least not that i've ever found. at least not that tastes good. That being said, black beans, vegetables, rice, and (optionally) chicken still taste good wrapped up in a tortilla, and that is what we made last night, and it was really simple and tasty. Here's what we did:

1) chicken: We seasoned it with cumin, mexican chili powder, and red pepper flakes then grilled it up on a George Foreman.

2) veggies: We sautéd red onions, green bell pepper, and red bell pepper and added mexican chili powder, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper.

3) rice: We used brown rice and added lime juice and a teeny bit of zest to the water while it was cooking, and then for the last 5 minutes or so added in some cilantro. The rice, i think was the best part...

Then we just heated up some canned black beans and some tortillas and put it all together (well, i left out the chicken and picked around the red bell peppers, but to each his or her own).


Last but not least i finally got some baking done because everyone in my apartment was having sugar/chocolate withdrawals. I got the recipe from my Martha Stewar'ts Baking Handbook (a.k.a. bible) but turns out the recipe is also on her website and can be found here. So tasty, but in the description she says the recipe has more butter and less brown sugar to make them crispier, i used a little less white sugar and added a little more brown sugar in hopes that they would be a little chewier and i they are definitely chewier than the last time i made them.

Lucha Libre hat

I haven't ever really properly learned how to embroider, but for a while i got really into it and bought several embroidery patterns from Sublime Stitching. I really really like the mexican-themed ones (yay Dominguez) especially the Day of the Dead and Lucha Libre patterns. I embroidered the lucha libre mask on some scrap piece of fabric, then cut it out and appliqued it to the crocheted hat!

For the hat, i used the "anarchy hat" pattern from The Happy Hooker and wool Cascade Yarn 220.

When i was finished i gave the beanie to my brother Matt, who i think wears it sometimes.

All about my Cables

My favorite thing to do in knitting is cable. I dont know, i think it's so much easier than working with multiple colors, but it still looks like you did something really fancy to the layperson (or at least that's what i imagine).

Two christmas's ago for my room's secret santa gift exchange Allie gave me the Vogue Knitting Stitchionary2, which features some 200 cable patterns... i really like it. So, over this last summer i made two scarves with some of the patterns, my favorite of which is a chunky yellow/mustard one, which I like. a lot.



I used two yarns to knit this scarf (you can kind of see the two in the 2nd picture) oh, to clarify i just knit with two yarns at once.

1) The first is from Art Fibers in San Francisco. Its a yarn called Celtic, (extrafine merino wool) Color 1. They sell some of their yarn online, which is cool because i'm in boston now, although i've never seen Celtic up on the website (maybe i just miss it?) but i could email them if i wanted it that badly. Anyway, it's gotten a little fuzzy/pilly, and it gets all over my peacoat, but other than that i love the yarn. It is realllly soft, never even remotely itchy, and very warm, perfect because it was 20° and windy yesterday.

2) you can almost see throughout the scarf another thin, slightly darker yarn. My friend got me a couple balls of yarn when she was in Peru. I think its an alpaca blend of some kind, but i can't really tell you anything else about it. except that i didnt think it would look good with anything until the girl at Art Fibers held it up to the yellow Celtic yarn... maybe it clashes but i really like it.

I think i knit it on US 19 needles, but it could have been US 17... i can't remember.

Either way, its only 13 sts across i think, knitting with chunky yarn goes so quickly, and i think everyone should have a chunky, braid-cable scarf. In fact, for this last christmas i knit another one for Allie in a lavender color (but with a different yarn), AND now my friend Alex is knitting one for herself in a really pretty orange. I don't have pictures of those right now though, so...tough.

First blog post!

So here's the story. My roommate and i have been getting progressively more into baking/knitting/crafting in general, and we talked once about hosting a blog together. Sooo she doesn't know about it yet, but i assume that she will be excited and make posts too. Since i doubt we'll ever really get our own Food Network show on which we can display our many baking/cooking/crafting abilities, we may as well still share them with the world via blogging. Although i fully suspect that only about 5 people will read this...

Also, to be fair, credit should be given to my sister-in-law who has had a crafting blog for awhile now, that i read regularly (Craft Buff)

Anyway, i suppose i'll start with our most recent project which has been baking heart-shaped cookies and making valentines for, well, valentine's day. I know heart shaped cookies aren't incredibly original, but they look really cute, and are tasty!



We tried a few different ways of icing them. Allie made me use the piping bag, which i think would have been more successful if we could have found a smaller tip... she wound up drizzling icing on with a spoon, which looked really cool. I think the only piped ones that came out well are the little ones that have the hearts piped on them.

Also, she did some cool marbled ones, by putting on some blobs of frosting, and dragging the color around with a toothpick end.


More to come! we bake at least once a week... it's bad