Soup and Peter Pan

Today, the time has changed and I am trying to mentally prepare myself for the sun going down at 4:30 (and earlier as we get closer to Christmas). I always considered myself a cloudy/rainy day type girl, mostly because the sun burned me every time I went outside. However, being here has taught me that sun = warmth, and 50 degrees feels a whole lot better with the sun than with wind and rain and clouds. All that being said, the sun was out today, and I enjoyed the warmth flooding into our living room.

But thanks to the cold, dreary days, I have begun to enjoy making my own soup as well. Since I'm still on the job hunt, money is getting tight, and we are needing to be creative with groceries. The usual cheap staples (loaves of cheap wheat bread, rice, oatmeal, beans, pasta) are unacceptable for my Primal Husband. We've started making all kinds of soups because 1) they're warm, 2) they're filling, 3) they're cheap, and 4) leftovies.

I thought I would share our favorite soup recipe with you. It's cheap, it's awesome, and we make it at least once a week.

Chicken Veggie Soup

What You'll Need:

• A whole chicken. You can do chicken breasts, but we've found whole chickens are cheaper. At Morrisons here, after about 6pm, you can get a whole cooked one for half price, which comes out to around £2.50.
• 1-2 tbs of olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 3-4 (or 5 or 6 or more depending on who your husband is) garlic cloves, chopped/minced
• 2-3 sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped into half-inch pieces
• 3-4 carrots, peeled and sliced
• 2 celery stalks, cut in half long ways and sliced
• 2 zucchini/courgettes, cut into little half-moons
• 1 cup or so of fresh green beans, cut into bite size pieces. 
• 2 cans of chopped tomatoes
• Your Favorite Spices, to taste (we use parsley, oregano, sage, salt, and pepper, and sometimes Tony Chacheres' Creole Seasoning if we want it spicy)
• 4 blocks of chicken stock cubes (each yielding 500ml of stock) - so roughly 2000ml stock, or about 8.5 cups. You can do more or less, this just fills up our soup pot. I make them one at a time and add them at different times throughout the process.

What To Do:

• Start out by cooking your chicken in the oven. Whether it's whole or pieces, just cook it however until it's done, shred it, and set it aside. It will be the last thing you add to the soup, so it can be cooking while you start on everything else, and you can shred it while veggies are cooking.
• Cut up your onion and garlic first and add to your soup pot with the olive oil. Turn your stove to a medium temperature and saute the onion and garlic until they are pretty soft, maybe 5-10 minutes. 
• While they saute, prepare the rest of your veggies. I divide them into groups based on how quickly they cook. We usually put beans alone, carrots and sweet potatoes together, and zucchini and celery together. 
• After your onion and garlic are soft, prepare and add 500ml of stock to the pot and throw in your green beans and spices. Bring them to a boil and let the green beans cook almost all the way. This takes forever, so if you don't mind a bit of crunch, you don't have to cook them as long.
• When the beans are soft, add another 500ml of stock and the carrots and sweet potatoes. They will usually take about 5-10 minutes to get soft.
• Next, add the last two batches of stock and the zucchini and celery. They don't take long to cook, and they'll get softer while it simmers.
• At this point, you can add your chicken and tomatoes. Everything will simmer together for 10-15 minutes or so. You can add more spices for flavor and taste test everything along the way. 
• EAT THE SOUP. It's really good with cheese and Becky Michelson's homemade bread. 

Hope this recipe makes enough sense for someone to make it and enjoy it. The whole time I'm cooking it, I'm running around from checking the pot to cutting the veggies to making the stock to shredding the chicken, so I don't really think about what I'm doing. You can add whatever veggies you like or whatever is in season. But we tried it with eggplant once, and that was just weird. Like eating wet Styrofoam pillows.

RANDOM:

Also, a lot of groceries here are super cheap. This particular day, I filled up a big canvas bag with all these groceries and spent £12 and some change. 4 cans of tomatoes, two bags of puffed rice cereal, 2 litres of semi-skimmed milk, ketchup, squeezy honey, 6 sweet potatoes, a bag of onions, 3 courgettes (which is fancy for "zucchini"), 15 free-range eggs, 7 bananas, three bell peppers, 8 breakfast sausages, and a pack of 8 pork chops. I mean, really guys. 

I also wanted everyone to experience this. The following is a picture of a lion stuffed toy that I won in a random box of stuff at the auction last week next to a picture of my parents' cocker spaniel, Nicklaus in a lion costume. I think the resemblance is uncanny.

Lastly, as we approach Halloween, I would like you to see the best costume of all time. Our senior year of college, my friend Emily and I decided to go to Incognito (BCF's unofficial Halloween extravaganza) dressed as Peter Pan and his Shadow. We had identical costumes, except I was black from head to toe. We even had little felt hats with feathers that Emily made with duct tape and hot glue in like 4 minutes! Soooooo great. I followed her around, mimicking everything she did all night. 

I can't believe this was 5 years ago!

She caught me!

Love it. 

Carm

Starting Over

Well, I delayed writing for a few reasons.

The first is that we still don't have internet in our flat. I've spent the hours of 10-3 at Starbucks just about every weekday to get things done that we needed to: Set up internet/phone access, set up electricity and gas in my name, move more money from savings to checking, search for things we need for the flat once we have an income.

We are missing some odd things from this flat. I was told when we were preparing to move (by the lovely Krisi Hillebert!) that "furnished" meant different things to different people and it's really the luck of the draw what you get. I didn't really expect this though. Since nobody has lived in this flat before us, the furnishings are bare minimum. We have two arm chairs in a giant living room. No trash bins, no cookie sheet, no hangers, no DRESSER! CLOTHES ARE EVERYWHERE!! Also, there are no drawers or cabinets in our bathrooms. TOILETRIES ARE EVERYWHERE!

We thought it was pretty ironic that, in our little seminary apartment, we had loads of stuff crammed into it, into every drawer and cabinet and closet, and now, we're in a much bigger place with probably a quarter of the things we had in Crutcher. Just feels empty.

Another reason I delayed in writing was because I was really hoping to start a new blog with a new job. Unfortunately, I didn't get the job that I interviewed for. We are both pretty bummed about it, and we don't really know what to think. We approached everything with the right heart and the right attitude. We praised God for his provision above and beyond our expectations, so it made sense that he would provide us a job above what we were willing to settle for. We were reading James and talking about faith and asking God for what we need. We earnestly asked God for this job, but it didn't come. We spent the weekend asking ourselves so many questions:

Did we not ask enough? (James 4:2)
Did we ask with the wrong attitude? (James 4:3)
Did God not want me to have this job?
Why would God give me this interview for no reason?
Should I have gotten a coffee shop job months ago and quit wasting time?
Am I going to find another job?

We don't really have any answers. We are back to the drawing board. All 18 of the other jobs I applied for have fallen through.

Kind of depressing, I know. I don't want to use my blog to be sad. Just wanted to be informative. I had a lot of other things to write, but none of them really seem pressing or important. Just continue to pray that we find a job that will provide for our needs.

Carm

Character

I want to tell you a little story about this shutter. But first, let me tell you some history about Castle Rowe.

Our flat used to be the schoolhouse for the New Park Preparatory School, which encompassed the whole area around the building, including several buildings and recreational facilities. The school was founded in 1933, with 13 boys. By 1938, they began boarding students and by the 1970s, they admitted girls to the school. Here's a lovely picture of what their school kids looked like in 1983.

There was another school in the area, St. Leonards, that began accepting boys, which made recruiting difficult for New Park. Eventually, in 2005, the two schools merged into one and the few students left at New Park relocated to St. Leonards' campus. This meant the New Park School and all the surrounding buildings were left abandoned... for years.

The whole complex was boarded up, waiting to see what they were going to do with the property and the buildings. The New Part Trust decided to demolish most of the building to build affordable flats in their place. The one building, however, that they weren't going to demolish was the original schoolhouse, which they decided to renovate and turn it into a flat and maisonette to provide affordable housing to families involved in education. From what I've read, there used to be security.  There were gates at the entrance to keep intruders out. But you and I both know that kids will find their way in.

Fortunately (I guess) for the trust, some lovely arsonists took care of the demolition for them. I found a local blog where someone happened to walk up on the fire.

Thank goodness the schoolhouse was spared.

After years of planning and preparing, they began building two apartment complexes on the site along with the renovations of the schoolhouse. They set off with approved building plans with an expected finish date of March 2013. Praise the Lord it wasn't ready then or it probably wouldn't have been available for us when we got here.

Less than two weeks before we were supposed to fly out (and I was in full we-don't-have-anywhere-to-live freak-out mode) we received an email from Martin who saw an advert about our need at his church. He just *happened* to be the chair of the New Park Educational Trust and they just *happened* to have a flat available for us September 1. After some further delays, I'm happy to say we are settling in to our new castle. Still a lot of issues to work out. Caulk the shower to prevent leaking. Get a timer for the boiler. Figure out why the towel radiator in the spare bathroom isn't functioning. Fix the cracks and holes in the living room ceiling.

Fix the shutter in the living room. 

Knowing the story behind the house helps you to understand why I love this little broken shutter. After the schoolhouse was boarded up in 2005, local kids began breaking in and disturbing the property. Somehow, someone made off with the shutters in the living room. (Who steals shutters?) Somehow, they FOUND THEM. Not sure where they were or who took them or what it took to find them, but they got the original shutters and put them back in, and gave em a nice white coat of paint. They are an eyesore to Martin, and he apologizes profusely for them. But I love them and their story.

They are broken. They were lost and found again. They were brought back to where they belong. Whenever I see them, I remember how God delayed the renovation of this house for it to be ready at the exact right moment. I remember how my faith got to such a low point through this whole "moving-to-Scotland, I-am-freaking-out" process as I wasn't able to plan everything so perfectly and I worried through it all.  But God took broken Carmen and put her back where she belongs.

Carm