Soup's on — sort of

I've been doing more experimenting in the kitchen. Last night I sauteed some onion, green pepper and garlic, then poured in a can of tomato sauce and some diced fresh mushroom (I hate canned mushrooms) and seasoned it with some oregano and basil. That got dumped over some pasta and made a decent meal.

Tonight I dumped a can of tomatoes and a can of mixed vegetables into a pot, added a cup of chicken broth and some more oregano and basil. I ate that with a grilled cheese sandwich.

These experiments don't result in anything that I would serve to anybody else, but my theory is that if I start with edible ingredients, the result will still be edible. I'm taking baby steps, trying to learn how to prepare quick and cheap meals.

I can cook, in that I can follow a simple recipe. I shy away from more complicated recipes, especially those that feature more than two dozen ingredients. I'd like to be one of those people who can throw together a great meal from the most humble ingredients, someone who knows what they're doing. So when I conduct these culinary experiments, I'm intentionally not following anybody else's recipe.

Let's see, where was I?

Wednesday night was our final C2 class. I have now been taught all of the C2 square dance calls. Please notice that this doesn't necessarily indicate that I have learned all of the C2 calls. :-)

Barry and I will embark on a new square dancing schedule. On the second and fourth Monday of each month, Ett calls a C1 dance at the Cherry Hill campground. On the first and third Thursdays, she calls a C2 dance. The second Monday conflicts with my monthly heart circle, but we'll be attending the other dances to brush up our C1 dancing (neither of us danced any C1 over the summer) and to cement our C2 dancing.

Ett seems disappointed that we're not immediately going out to dance to other C2 callers, but my personal feeling is that I'd like to continue getting floor time with a caller that I know before having to deal with anybody else.

However, I did fill in a couple of C2 squares back in May at the Rehoboth fly-in when Mike Jacobs was dancing. Everybody congratulated me on my performance, when I had only been in the class a couple of months or so. So I'm really not that freaked by dancing to other callers. At least not Mike.

I travelled to Virginia Thursday evening to install Doug M.'s DSL kit. No worries. Then we had dinner at Luna in Dupont with Ed B. and came back home, where I helped Doug finish a project for one of his clients. Then bed.

Tuesday I had reinstalled the operating system on Russell's laptop (he was unable to drag any files around, although he could move windows; very strange). Friday he brought it back to me so I could take care of some stuff that I missed, like software that needed to be downloaded and installed.

Today: slept late, lunch with Russell, grocery shopping, angeled at Chesapeake Squares' mainstream square dance class, napped, made dinner.