Last spring when I had backyard greens to spare, I put up several quarts of “green soup.” And boy, am I glad now. It’s winter. It’s not that cold, but it’s grey and windy and grey — and nothing is growing in my garden and yet, down in the basement freezer, there are quarts of this lovely soup, made with my very own greens. A saving grace.
Green soup is very easy. Wash and chop greens of any variety — most of last springs’ soups were made with a mix of broccoli rabe, komatsuna, spinach, and mustard greens. In a big pot, sauté some chopped onion, and maybe a little garlic and red pepper flakes if you like. Then I like to add some peeled and chopped carrot (for sweetness). Sauté for a few minutes to start them cooking, then add all the greens and sprinkle with salt to taste. Throw in a few peeled and chopped potatoes (for a dutch oven full of soup, I’ll put in 2-3 peeled baking potatoes. You want them for the starch, to thicken the soup up.) Wilt the greens and add either stock or water to cover. Simmer until the potatoes and carrots are very soft, and the greens have cooked through. Then puree with an immersion blender. You can add a little cream if you like, or a dollop of sour cream or yogurt to the soup bowl.
I froze this in quart jars, which made me feel guilty for not eating them all summer, but are now rewarding me with late-winter green goodness. With a slice of toast, this is a perfect lunch.
Chicken feed has been a problem lately. When I first got chickens, I bought regular commercial feed from the feed store where I bought the chickens — they carry the 
— wheat, sunflower seeds and flax (although there seems to be some corn in there too, but that’s probably because I poured the dregs of the regular feed into the scratch when I ran out of feed).
One reason I went into something of a tailspin about chicken feed last week, is because this company actually tells you what the ingredients are. You can’t find a list of actual ingredients on the commercial feed bags — you can find the “Guaranteed Analysis” but not what’s actually in the stuff.
I woke up the day after Christmas and decided that after ten years, I couldn’t stand my kitchen one more day. That it was time. Time to paint the kitchen.
This corner is one of the characteristic weirdnesses of my kitchen. It was originally the closet for the room on the other side, but I had that wall pulled down before I moved in, so that there would be someplace to put the refrigerator. The floor beneath the fridge is really uneven — the vinyl flooring ends and the wood floor from the former closet begins. It’s one of the challenges of replacing the floor in this room. Now this corner looks like this:
This is the Ginormous China Cabinet. I actually love this cabinet — there are two big flour bins on the bottom, one of which perfectly fits a 30 lb bag of dog food. There’s room for everything in here. The downside is that the countertop, which you cant’ really see in this photo, is a very ancient piece of linoleum with a swirly grey pattern. Not only is the pattern ugly, but it always looks dirty.
I thought this project would take three days, and it took six. Everything needed two coats of paint, and to mask that green on the walls, I had to prime them as well. It was as big a pain in the ass as I’d figured it would be — but now it’s done, and I have a nice, clean, cheerful kitchen for only the price of paint, and my time.
While the big dinosaurs were truly impressive, what I liked best were the little ones like these two, posed as they might have been in life. For one thing, these aren’t casts, these are real fossilized bones. The Supersaurus is a cast, mostly because it’s so big that it would be impossible to support the weight of all those fossilized bones. What we both really liked was that in the cases below the Supersaurus were some of the actual fossilized bones, with great signage pointing out the lines that signaled growth plates.
