Couldn’t help myself. I know that title is totally cringe-inducing. Oh well.

You know I love me some soup – and these nights are begging to be warmed up. It only seems natural to share some of my lessons learned.

I haven’t met a soul who doesn’t enjoy a good baked potato soup. Sour cream, cheddar cheese, and the winner of all additions – bacon. Yum! But one thing I learned this month was that mushroom broth does not make for a good potato soup base. If you’ll note the slightly green tinge my soup has in the picture above…well…yeah. It tasted pretty good, but definitely lacked the presentation points.

If you’re tired of candied sweet potatoes, try a cream of sweet potato soup:

I seasoned mine with sage and rosemary (and plenty of pepper) to create a savory soup that really took me by surprise. I loved it – but would not recommend garnishing with sour cream. There was plenty of cream in the soup without it. I really loved the cheddar and monterey jack cheeses in this – and a dash of cayenne gave a nice kick.

Finally, and I don’t know why I don’t have any pictures of this, but I made my classic chicken and rice soup – the one that’s so hard to do wrong? Well, I figured out the wrong way to do it: skipping the bouillon. We didn’t have any and I was in a rush so…it was the most boring soup I’ve ever made. Obviously I made it work with other seasonings, but that was definitely an eye opener.

I think I could eat soup year round. What are your favorite kinds of soups?

I know we’re almost into February by now, but I thought it was probably time to share my awesome New Year’s Eve story. I think we can safely summarize the night with one word: Food.

I am legitimately afraid I will forget everything we ate that night. This would probably be for the best because we ate a LOT of food. And it just kept getting more ridiculous – but it was all so good!

You might say it all began when Mama Pirates bought every. single. last. bit. of chorizo they had at the store. All of it. Sometimes you just need paella.

It might have escalated when JM requested there be enough burritos to have leftovers. Which, if you’re not familiar with the eating habits of adolescent boys, requires an inordinate amount of burritos.

We might have gone to a whole other level when Mr. and Mrs. B-dub and I felt like making our own sushi.

And we all might have been really excited about PN’s new deep fryer. And there might have been some french fries thrown into the frey – though I did restrain myself from making any hush puppies even though we all wanted them.

It was, in a word, epic.

Doesn’t the Pirate kitchen just make you want to cry a little? I love it.

Did you think that was all the cheese we were putting in the burritos? As if.

Would you believe this is not all of the burritos?

Now let me really blow your mind: They barely lasted past the next day. Not. even. kidding.

Ever wondered how they make tomago? We did some experimenting to see if we could get it right.

Where there’s tomago you know there’s sushi!

I share this blurry picture only to prove we actually did it. I was too excited to eat it to take more than one shot and this one just happened to suck. Oh well – it was too yummy to be worried about taking pictures.

All in all, I’d say we got the year off to a pretty good start.

What did you like best about your New Year’s celebrations? Can you believe this month is almost over already?

Let’s talk about this bread.

I used to work at Great Harvest Bakery when I was in high school. I have so many memories of afternoons spent at the bread store. Fun fact? That’s where I met my prom date.

Anyway, I’ve never had a bad kind of bread from Great Harvest. I’m not necessarily in love with every loaf they produce (Dakota is one example. I can’t handle the seeds), but most of them are to die for.

Lately I’m in love with the Breakfast Blast. Honey Whole Wheat bread with cinnamon chips, dates, and rolled oats. What could be better?

Making it into French toast.

Then taking a tip from Meghann and adding some ricotta and honey and putting it in the toaster oven to let the ricotta get all bubbly.

Oh. my. gosh.

It was every bit as fabulous as I’d hoped – though I definitely wouldn’t add so much honey next time. And I know it looks like there’s a ton of cheese on it, but that’s because it all melted out. It was delicious anyway : )

Do you go through “food phases” like me? What are you loving these days?

I have some words that will change your life completely: Hot Pomegranate Apple Cider with Cinnamon.

It’s a simple treat, really. Get out a pot, pour in cider, add some pomegranate juice, and sprinkle cinnamon on top. Heat it up and enjoy.

I’m not even kidding a little when I tell you this drink may be replacing hot chocolate in my heart. Yes, actually, I am kidding. It already HAS replaced hot chocolate.

If you make this, you will thank yourself. And hopefully me.

Moving on.

I’m still recovering from bronchitis-type death so when my appetite came back today I was pretty happy. And we have about 4 inches of snow outside so I knew exactly what a day like today called for: Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup.

Not just any grilled cheese though – I opted for cheddar and ricotta with pepperoni. You obviously can’t pair that with a classic tomato soup so I went with roasted red pepper and tomato soup.

Here’s the secret step you’ll definitely kick yourself for skipping: I swirled a little sriracha into the soup. And anyone who knows their grilled cheese and tomato soup eating rules knows you have to dip the sandwich in the soup. Definitely just the thing to keep you warm on a frosty winter day!

I can only hope at least one of the neighbors saw me balancing my sandwich plate on the balcony rail. Gotta love it.

My roommate and I celebrated our one month anniversary of living in our new aparment on Tuesday. By which I mean we had ice cream and watched 3 episodes of Hoarders.

I’m excited to put some final touches on the apartment so we can have our housewarming party. By final I definitely mean “semi-final” – I want the place to look finished before we have guests over, but I am the first to admit I will never feel like we’re “done” decorating!

The thing about getting settled into a new place is that it takes some time. When we first started unpacking, I wanted everything to look finished right away. That was pretty much never going to happen. It definitely looked “lived in” but it also looked like two college kids lived there.

Now that we have a real coffee table (instead of a tupperware bin) and some other “grown up” furniture around, the place is starting to look really great. I’m finally comfortable inviting people over – but not quite ready to have a party!

Before I’ll be excited about having guests over there are a few projects I want to tackle – the biggest one being our walls! We have SO much blank wall space still. I love that we have room on our walls for tons of art, and my bedroom walls are almost full of pictures. But we still have a lot of empty wall space and I’d really like to work on that.

The second issue we have is lighting. My roommate and I are going crazy over the lamp situation in our apartment. Most important is the fact that we have lamps right now – we aren’t in darkness. So that’s good. We want to replace our floor lamps with a set of table lamps. Unfortunately, we have had a nightmare of a time trying to find the right table lamps.

Finally, we are still working out the little details. If you know me at all, you know I am all about the details so I’m definitely having some issues with the little things. By little things I mean everything from making sure our spice rack isn’t too close to a heating element to searching for the perfect little table to set by our door so we have a place to put purses and mail to stressing out about the number of tchotckes that are showing up in our house. Oh and we still don’t have a napkin holder.

Still, we are getting closer all the time. The biggest obstacle to making progress? I like coming home at the end of the day and relaxing. There are just not enough weekends in my life!

I’m excited for a brand new year of blogging! I can’t wait to show off some of the things I’ve been cooking up. Here are some of the posts you can look forward to this month:

Food
- Delightful Christmas treats (that may result in a sugar coma)
- Soups, soups, and more soups (does that word look wrong to you yet?)
- How I spent my New Year’s Eve (I’ll give you a hint: eating food)

& Other Pursuits
- A tour of my new apartment
- Planning the 2011 garden
- Housewarming: The plan and the pictures

While I wasn’t blogging often in 2010, I was busy taking pictures so look forward to those coming up this month too.

I mentioned recently that there was an incident requiring its own blog post. This is that post.

Prince Regent wanted one thing for his birthday treat – a cookie cake. I thought for sure that this was something I could handle – after all, chocolate chip cookies are the most basic things to make on the planet.

Well…I thought wrong. Maybe it was because I waited until the middle of the night to start baking and my head wasn’t in the right place. Or maybe, just maybe, even Empresses make mistakes.

When I went to put the dough on a sheet, I realized all of our pizza pans were still at Lady Shutterbug’s house after her birthday party. So I used what we had – the pizza stone. I pushed the dough into a beautiful circular shape, leaving a nice thick margin at the edge of the stone to allow for spreading. The stone went into the oven and I settled in to catch up on my DVR.

Minutes later, Prince Regent arrived in the kitchen.

“Smells…crispy,” he commented. Or something like that. I asked him to peek in the oven, cause it did smell a little like burning. “Ohhhhhh,” he remarked. It took me a few minutes to react, figuring that there was something that had spilled a while ago that was now burning. How wrong I was.

The dough had not only filled in the margin I left, but it had spilled over the edges of the stone and was now ON FIRE in my oven.

Through a series of events that can really only be described as unfortunate, the next thing I knew a fire truck was outside my house, Mama and Papa Shutterbug were pounding on my door, and our house was full of smoke.

However I wasn’t about to let something as simple as a chocolate chip cookie ruin me. Oh, definitely not.

So the next morning, as soon as the smoke was clear, I decided to try again. But this time I had to be prepared – I went to Michael’s and got an enormous cake pan.

And that solved everything. Just like that, making a cookie cake was as easy as I had imagined it would be.

Of course that’s not the end of the story. It would have been far too easy if I had all the tools I needed to finish the project. Naturally I was missing another crucial tool – well, tools. The tips for the piping icing.

And so I ended up just squirting the icing onto the cookie straight out of the tube. It came out looking just about as awesome as you might expect – choppy and uneven. But considering the fact that the cookie cake even existed at all was a miracle, I figured we could handle some choppy icing.

You know, I don’t think the birthday boy even noticed : )

As to what this might be?

Other than a learning experience, I mean : )

Would it surprise anyone to know that I’m already daydreaming about my birthday cake? Granted, we’re only two days out so I can’t really say “already” – it seems like a good enough time to start that for me!

I am a big fan of the birthday treat. Everyone should get something special on their special day! And accomodating everyone’s different tastes and desires has helped me expand my culinary horizons. I might never have started my love affair with pie were it not for P and her birthday pie.  

Anyway, it’s only natural that I be thinking about the kind of cake I want for my own birthday this year. Maybe it’s because I just had breakfast so I’m not hungry – but I really can’t think about cake right now. For me, this is just too weird.

Still, cake is not the only – nor is it even the best – treat out there. Yeah, you heard me. I just admitted that cake is not the best thing. It’s definitely a good thing, but not the best.

What then, however, is the best? I’m not sure I know the answer to that, but I’m scheming away. I don’t even know if I’ll try to come up with “The Best” treat ever for my birthday. Maybe it will just come down to whatever I feel like eating when I wake up on Saturday.  I definitely have a few ideas rolling around in my head.

Do you have a go-to treat you like on special days?

image from wetakethecake.com