I'm way ahead of you all with the soup thing. I made Dutch pea soup the weekend before last, using some ham scraps that my mother had frozen. Also, I made black bean turkey chili with pumpkin a couple weeks ago. But I still have two cans of pumpkin sitting there unused. I really like that stuff as a thickening agent but haven't thought out clearly what I am going to do with it. Maybe pumpkin soup with a gingery or curry flavor to it.
Last night, I put a pork roast in the crockpot, along with a cup of cider and some dried apple rings & golden raisins & other stuff, following a recipe that told me, toward the end it had to be cooked for .... five hours ... in a crockpot. How had I not noticed that part of the recipe until putting it together, figuring we'd be eating it pretty soon afterward? I did this around 4 PM, which is usually more than adequate time for starting dinner. So, since I felt ravenous just two hours later, I ended up driving over to Wegman's, a perfectly wonderful Upstate NY grocery store, to get some takeout dinner: Pako-crusted tilapia with escarole and cannellini beans and garlicky broccoli. We'll have the roast tonight.
Today is markedly overcast. Thus ends our streak of perfect weather following last week's frost. This was our Indian summer, I believe. There are moments when I was able to bask in it, just for a little while, and moments when I looked on at it & felt it was being wasted on me.
Here's a note to myself: If mother starts ostentatiously cleaning in the room where I'm trying to work -- because it's still office hours & I still have work to do -- then I must take my laptop and leave. Because her choice of time & place for cleaning is not an accident, and it's usually motivated by anger. And it's best to get out of her way then. Yesterday I was a little too slow in making my escape to Target & Wegman's.