Soup!

from Orangette

I'm in a real soup mode. It's very snowy here today, and this is our 4th fairly good-sized snow in a month. There is really no kitchen aroma that beats simmering soup on a cold winter's day. Ever since we had Schi at our favorite local bistro the other night we've been researching and cooking soup. Schi is a Russian soup made with bacon, carrots, cabbage, tomato and venison. Well, really , there are all kinds of Schi. I think it means soup in Russian. There are lots of pretty food blogs with posts about soup...so I thought I'd share some. The above photo is from Orangette, a food blog most people probably already know and love, but I liked the recipe for split-pea soup featured a few posts in from the top. I made yellow split-pea soup with ham, pretty much the same recipe, but using yellow (more mellow) split-peas instead of green. It was sooooo good.

the yellow split-pea soup I made

Then I found Hearth Bird, a nice food blog that had this terrific looking Russian sour cabbage soup. 

Hearth Bird

I think if you want to really research soup recipes, go to Seriously Soupy a blog that has this wonderful looking Ribollita. 

from Seriously Soupy

And, I just read that it is National Soup Month! So get into your kitchen and make some soup. I hope you have a cute kitchen assistant like I do.

Scratching

I've been doing what Twyla Tharp (in her book "The Creative Habit") calls scratching. Tharp suggests this form of investigation as important food for anyone at the beginning of a new creative endeavor. I became interested in the work of Judy Pfaff after watching an Art21 documentary on her. The above photos are of one of her installations and a drawing piece. The thing I admire most about Pfaff is her unified voice across her wide use of many mediums. She creates installations that look like drawings, and drawings that look like installations. Since my biggest focusing goal for this year is to be more "all of a piece", I think I can learn from looking at Pfaff's work.