chicken soup with stars, garlic breadsticks, chocolate chip cookies
I’ve had a pretty hectic few weeks. Months. I lose track. Work has been reasonably busy, plus I’m volunteering, I’m writing, I’m trying to get any number of other things done. And I have been slacking off on the blog. Last Sunday on Oscar night, I knew I wasn’t going to get through any blog recipes, but I did want to cook. So I turned to some of the 
dishes I can make without using a recipe.
I started with dessert, chocolate chip cookies. I do this one by ear now, loosely basing it on the recipe from the bag. Having it memorized is handy when you buy a bag that doesn’t have a recipe printed on it. Blend flour with salt and baking soda, cream butter with sugars and add eggs 
and vanilla, mix it all together, stir in chips, scoop and bake. I think this was the first batch of standard chocolate chip cookies that I’ve made with the Kitchen Aid. It saves quite a bit of work. I didn’t think to take pictures before baking, but then there’s probably nothing that new to show about chocolate chip cookies.
Once the last of the cookies were in the oven, I washed the mixer bowl and started a simple pizza dough for breadsticks, throwing in a bit of basil and oregano to liven it up. I let the dough rise for an hour, shaped it into twelve sticks, let those rise for about half an hour, then brushed them with garlic butter and baked them for 15 minutes.
Once the breadstick dough was rising I began chopping vegetables for soup, then chopped up some chicken breast, and then began to cook. I sauteed onions in olive oil, added the chicken chunks and browned them, and then began adding items in turn. I follow a sort of loose order, starting with things that either will benefit from close-to-the-pan sauteeing 
(like mushrooms) or need longer cooking (like potato chunks), and adding things until the pot is basically full of vegetables steaming in their own vapors. Finally I add broth, bring it all to a boil, and let it simmer until I’m ready to add the pasta. It’s never quite the same soup twice, but it’s always good.
I wasn’t trying to make a 
complicated meal; I was going for simple, really. Hearty and basic. Comfort food. It still took a fair bit of effort: chopping vegetables, stirring, cooking, and washing dish after dish after dish. I will never have a dishwasher in this apartment; the lease and the building structure ensure that. But some day…
I swear I really did not think 
about the fact that chicken soup with stars would be appropriate for Oscar night until I was ladling it into bowls. Everything was great, and it was nice to be cooking.