Friday part 1 - Sick Day Freezer Soup

Friday was a big day, wow. Fridays are the day I don't do any teaching, so it's my day to... you thought I was going to say cook all day, didn't you? Actually no! It's the day I should be practicing all day. Truly, I did get a fair amount of work done at the piano, 3 or (maybe) 4 hours. Could have been worse. But it could also have been better! But you can't cry over spilled milk.

Jenean was so so sick, and though she almost never lets herself stay home sick, she did stay home Friday, thank God. So since you feed a cold (right? and starve a fever?), I made her some stuff.

For breakfast, a soft boiled egg on toast. Only, I didn't read through the whole recipe for soft boiling, and ended up over cooking it. I was "using" a recipe from Cooking for Engineers, but here's a hint for all of us, You Guys - something I struggle with pretty severely myself - when you're making something from a recipe, read the whole recipe first. Like, the WHOLE recipe. Suffice it to say, I over cooked it. Jenean was nice enough not to complain.

Then I went and practiced for a while. Then I made chicken noodle soup (no meat, just broth). We had in the freezer a big tub of chicken stock we made a few weeks ago, and also in the freezer, a zipper bag of collected fresh pasta bits leftover from the three times I've made pasta (Axel F gave me the PASTA ROLLER ATTACHMENT for my kitchenaid for Christmas, I am a lucky girl). I felt foolishly frugal doing it at the time, but when there were small unshapely ends of pasta sheets, I just started throwing them in the bag in the freezer, for a future unknown use. And here it was today! I:

boiled the stock (maybe a quart?),
threw in a diced onion and two sliced up carrots,
added a little crushed red pepper, black pepper, and not quite enough salt (oops),
and when the carrots were soft, I threw in a couple handfuls of the still frozen pasta scraps.
those cooked up fast, got nice and plump and floaty.
I threw in some minced parsley, and it was sick day freezer soup lunch!

I'm gonna stop here - there are a couple more things to tell you about (teaser: soft pretzels and squash sesame noodles!), but it seems like overkill to put it all in one post.