After much gnashing of teeth and wrestling with HTML and PHP, I've decided to pull up stakes and move the whole circus to Wordpress. Stay tuned as the adventure continues!

This weekend was the first really cold, rainy/snowy, blah weekend of the winter. So I decided some soup was in order. I forgot to start it around noon today (which would have given it enough time to cook on low and be ready for dinner). I could have waited until tomorrow, but I had hamburger that I needed to cook today or toss tomorrow. So, what to do? I didn't think about it until dinnertime....so voila, Instant Crock-Pot Soup.

I started with a recipe from 101 Things to Do with a Slow Cooker by Stephanie Ashcraft and Janet Eyring, and modified it for my own tastes and the ingredients I had onhand (for example, the recipe calls for canned vegetables, but I used frozen.)

This recipe would normall take 4 - 8 hours to cook and I cut that down to 2.5 hours.

"Instant" Beef Vegetable Crock Pot Soup

•  
• 1 Pound Ground Beef (cooked and drained)
• 1 6-oz. Can of Tomato Paste
• 1 Quart Beef Stock (I used Rachel Ray Stock in a Box)
• 1 Cup Mr. & Mrs. T Bloody Mary Mix
• 2 Cups Water
• 1 Teaspoons Beef Buillion Powder
• 1 Tablespoon Butter
• 1/2 Large  Yellow Onion (peeled and diced)
• 1 Large Red Potato (skin-on, diced into 1/2" cubes)
• 1 1-Pound Bag Frozen Mixed Vegetables (diced carrots, green beans, corn & peas)
• 1/2 Teaspoon Dried Basil
• 1/2 Teaspoon Dried Oregano
• 1/4 Teaspoon Fresh-Ground Black Pepper
• Salt to Taste (add at end of cooking)

Cook hamburger in a large stock pot, drain and reserve. Add onions and butter to pot and cook on medium heat until translucent. Turn slow cooker on high heat. Meanwhile, pre-cook diced potatoes in microwave on high until mostly done (about 3 minutes). Stir potatoes halfway through cooking.

Add tomato paste and remaining liquids to pot. Whisk to incorporate tomato paste. Add remaining ingredients, stir. Bring to near boiling. (This is the big time-saver! It takes a crock pot a long time to get cold ingredients up to cooking temperature, so you're giving it a head start on the stove.)

Turn off stove. Using a large ladle, carefully transfer hot soup to the preheated crock pot. Put on the lid. Do not remove lid during cooking.

Cook on high for 2.5 hours. Turn off crock pot. Taste soup and add salt (or more beef boullion powder) to your liking.

Yield: Way too much for one person (about 4 - 6 servings).

I had a bowl for dinner, then froze one-half and put the other half in the fridge for tomorrow. Mmmmm, vegetable soup.  :)

In yesterday's column I rambled on about personal growth work. The bad news about personal growth work is that if you do it right, you never "get done." (That's the good news, too!)

I've cleared up a lot of mental/emotional baggage but I still have some body baggage hanging around. In mid-September I set off to do something about it. I started actually using my gym membership and I started working out with Tony Horton's Power 90 DVD at home. And I've managed to lose 7 pounds and a pants size so far. Woohoo! Go me!  :)  I am amazed, because I've been sick for the past two weeks and have only worked out once, but I'm still shrinking. Life is good.

I really like Power 90. It's definitely a challenging workout, but Tony does a good job of showing you beginner modifications you can do and still get the benefits of working out. I'm still on the Level 1 workouts and they're plenty strenuous. Overall, it's a good system. I would recommend it to somebody who doesn't want to commute back and forth to a gym.

Isn't personal growth fun?

Embarking on a quest for one's soulmate was bound to have its ups and downs. I choose to believe that everything happens for a reason (whether or not that's true, I get good results by pretending it's true.) So every man I meet who turns out not to be "the one," I try to be just as thankful as if he had turned out to be Mr. Right. Sometimes that's hard, but I think it always leads to personal growth and gets you one more step down the path to enlightenment.

I think most people don't undergo personal growth except at gunpoint. Because it's damn hard. It's terrifying to look inside yourself and see a big ball of neuroses staring back. I had a very odd but very valuable experience recently as part of my soulmate search. I met a really handsome, funny, smart, sexy and talented man with a lot to offer. (JP, you can stop reading this now. Please move along...nothing to see here. Seriously, don't read this.)

Anyway, along with all of his amazing attributes was a big ball of neuroses that was remarkably similar to the big ball of neuroses that I used to carry around inside of me. You see, I've been doing personal growth work for about 11 years now. I was lucky enough to hit rock bottom in about 1996/1997 (I don't remember those years, but I'm told they were relatively unremarkable.) And I started on the whole introspection/self-improvement thing because I had no choice. (Well, that's not true...my choice was live or die, and I chose to live.)

I wrestled around in the mud with my demons for several years and managed to turn most of them into harmless shmoos. It was hard work. Incredibly, gutwrenchingly hard work. I was lucky to have the support of some remarkable friends and mentors, and I got past most of the emotional baggage that was keeping me unhappy and isolated.

But meeting this man recently was watching a movie of myself circa 1998. He has SO much going for him, and is amazingly attractive on any number of levels. And yet he has created so many emotional barriers around himself that it's difficult to get anywhere near him. And those defense mechanisms, those barriers, are so very similar to the ones I constructed for myself all those years ago. Unfortunately they made it impossible for us to connect on any kind of meaningful emotional level.

It's rare in life that you get the chance to have clarity about yourself, to have a really objective sense of how you've changed. And this man, although he turns out not to be my soulmate in the romantic sense, is certainly a soulmate in terms of being a survivor. He has given me a mirror that allowed me to see inside  myself and see what I've been able to accomplish in the past 11 years. It's a gift and I appreciate it deeply, although it's very difficult to convey this to him. I really hope that someday, someone will enable him to have the same kind of experience so he understands how profound it is, and how inspiring.

I'm really grateful to have met him and learned from him.

So, the bad news is that my search for my romantic life-partner soulmate goes on. And the good news is that my search for my romantic life-partner soulmate goes on.  :)