The Bunny Box

Well hello, there!  I hope you all enjoyed your month of Jewish Holidays.  Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and then Sukkos, and now we're all kind of sick of eating, right? Nah.  Never. But all the same, this Shabbos called for lighter fare and less time in the kitchen, especially since I've had a virus for the past week.  So I decided to keep it REALLY simple and just make a pot of classic chicken soup for dinner. But then, you know me.  I can't just leave it at that.  I had to do SOMETHING interesting with it. While walking through the grocery store contemplating what I'd make, I found myself irked by the price of a chicken these days.  $14?  For a chicken?  That's max 2 meals for us.  But $10 for a 5lb package of frozen ground chicken?  That's a lot more meals.  Bang for your buck, ya know?  So I started formulating ideas. What I landed on was making wontons for the soup.  That idea lasted until I started try...

For a long time, I've been hunting for a simple, slightly sweet butternut squash soup recipe. After hunting for a while, finding recipes with obscure ingredients and trying others that came out too savory or, even worse, too bland, I decided to create my own recipe. I took a look at some of the common ingredients used in these recipes and picked out some of my favorites, throwing in a few of my own along the way. I came up with the recipe below and tried it out tonight. The soup came out just the way I like butternut squash soup to taste. It was just slightly sweet, a little bit savory, warm and creamy. Enjoy! Butternut Squash Soup Yields: about 10 servings (depending on the size of your bowls) Ingredients: 1 tsp olive oil 1 large butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into small chunks 1 large parsnip, peeled and sliced 2 medium size carrots, peeled and sliced 1/2 small onion, diced 2 inch cube of ginger, sliced 1/4 C brown sugar 1 C pineapple juice 4 C water 1 C Sweetened Mi...

I originally started this post last night to be exclusively about the mushroom soup but then I got distracted. Then today, I made the most amazing ginger snap cookies and they overshadowed the soup by a lot, so this is now about cookies, with a side note about the soup. The recipe I used for the cookies is the same one I used in my last ginger snap cookie post (which I'm too lazy to link to, sorry). The recipe is from David Lebovitz's blog . This time, though, I tweaked it to make it a little healthier. I was not expecting these to come out as amazingly as they did. I had been thinking I was making it a little healthier and cutting corners, so I was expecting the cookies to be decent, but nothing special. When I finally bit into one of these perfect, pillowy cookies, I was blown away by the subtle spice, the crunchy "crust" and the chewy, delicious center. These are the perfect cookies. Make them. Now. Perfect Ginger Snap Cookies (adapted from davidlebovitz.c...

This shabbos, I decided we were due for some time at home. So, I decided to make a soup shabbos, for simplicity. I made a huge pot of chicken soup (with kreplach) and some fish for dinner. I have enough of that left over to last quite a while, so I'm going to freeze some of it for later. For lunch, I took the minestrone soup recipe from this post but made a couple changes. First, I halved the recipe, because I needed it to fit in my crockpot. Second, I added some beef. Third, I took out the beans, green beans, and spinach, because I didn't really like them in the original soup. So what I ended up with was a REALLY good, hearty soup. It's perfect for Fall and Winter, and was really quick and easy to throw together. This is a meal soup, not a starter course. Here's the new-ish recipe: Beef Minestrone Soup Ingredients: 1-2 tbsp olive oil 1 clove garlic, chopped 1 small onion OR half of one large onion, diced 1 lb flanken beef, cubed 3 carrots, chunks 2 zucchinis...

I know what you're all thinking (all two of you!). "Two posts in one week?! Is she MAD?!" Yes. I am. But that's neither here nor there. I'm here to talk to you about the single most important food group out there: Soup. I have always been a soup fiend. When I go to restaurants, it's the thing on the menu that usually attracts me the most (and appetizers, my other favorite food group). I've often thought that if I were to go on any kind of diet, it would be a soup diet. In my opinion, there's just nothing more satisfying, more comforting, more spiritually uplifting then a big bowl of hearty soup. Now here's the sad part of my story. I have rarely been successful at soup-making. I can make all kinds of foods and make 'em delicious, but soups are the only things that have seemed to allude me. Whether I was burning the chicken soup because I hadn't yet mastered the concept of "simmering," or making vegetable soup that was ...