It’s O dark thirty and I am sleepless in Tacoma.   Took a long nap yesterday afternoon and retired at 9, so my full complement of sleeping hours are covered, for sure!

 

So, what better way to spend it than slow-cooking some homemade vegetable soup?

 

Got up at about 3 a.m. to put on a crockpot of YUMMY homemade vegetable soup.  Just can’t get enough of my homemade vegetable soup.  I’m hooked on it.

 

If anyone wants to try it, here’s what I do….

 

Ingredients

Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce  (add just enough of this to delight your tastebuds and no more; it has a lot of sodium and sugar in it, so be careful)

Johnny’s Dock seasoning mix (to taste)  or Lawry’s or your usual seasoning mix

One or more baker/russett potatoes  (depending on how much soup you want to make and how much potato you like in your soups)

One or more sweet potatoes  (I get skinny ones so they’re easy to slice and dice)

Celery

Beef or chicken broth (I prefer beef)

sliced or diced water chestnuts

1 package of frozen beef stew (if you want to slow-cook for eight hours; thawed if you want to cook faster and eat sooner)

2 to 3 cups of water

frozen peas

frozen carrots

frozen corn

frozen any other vegetable you love

 

PREP

 

Dig out your slow cooker. Plug it in. Put one carton of broth in it. Set it on LOW for eight hours if you’re cooking frozen beef.

 

Add as much BBQ sauce and seasoning salt as you think your soup will need. (You can add more if the taste isn’t up to par later on, so go easy on these to start.)

 

Cut up the baker potatoes, the sweet potatoes, and the celery into bite size chunks. Put them and the water chestnuts into the slow cooker. Set the timer on your slow cooker for eight hours unless you’re making a small amount. (I usually make enough to last a week and freeze most of it.) My large slow cooker is usually 3/4 full by the time all the ingredients (toward the end of the cooking time) get put into it.

This is how this concoction looks before adding the frozen vegetables

 

When you get to this point, you will see how much water you need to add to the slow cooker to completely cover the items that are in there so far. Add a little more water than necessary because an hour or 90 minutes before the end of the cooking time you will be adding froxen peas, corn, carrots and whatever other vegetables you like into the mix.

 

When the frozen veggies have cooked for an hour (which is shortly before the cooking time ends), taste the liquid to see if you think it needs more BBQ sauce or seasoning salt.  If so, add more.

 

When the cooking is finished,  I usually put lots of ice in my kitchen sink with a little water, ladle out individual servings of soup into plastic cartons, and place the plastic cartons with soup in them into the icy bath. (Keep the icy bath low enough that your soup cartons don’t float in the icy water.) Leave the lids off the plastic cartons until the soup cools sufficiently (usually about 15 minutes) that you can place most of it into your freezer for safe keeping. (If you stir the soup inside the cartons, you can cool them even faster.) When they’re cool enough, pop most of the cartons into your freezer; keep a couple in your fridge.  As you use the ones in your fridge, pull out a frozen one and put it in your fridge  so it will partially thaw (or fully thaw) before you want to eat your next yummy meal.

 

That’s it. Prep time is about 15 minutes. Clean up time is about five minutes. And you have yummy meals for several days, depending on how much soup you make and the storage capacity of your freezer!

 

I can’t get enough of this soup.  Especially this time of year when it’s cold outside. Here is the final image after the frozen vegetables have gone in and cooked sufficiently.

 

 

In Other News…

 

I’m halfway through reading Barbra Streisand’s memoir.  It’s 900+ pages long.  It’s fascinating to read her creativity process, and to understand how she got an unearned reputation for being a “bitch” to anyone who doesn’t understand her process or her perfectionism.

 

I don’t consider her a bitch at all.  I consider her a consummate professional  — a Renaissance woman — which can be terribly intimidating to insecure men, something the entertainment industry and plenty of other industries have plenty of.

 

Most of the people she worked with were equally professional and driven  and considered her a wonderful collaborator.  Those who didn’t were  jealous, insecure, misogynistic or just downright mean-spirited individuals. I’m glad she finally decided to write this book.  I always believed she has been unfairly maligned. As a fellow creative (previously and sometimes still considered female), I’ve had a very small taste of what she has endured, and it’s no fun.

 

I worked with another creative, Ted Crail at the Animal Protection Institute. Half the staff was terrified of him, I think, because he was exacting.  He expected excellence. I adored him, because we were on the same wavelength.  He never disparaged me because he knew I gave everything I had in me as a writer and representative for the Institute!  He was only hard on people who seemed to be there simply to collect a paycheck.

 

He wanted commitment and passion.  He got it from me.

 

That’s what Barbra expected, too.  She didn’t always get it, and when she didn’t, she frequently pushed back and demanded it. Those were earlier times (1970’s -1990’s) when women weren’t respected as much as they are now. (And even now, they aren’t as well respected by most men as they ought to be.)

 

I have loved most of her movies and I have a few of her albums. I look forward to watching some of the movies again after learning what she went through to make them.  Especially YENTL, possibly my favorite of all of them.  What a slog to get that one made.  No studio wanted to do it. It took her 15 years to finally make it happen and it is a masterpiece.

 

She wrote it, too!

 

Yeah, she’s amazing.