Soup (also other delicacies, and a good weekend in general)

Hello, friends (if we're still friends after such a scandalous absence ... sorry ...)

It is Sunday night, and I have had a wonderful weekend. Friday night I played games with friends, (learned how to play Settlers of Caton) then went for a long walk, tested the theory that my shirt glows in the dark (it kind of does), then went to the campus snack shop and helped do a Sudoku puzzle while eating snacks.

Saturday, I went to work, heated up some lunch, went shopping with two friends, did homework (reading "Confessions"), took a nap, packed up a ridiculously long list of stuff into my backpack and a bag, and headed down to a townhouse. For a few days a group of us had been passing around a reply-all email planning a dinner of home-cooked food, and Saturday was the night.

We arrived around 4:30, and started with wrapping potatoes in foil to bake, peeling a squash, shredding cheese, and mixing bread dough. Then we wrapped chicken in bacon, poured sour cream and cream of mushroom soup over it, and put it in to bake. While the dough rose, we fried bacon and chopped onions, mixing crumbled fried bacon and onions to make filling for the turnovers. When the dough was ready, we divided it into 30 pieces and made a 5-person assembly line to roll the dough into little circles, put some filling in, crimp the edges, etc. Those rose again while we took the potatoes out of the oven and peeled the aluminum foil off. The squash meanwhile had been boiling quite nicely, and the chicken was browning. Another friend, who had opted to cook in the dorm (conservation of oven space and all that) arrived with a pan of brownies, and we chopped up a pineapple while waiting for the chicken to finish and the turnovers to bake.

Dinner was served around 6:30, with around 10 of us partaking. The whole pineapple was consumed (not surprising, I suppose), the squash was also all gone (slightly more surprising; I had assumed I would be making something out of leftovers from that), and out of 8 lbs. of chicken, only three pieces were left with some soup. The potatoes were a somewhat different story - I had overestimated how many would be eaten, and there were a good dozen baked potatoes still left when we were all finished eating, along with some diced onion and shredded cheese that had been intended to be toppings. Since we had started with chicken breasts still on the bone and I had cut them off for the dish we made, we also had a platter of chicken bones that still had a good amount of meat on them (the knife was very, very, ad infinitum very dull ... and did not cut closely to the bone well at all ...). We cleaned up, packed everything, and brought it back to my dorm. We then settled in next door (more room, since she doesn't have a roommate) to play Fishbowl (the game with three rounds - clues, charades, one word). With our group, we had obscure history/music/computer science/television show/scientific clues, and it made the game ridiculously hard - and insanely fun! We laughed through 2 sets - (6 rounds). After everyone left, I went down the hall and talked music for a very long time, then got some wonderful sleep.

Today after church and lunch I still had the leftovers to deal with - so I went up to a friend's house to cook the bones down. The rule in the dorm is that if something is on the stove, you have to be in the kitchen - and I had no intention of standing in a kitchen (that has roughly 6 square feet of floor space) for a couple hours! I put the pot of chicken bones on the stove with some water and settled in to read some more of the Confessions. I finished that assignment and started one on the philosophy of Loyalty. At around 4:00, the meat was falling off the bones. I strained the broth out and put it on to cook down a little while I picked the bones apart from the meat - not a quick job, but one I have done many times and that doesn't take all that much thought to do.

After turning the broth off to cool, I chopped the potatoes up into chunks, poured in a can of corn, and added about 2/3 of the chicken (the rest came home with me for sandwiches this week!). By this time the broth had cooled until it had separated, and I skimmed the scum part off the top because I think I heard somewhere that you should do that. Then I poured the broth into the pot, turned it on to heat, and added salt, pepper, and some general seasoning powder that I found in the cupboard up there that smelled like it would go well with chicken soup.

While that pot was heating up, I mixed up some dumplings (adding in the rest of the cheese from last night) and then glopped (blobbed?) the mixture onto the soup, put the lid on, and went back to do some more work. Around 5:30 it was all done; I set the table and we ate delicious thick soup and dumplings. There was also a lot left over, so I put it in a pie plate and left it in the refrigerator as some kind of payment-in-kind for usage of the kitchen. (Perhaps more to the point, I had not remembered to bring anything bring soup back in ... grr, it was delicious soup!)

Cleanup was not difficult, and I made it back to Lambein in time to pass a textbook off to a classmate and help my future roommate practice her singing. I suppose it was all 'last night' now, since we are just past midnight, but that was my weekend - full of good food, amazing friends, and much-needed rest and change of pace from the week. Now it's back to work for the week, after getting some sleep tonight!

I know this post broke precedent in format, but I just wanted to write about the weekend and I hope no one cared. It was a lot of cooking time, but it was done with fabulous people and lots of fun, so there is no reckoning how priceless the memories are. It was certainly my favorite weekend in a very, very long time!

Net blessings = immeasurable; God is so good :-)