What's for supper? Chicken vegetable pasta, and options

Tonight's dinner menu:

Chicken-vegetable sauce, or just vegetable sauce
Pennine

Pita crisps (made in the oven)

Sweet potato hummus

Apples, bananas, oranges

What we had for supper: finish off those packages

Last night's dinner menu:

Ukrainian-style pork dumplings, which look like big tortellini. We got them frozen from the Eurofoods store.

Macaroni and cheese, made with very small farfalle (bowties) that we needed to use up.  I used The Boy's Smack 'n' Cheese recipe that I learned years ago from Coffeemamma, and let it sit to thicken towards the end rather than overcooking the small pasta.

A skillet vegetable mixture of (reheated) butternut squash, red pepper, and corn, heated with honey and water (that is, the end of a honey bottle swished out with water), salt, pepper, margarine, and nutmeg. I thought it would go well with the pork dumplings.

Saturday shopping: snow and the Salvation Army

1.  Weather: wind and snow.  People, this is not right.

2.  We stopped at the Salvation Army thrift store this morning.  Their book section was a mess--they don't even try to organize them, and the prices range from dirt-cheap to outrageous.  Which means you can totally luck out, or come away with nothing.

I guess this was our week to luck out:

The Once and Future King, older Dell paperback

The Writer in the Garden
Carrots Love Tomatoes, by Louise Riotte
Roses Love Garlic, by Louise Riotte

Picture books:
Enchantment in the Garden, by Shirley Hughes
Hattie and the Wild Waves, by Barbara Cooney

Handel Classic Hits CD
Chrissa Stands Strong, an American Girl DVD (for Dollygirl)

A sweater for Ponytails
A top for Mama Squirrel

Chef Earl's Soup (and Ruby Red Rutabagas)

[Reposted from October 2006, for the Diet Edition Recipe Carnival, and because I am going to make a big potful of this tomorrow.]

In February 2003, Canadian Living Magazine published a story about chef Earl Johnson's way-better-than-your-average-cafeteria-food at Gordon Bell High School in Winnipeg. They followed up that October (after many requests) with some of his recipes. We've been making his Potage Paysanne ever since, on cold days and when we can manage to get turnip (we use rutabaga), parsnips, leeks and parsley all in our fridge at the same time. (Sometimes we leave one or the other of those things out.) [Update: when I made this batch, we had a couple of cooked sausages in the fridge, so I sliced those into the soup instead of starting with bacon. It's a very forgiving recipe. Sorry about that if you're looking for a diet recipe, but you know what, you could also leave the bacon and sausage out entirely and just make it a vegetable soup.]

Now Mama Squirrel must be unflinchingly honest: she hates rutabaga. Rutabaga crumble, rutabaga casserole, rutabaga disguised with apples and spices--it's still rutabaga. Rutabaga raw and sliced is tolerable; and Earl's soup makes it taste...well, about as good as you're going to get a rutabaga to taste. We figured if Earl could convince the teenagers in Winnipeg to eat this, it must have something going for it.And it gives us one way to eat our ruby-red rutabagas with a smile.

(I'm not posting the recipe, in case you wondered or missed the link; Canadian Living did it nicer than I can, here.)