Shane is at his studio, Rose and I took it easy tonight. She had sausage and pasta. I had a nice wheatberry salad with roasted zucchini and tomatoes and little cubes of fontina cheese. It would be great over salad greens.

Last night, after dinner, Shane went and got the prosciutto from the fridge and ate it all. I think he might have been feeling meat deprived.

I had him pick up a steak tonight. Shane likes his steak with oven fries, these are our current favorite.

We had a ball of fresh mozzarella in the fridge that needed to be used. I made a ‘casual’ Caprese salad with roasted eggplant to bulk it up a bit, and also because tomatoes are hardly worth eating at this time of year.

It turns out Rose has Strep, not a stomach virus. She’s feeling better but doesn’t have much of an appetite, and is still on pastina soup. Shane is away for a few more days. The moment he got a break in his stomach virus (which may, or may not be Strep), he took off for the biennial, 5 day collage-a-thon, 100 Hours in the Woodshed IV.

I figured I should take advantage of my family’s absence and poor health, and experiment with some recipes. As a mostly vegetarian, sometimes pescetarian, I feel like I should eat eggs a lot. But more often than not, eggs don’t taste good to me. This has been a lifelong thing and I don’t know what makes an egg work for me and what doesn’t, except that most of the time a lot of cheese helps.

Tonight I combined one egg, an ounce of grated cheddar, an ounce of chevre, a tablespoon of half & half, and salt & pepper. I poured them into a greased ramekin and baked them for about 15 minutes at 350. The result was okay, but needs improvement. I wanted them to be creamier and custardier, I think. Perhaps more cream or (gasp) egg?

If you have suggestions, please do leave them in the comments section. Thanks!

When my 5-year old, who has barely eaten in the past 48 hours, asked for “orange soup,” I was thrilled. I wondered which orange soup she wanted. Was it squash? Carrot ginger? I was also confused, because I don’t recall her tasting even one, of the many orange soups I’ve made in her lifetime.

With a bit more probing she revealed that she wanted “you know, the kind of orange soup with abc’s in it.” And it hit me that she was asking for soup from a can, that reddish-orange goopy stuff, with the extremely mushy, over-cooked, alphabet pasta in it.

If you’re wondering how she would even know about canned alphabet soup, I wondered too. The answer can only be my mother-in-law.

Highly-processed food didn’t exactly seem like the most nourishing thing I could put in my sick kid’s empty stomach. My solution was to make it from scratch. It was simple, good, and best of all, she liked it.

• Canned Soup from Scratch •
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 yellow bell peppers, roasted, seeded and peeled
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 cup pureed San Marzano tomatoes
3 cups broth (I used vegetable, you could use chicken)
salt to taste
2 teaspoons sugar or honey (optional)
1/2 cup stars pastina

Roast two yellow peppers in the oven. While the peppers are roasting, sautee a small, finely chopped onion in two tablespoons of butter until soft and translucent. When the peppers are done, let them cool, then seed and peel them them and add them to the onions with the San Marzano tomatoes. Add 3 cups of broth, bring to a boil and cook for a few minutes. Puree soup using a hand-held (immersion) blender until smooth. Taste for seasoning, add salt and if it’s a little to acidic, you can add some sugar or honey. (I find that the San Marzano tomatoes vary in sweetness from can to can, so sometimes you need a little sugar or honey, and sometimes you don’t.) Bring broth to a simmer and add pastina and simmer until cooked. You’re done.

Leftover farro pie (which reheats quite well) and salad.