ode to pork products

mmm...i could tell as soon as the wind started blowing that it was going to rain hard. as a result, i didn't go outside the entire day. instead, i worked on my thesis all day in my room, watching the rain come pelting down outside. however, carrien had to go to class, and she came back soaked and wanting soup for dinner.

the contents of our fridge, which really wants a washing: one emaciated, very....tanned carrot, one bag of carrots, celery, potatoes, a couple onions, broccoflower and broccoli. huh. you know what would make all of this work? chicken stock! or....bacon...

we'd done a potato-leek soup with bacon and rendered bacon fat a couple times back in the fall, but we decided to do a broccoflower bacon cream soup once keith consented to buy us bacon on his way home. anyway, this soup was pretty standard: render the fat from the bacon, pour some of it off, cook the onion/celery/carrot mixture, add diced potatoes and broccoflower, add some water, and boil. i do very much like to cook with rendered bacon fat, even though it's horrible for your heart. it makes everything taste so wonderful, and it's nice to know that you can use the fat for something. to add more bacon flavor, we steeped the cream in the bacon pieces (de-fatted), then stirred that into the soup after we'd pureed it.

for all of you out there wondering what to do with your weirdly bright green broccoflower, this soup is it. it doesn't require much in the way of ingredients except a bunch of vegetables, cream, and salt, and it's really fantastic. it got the roommate sticker of approval as the "best soup [he'd] ever eaten." also went well with the remaining four cheddar-black pepper scones i'd made last week.

and the red sox won 14-3.

*
by the way, we transplanted the petunia to a bigger pot, and it seems to be doing just fine in its new, roomier environs. doesn't seem to want to contain itself within the pot anymore than it did previously, though.

and a random rant: someone in an archinect.com thread said that he taught himself how to make a website before anyone else was teaching it, with the possible exception of cranbrook and mit. wait, seriously? who teaches web design here? (ok, i taught my students how to use dreamweaver, but it's not the same thing) we're a tech school, not an art school - thus we do things more along the line of inventing the programming language that makes it possible to make webpages. please. get your facts straight.