Cooking and Quilting

I went to the grocery on my way home from eating out with friends last night so I could just stay home today and it worked! I slept til after eight and then I got up and after I ate some breakfast, I made two pots of soup. Some taco soup that I'll be taking to the student center Wednesday night to help feed the college students and pioneer woman's Delicious -- that's with a capital D -- cauliflower soup. My taco soup recipe came from one of my sister's DIL. It's very good. I've made a few changes to it. You can use either chicken or ground beef. I almost always use chicken. It has ranch dip seasoning and taco seasoning in it, rotel, ranch beans (which I'd never heard of til I got this recipe) and corn -- plus whatever else I decide to add - sometimes a can of diced tomatoes and green beans. Oh and chicken broth. Basically just a bunch of cans to open. Easy Peasy.

The cauliflower soup was a little more involved because of some chopping but certainly not real difficult but boy was it good. And I'm not a fan of cauliflower. There is no cheese in it. Just butter, onions, carrot, celery, fresh or dried parsley, cauliflower, milk, half and half, salt, pepper and sour cream.

After cleaning up from my cooking, I piddled around for a while and ordered some thread and fabric from connecting threads and then tried to decide how to quilt my log cabin quilt. I looked at a bunch of quilts on line and i'd had an idea about using a decorative stitch but the quilt is two big to have to keep turning it around. I finally decided on my standby -- free motion. So
I practiced on a scrap of muslin. It looks good on the practice square but when I work with the whole quilt it doesn't look as good. I think it is because my quilting surface is not totally flat and it makes it hard to move the fabric. I have one of those wooden extender tables that makes a larger sewing surface and that raises everything up about three inches. Then I'm sitting in a regular chair at the table so instead of everything being down just above my waist, it is much higher. Among other things, I find myself holding my shoulders real stiff and tight. I'm going to save for a sewing table but I won't get it until I move next summer because I realluy don't have the room to spread it out at this point anyway. Now that I've complained about it, I'll just have to suck it up and make it work so I can get the job done. More practice will definitely help too. Soooo, tomorrow afternoon, I'll do a little more practice and a few more blocks. Have a great rest of the weekend.