tomato soup, monkey bread, and snow in south carolina!

well, it's certainly been an interesting few days; full of cooking, baking, and the most surprising amount of snow i ever thought we'd see in coastal south carolina! it all started friday with my decision to just bake or cook whatever i wanted, whether my family liked it or not. i went to publix in the morning to get all the ingredients for making fresh tomato soup, a recipe i found in "the joy of cooking" book that i picked up at the library, very simple with few ingredients. once back home i put everything away and took care of household things before getting started. 

by 11am, i got everything together and started chopping the onion as the recipe called for...here's where the first lesson was learned: onions are smelly and will stink up the entire house. once the onions were chopped & set aside in a bowl for browning, i went to work on preparing the tomatoes only to learn my next lesson: recipes really should be read all the way through before starting. i had not realized that i needed to peel the tomatoes before chopping & seeding them; luckily i hadn't gotten very far in my tomato chopping so it wasn't so hard a lesson to learn. once the 3 pounds of tomato were peeled, chopped, and seeded i learned lesson #3: if the recipe calls for 3lbs of peeled, chopped, and seeded tomatoes, you really have to start with about 6lbs of tomato since peeling, chopping, and seeding them reduces their bulk. so, back to the store i went to pick up 3 more pounds of tomato...really glad that i had started making everything during the day so i wasn't heading out at night or worrying that the store would be closed (although, these days there's always a 24 store open within easy driving distance so i need not be worried about that)!

back from store trip number 2, i went back to peeling, seeding, and chopping the remaining tomatoes. side note, i am now very good at peeling tomatoes, by the way! once that was all done i started putting it all together in the pot like the recipe called for and further stinking up the house, as my husband said. after it all simmered in the pot for about half an hour, i added the spices, and put it into the blender to puree it. it all turned out as well as i would have expected since, really, tomatoes and onions are all that are in the recipe. i can add in some heavy cream to make it creamier, if i so choose.

since the tomato soup took longer than i expected i didn't get the chance to bake anything else, instead i chose to look for a recipe for monkey bread. and while i found tons, they all called for either canned biscuits or bisquick, two items that i did not have and i was pretty much refusing to go back to the store for a 4th time (i went back to publix to pick up some king cakes for luke, but hadn't decided on the monkey bread at that time). i finally found a recipe that was all from scratch using yeast dough and decided that that would be the one to try. it was too late to start so i figured i would start the next morning while the kids played in the snow that had started falling.

the weathermen were calling for snow all day, but i was very skeptical about the amount they were calling for since we rarely see more than a few flurries. but, lo and behold when it started coming down around 6pm it didn't stop until the wee hours of the morning and was sticking nicely to the ground, leaving behind about 5 inches of accumulation our yard when it was over. the kids played in it for a bit in the evening, making a little snowman in the driveway before we called them in. once they woke up on saturday, they were itching to get back out in the snow as soon as they could! so at almost 9am, i bundled them all up and let them have fun in the snow while i got everything together and started for the monkey bread.

and so that this does not turn into a much longer blog, here's a few lessons i learned while making the monkey bread:  

lesson 1: even if the recipe suggests using a paddle attachment on your stand mixture to mix the dough, the dough hook works much better once all the ingredients have been combined for the dough.


lesson 2: yeast dough takes a long time to rise in the winter, in a house that is not heated above 70degrees...i stuck the bowl in the powder room since i was probably the warmest place.


lesson 3: a two quart casserole dish will substitute nicely for a 10inch cake pan.


lesson 6: the oven, not turned on of course, makes a good place for dough to rise as well.


lesson 7: my oven runs extremely hot and therefore baking times really don't matter...they are more of a suggestion.


lesson 8: homemade monkey bread, made completely from scratch, no matter how time consuming it is...is so very yummy and well worth the wait!

ok, so it wasn't exactly a short blog entry today. i learned tons of lessons through the whole thing though, way more than i originally thought! the final lesson being that i should keep to daily blog entries just to keep them short!