Soup Night #3

We have a kind of a “winter pattern” about our eating. Often (though not so often as we used to) we buy a full roasting chicken, roast it on Sunday afternoon, then use it for several suppers throughout the week.

The following Sunday we boil the carcass for soup stock, and during the ensuing week we eat chicken soup (adding to the stock: carrots, celery, spices, chicken pieces, brown rice).

Tonight we’ll have Soup Supper Number 3 this week (and tomorrow we’ll likely have Number 4–there seems to be enough remaining stock).

I also used to make batches of hot cereal in the winter—oatmeal or cornmeal—and eat it for a couple of evening meals—especially on cold nights. But this year I’ve done this only once. Don’t know why.

I guess, as the years go on, I’m getting a little ... lazier ... about supper. I now frequently buy a pound of sliced turkey at the store—make sandwiches throughout the week. Or we buy one of those little chickens that the stores now roast. It lasts a few days—and we don’t bother with the bones.

Joyce, by the way, is a big Salad Person and has a sizable one every night—no matter what the entree. So if what I’ve prepared doesn’t appeal to her, she just loads more salad on her plate. And munches in perfect contentment while I slurp cornmeal mush. Or whatever.

Oh, and I always have homemade sourdough bread—lunch and supper.

I’m usually a little more ambitious in the summer—grilling outside. But last summer I found I was getting a little weary of even that. So I “grilled out” last year far fewer times that I’d done during the other summers of our half-century of marriage.

All of this seems to be heading toward a sentence like this one: From now on I’m just going to eat Wheaties.

That would be pretty sad, I know. But I remember my great-grandfather Lanterman, who ran a farm for nearly 90 years in Austintown, Ohio. Near the end of his independent life his default meal was Grape Nuts cereal—with coffee instead of milk in the mix. His favorite drink was Old Overholt Rye Whiskey.

That’s all starting to sound pretty damn good to me!