For my birthday I got the colossal cookbook 1080 Recipes, which is apparently the Spaniard’s Joy of Cooking. It’s full of perfectly whimsical drawings and ridiculously delicious recipes. There’s a solid 40 pages of just egg recipes. Including: poached eggs with asparagus (oh hey, two of my most favorite things on earth), shirred eggs with mashed potato, and the Spanish omelet/Tortilla Espanola. Other things I’ve been fawning over: garlic soup, galacian stew, PAELLA, potatoes with chorizo and bacon, noodles with crayfish, fried artichokes, green bean salad with foie gras (!!), santiago torte, and cinnamon-heavy Christmas cookies. Oh gawd, am I hungry. Anyway, Sunday I went home for dinner and made minestrone. (Read: Sunday I went to the store and got a bunch of vegetables and Momma made minestrone.) Zucchini, green beans, carrots, butternut squash, tomatoes, onion, celery, leeks, and beans. And sausage, which wasn’t in the recipe, but we’re people who need some meat in our soup. And bow tie pasta. Ok, best vegetable soup ever. A bowl of hot flavorful veggies with bits of spicy sausage and crusty bread to dip in? Oh, yes, please. The squash was surprisingly delightful in the soup. I love the taste of squash, and the texture was just right. Good soup, good soup. And perfect for a poor little person all sore and bruised from trying to learn how to telemark ski, also known as flailing around while doing lunges while sliding down a mountain. (I just needed to complain about it a little more, and what better place than my very own blog.)

My beautiful new chef knife and I (birthday!)

It’s a good five inches thick.

Mmmmm… the very traditional Spanish dish… El Minestrono.

A random picture Dad took that I like a whole lot. So it’s getting blogged. Whoop whoop.

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