Warming up with Soup

When there's chill in the air the troops ask for soup - warm-your-core-up-soup. And to me, the best way to enjoy soup is under the warm glow of lights - the warm-up-your-skin kind of lights.
The soup du jour, Brussels sprouts and sausage soup.1 lb. brussels sprouts
1/2 lb. andouille sausage - I used some kind of chicken sausage found at Trader Joe's.
1 tsp. olive oil
3 large red potatoes
2 bay leaves - Dan walked to a tree down the street :)
1 tsp. caraway seeds
4 cups chicken broth

1. Trim ends off brussels sprouts, remove any damaged external leaves, and cut in half lengthwise.
Set aside
2. Cut sausage into 1/4 in. thick slices. Put olive oil and sausage in a medium pot over medium heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until sausage is well browned, about 7 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, peel potatoes and cut into roughly 1/2 in pieces.
4. When sausage is browned, add bay leaves and caraway seeds to the pot. Cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add potatoes, broth, and 1 cup water. Bring to a boil. Add brussels sprouts. Partially cover pot and reduce heat to low or medium-low to maintain a steady simmer. Cook soup until potatoes and brussels sprouts are tender, about 15 minutes.
Remove bay leaves and serve soup hot.

With garlic bread and the 4 of us around the table - summing up our week and preparing for the week before us - we enjoyed our warm-your-soul-soup.

Rainy days on Mondays...

No break for soccer players - especially when your school field is an artificial turf.

These photos don't express the joy but I can see it - she's smiling, that Breana...in fact, that all were!

{Breana in the middle wearing all black}
Me? I sought refuge in my vanagon. The vanagon is sweet heaven in the rain - the rain pitter patters on the roof and the space in the middle of the vanagon allows for dumpage of wet clothes without fear of leaving a permanent sopping mess on the floor.

For this hour and a half I had my phone at the ready in case sick-Kaitlin needed anything at home, I had my iTouch playing Anna JiEun Lee's Violin performance of Sarasate's Gigeunerweisen Op.20, No.1 at Carnegie Hall (she was 12) and my most current read "The Horse Whisperer" by Nicolas Evans.

I was absorbed with this book, it certainly is a love story. The love story that gripped me the most was the one that affected Grace & her horse, Pilgrim. Their story was of a trust that was broken, the pain felt to understand it and the process that it took to bring the trust back.

Certain passages stayed with me:

"I guess that's all forever is...just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now."

"There were such moments, he knew, when the world chose thus to reveal itself not, as it might seem, to mock out plight or our irrelevance but simply to affirm, for us and for all life, the very act of being."

And finally,

"Sometimes what seems like surrender isn't surrender at all. It's about what's going on in our hearts. About seeing clearly the way life is and accepting it and being true to it, whatever the pain, because the pain of not being true to it is far, far greater."