Kitchen Challenge: Soup's On

Sundays are a tough day for me as far as meal planning and cooking is concerned. A lot of our friends plan and enjoy big family dinners on Sunday nights, and while that sounds wonderful to me, it doesn't really work for our family. Tom often works a full day and into the evening on Sundays, so we're hardly ever able to sit down to dinner as a foursome on Sunday nights. And I usually devote Sunday afternoons to cleaning the house and catching up on laundry, which doesn't leave me much time for prepping, making, and serving elaborate Sunday night meals.

I felt the need to make a change to our regular Sunday night menu (leftovers or take-out) though, so I created my own winter soup challenge and committed to making a new soup recipe every Sunday night throughout all of January and February.

Some weeks went more smoothly than others. (It's tough to find the motivation to make soup when it's 84 degrees outside. Or when both of your kids are sick. Or when you realize you forgot to purchase an essential ingredient at the grocery store and have to make a special trip to Kroger so as to not waste the already-purchased and partially cooked ingredients.) Some soups were hits while others were misses. But at the end of the nine weeks, we could all agree that the challenge had been a positive experience for our family. My husband loved trying a new recipe every week. My kids finally accepted soup as a reasonable dinner option. (Previously they were both inexplicably and vehemently opposed to eating soup.) And I ended up with quite a few new soup recipes.

Here's how the challenge went down:
Week 1: Mexican Chicken
Week 2: Chicken and Wild Rice
Week 3: Cheeseburger
Week 4: Beer Cheese
Week 5: Spicy Chicken Corn Chowder
Week 6: Santa Fe
Week 7: Broccoli Cheese
Week 8: Creamy Potato
Week 9: Tomato Basil

Tom's favorite was the Tomato Basil, while my favorite was the Chicken and Wild Rice. You can find these two recipes and recipes for a couple more of our top choices by clicking on the links above.   (The original Tomato Basil recipe can be found here, the original Chicken and Wild Rice recipe came from an old Taste of Home magazine, and I'm sorry to say I can't find the links to the Mexican Chicken and Spicy Chicken Corn Chowder recipes online anymore.)

If you're interested in the recipes for any of the other "hits" ( Beer Cheese and Broccoli Cheese), let me know and I'll update this post to include those recipes as well.

Desserts are up next (and already well underway) on Kitchen Challenge; throughout all of March and April I have been/will be making a new, from-scratch dessert every weekend. If you have any suggestions for recipes I should try, please share them or a link to them in the comments section. Yum!

Happy Halloween (or Cakes, Cakes, and More Cakes)

My mom is a very good cake decorator (while cake decorating is just a hobby for her - she's a nurse by profession - she's placed cakes and gingerbread houses in Madison competitions), so starting with our very first gingerbread houses and her famous Halloween cupcakes she began teaching my sister and I how to turn decorator frosting into art.

Despite my mom's hard work showing me the ropes, I'm not very good at cake decorating. I don't have a very steady hand, and while I can follow a pattern (organized control-freak that I am), I'm not particularly creative or artistic. Additionally, I don't really enjoy the cake decorating process. I'm not very patient (cake decorating takes quite a while as there are usually a lot of steps), there are far too many opportunities for catastrophic error, and the clean-up is insane.

All that being said, I love the feeling of accomplishment that comes with a completely decorated cake (that other people can correctly identify/recognize), and I love creating things that members of my family will appreciate and enjoy.

So while I won't be entering any cake decorating Food Network Challenges any time soon, I will continue to create these mediocre but well-loved cakes and cupcakes for my kids (and maybe my husband, if we can discover a kind of cake he actually likes) until they ask me not to.

In honor of Halloween, here's a pic of my Halloween cupcakes (of which I made six dozen this year) and a trip down my kids' birthday cake memory lane.

Will's 1st Birthday (we hadn't discovered a dairy-free frosting that Will could eat yet, nor could Will eat any candy decorations, so the cake was just train shaped)

Will's 2nd Birthday (Will wanted a train cake again, so we went with the same cake shape and added candy for decoration)

Will's 3rd Birthday (by this point we'd finally figured out which frostings Will could eat and therefore could finally use it on his cakes)

Hallie's 1st Birthday (we chose a cupcake cake for her, but she was afraid of the cake and wouldn't pose with it - enter Will-the-photo-bomber)

Will's 4th Birthday (I nearly had a meltdown during the decorating of this cake, but my mom helped me through)

Hallie's 2nd Birthday (she LOVED this Minnie Mouse cake, which I was particularly proud of because I used a Mickey Mouse cake pan and turned the cake into Minnie on my own)

Will's 5th Birthday (my most recent - and well-received, likely due to the fact that Will's getting older - project)

I'm glad I have a few months until Hallie's 3rd birthday - after Batman and six dozen Halloween cupcakes my Carpel Tunnel Syndrome needs time to recover.

Happy Halloween!