Oktoberfest Soup

I remembered to bring my lunch bag to work yesterday – can I get a woop woop!   First I made my breakfast – my spinach, ham and cheese omelet with cranberry nut toast on the side.  I bought six slices of that bread at Mariano’s for $1.25 – so good!

While my omelet was cooking in the microwave, I pulled out all the ingredients I thought would work in a crock pot soup.  I had two things going for me.  1.  I had smoked Polish sausage, which was fully cooked.  2.  I brought a container of German potato salad – also fully cooked so I didn’t have to worry about crunchy potatoes at lunch time.

The lineup:  16 ounces of smoked polish sausage, 1/3 of a jar of sauerkraut, with juice, a 32 ounce container of chicken broth, 2 carrots shredded and the 16 ounce container of German potato salad.  I don’t know if you can read it, but the potato salad only cost $1.39!

Some might think it is odd that I make a crock pot soup at work, but you know what?  It worked!  I am already thinking of other things I can put together that would be ready by lunch time.   I started by dicing up the sausage.  Then threw everything in the pot except the carrots, and at the end shredded the carrots over the top of the crock pot, making sure they were submerged under the chicken broth so they would cook a bit in the few hours they would be in the crock pot.   And, of course, I do have my pantry at work of spices.  I usually have crushed red pepper, cayenne pepper, and a pepper mill.

After the soup cooked for about 90 minutes, I took a taste.  I used Bavarian sauerkraut – a favorite of my Dad’s and the soup was a bit too much on the sweet side for me, so I added just a pinch of cayenne pepper to bring it around.  I loved how you could taste the smokiness of the broth, and you could really taste the smokiness of the sausage in the broth too.  So while this was cooking away, Hannah called and said she wanted to meet up for lunch – well, I never say no to that!   Only one tiny problem.  The traffic sucked ass from her house to my office, and it got to be so late that I had to take a rain check – it would have been nearly 2:30 when we started to each lunch and that’s just a bit late for me.  So I did end up eating the soup for lunch after all!

This kind of reminds me of a peasant soup – so simple, yet somehow the flavors were complex with whatever seasoning was on the German potato salad (most likely Dijon mustard), the smokiness of the sausage, the sweetness of the sauerkraut, the punch of just a bit of heat from the cayenne and I liked that the carrots still had a bit of a crunchy bite to them.  Courtney, I gave this to your BIL, and he gave it two big thumbs up!

Later in the afternoon, Hannah and her boyfriend did end up making it to my office, but this time to bring me coffee since it was nearly 3:30 in the afternoon – next time we’ll plan a bit better Hannah! And in case you were wondering, Hannah died her hair black again.

After she left I saw this note on my phone.  She always left me notes around the house when she lived at home – and I still have a few where she left them – one on the back door telling me to have a great day, one in the medicine cabinet. 

I came home to some loot!  Although this may mean that I am not a finalist in the Fisher nut recipe contest – or I could have been one of the random 10 people to get her cookbook and some nuts – who knows?

I guess we’ll see on that!  I ended up making taco salad for dinner.  I could have sworn on a stack of bibles that I took a picture of it, but when I downloaded my pictures, it wasn’t there.  Luckily it’s not the first time I’ve had a taco salad on this blog, so here is the look-a-like salad from a couple months ago:

And even without going to the gym thinking I was going to have lunch out – I did pretty good on my steps!  I took lots of extra trips to the copy machine, etc., and it added up!

It’s getting cold outside, and I am not liking it.  It was a balmy 53 degrees when I left the house yesterday morning and by the time I got to work it had dropped nearly 20 degrees.  Boo!  I still refuse to wear a winter coat this early in the season – at most I’ll wear a fleece jacket, but that’s about it.

Alright, we’ve made it to Wednesday already – make it a great day!