OYW: November/December

Hey Donk,

I know this is your month to choose winners and our final project(s) of the year, so I'll just get right down to business with my one and only responsibility: the recipe.

Friends, I don't know if you all have embraced the de-stashing theme here, but I dig it. I am in a constant state of de-stashing something; the garden, my closet, all that crap under the kitchen sink - you name it. If I can't close a drawer or find an earring backing - I start de-stashing.

Clutter BUGS, y'all. You know.

Anyway, since this is our last official ~a long sanctioned trip through the de-stashing machine, I want to do up our recipe right. Which means I want to de-stash the HELL out of my fridge because what with the final harvest from my garden and two weeks of farm share stacked up in the crisper from our out-of-town-ness (more to come on that soon), we RULLY need to do something impressive.

Otherwise, the carrots, they will kill us all.

And get a load of those ugly tomatoes. Ugly but delicious.

Of course, that means soup. There's no better way to get rid of two tons of disparate vegetables, leftover dregs of pasta and HEY! FUN! a random can of beans than to make soup. And I suppose I barely needed a recipe for a soup with vegetables, pasta and beans since that is the magic behind your standard minestrone, but I do like my recipes and so I found one that suited the amount of fucking with it that I was itching to do.

Thankfully The Pioneer Woman doesn't know that I bastardize her recipes to suit my own smoky rendered beef goodness version.

Though, I don't think she'd have too much trouble with that part, given her love for pork and butter and such.

Anyway, this time around I settled on her Roasted Vegetable Minestrone with my own beefy whole wheat twistiness.

Specifically, make her recipe except:

• Sub the random summer squash you have lingering in the fridge for the zucchini she calls for
• Sub the ugly final harvest tomatoes for canned, making sure to get all the juices into the soup
• Sub whole wheat dried pasta shells for plain old pasta
• Add a wedge of frozen rendered smoked beef fat to the final product and stir in around until it's all mingled and melted in with the soup

It ain't pretty and that matters not in the world of DELICIOUS.

 Aside from that, I made it just like Pioneer Woman. Which is to say that I can't leave well enough alone.

Well enough alone isn't my style anyway.

It's super good though - so try it out. And de-stash your fridge and garden and pantry or the nearest grocery store that has all the things you want in your minestrone.

Can I say it? De-stashing never tasted so good? Yeah. I said it.

So, Donk - tell us what we're doing for November and December before we bring to a close this year's sew along.

Which, can you believe? Another year - a  FOURTH YEAR - of ~a longing? That's craziness.

xo
Finny