The month of spookiness and soup

Hey everybody, CstM here. I hope you’re all doing amazing.
This has been the month of trying out new recipes, especially soup. Leggy has been my culinary guinea pig. A job I don’t think he minds too much.

Clockwise Potato soup, Shrimp and broccoli with homemade prawn toast, tomato soup, French onion soup and broccoli and cheddar soup

It started out with loaded potato soup, with homemade croutons. That was very delicious, although I still think it’s a slightly over glorified mash with extra steps.
Then we tried out a recipe for Broccoli and cheddar soup. Now I wasn’t really expecting too much from this soup, but dang that thing was so good. Definitely my favourite one so far. Closely followed by the tomato soup. It has roasted tomatoes and garlic in it, plus chipotle paste that gives it a nice kick. The grilled cheese sandwich even had bacon jam, which warms my Danish heart.
The French onion soup wasn’t my absolute favourite. It wasn’t terrible, just not the most amazing either.
Lastly we tried the stir fried broccoli and prawns. That was very delicious. I’d highly recommend that. Was very quick and easy to make.

I got a couple of cross stitches finished for Halloween, so that was pretty neat. I’m working on one last Halloween piece before switching to my pile of Christmas projects.

Now new things are happening. I actually finished the book of the month. I know, it’s a bit of a shock. Who saw that coming?
There will be spoilers of The Pearl coming up, so if you want to keep yourself free of those, please skip this section.
I actually really enjoyed this book. I admit I had a somewhat hard time getting into it at first. It started out very action packed with baby being stung by a scorpion, but it has moments of being quite over descriptive of the nature. Like no one cares about all the different species of fish in the water. Well at least I didn’t.
Then there was Kino and his ability to hear the song of family, the song of the ocean and so on. I’m sure it’s some metaphor or something but it just left me wondering if the guy needed to talk to a doctor or something.
Now the copy I had was 124 pages, now what I didn’t realise was that 40 of them was an extract from one of Steinbeck’s other novels. So I had a massive emotional rollercoaster reading the book. First the joy of finding the pearl, then the outrage at the pearl merchants trying to cheat Kino out of his rightful pearl price, followed by the horror of Kino turning into a bit of a twat, hitting his wife when she tries to free them of the pearl. He really should have listened to his wife. Did he learn nothing from Alien? Granted that is a bit after his time, but still. Listen to the woman!
Then as if it wasn’t dramatic enough Steinbeck throws in a bit of manslaughter and an epic run for safety up in the mountains.
Now at this point, my book till had plenty of pages let. Or so I thought. So I was in a false sense of security, thinking there was plenty of pages left. They still had loads of time to get through the mountains, sell the pearl and live happily ever after. Imagine my surprise and deep feeling of betrayal, when we went from Hey, we’re in the mountains, there’s a nice pond with wild life. It’s really pretty, a scene straight out of Bambi. And then, Bam! dead baby! Like WTF! I was not in anyway what so ever prepared for that. What sort of Game of Thrones moves are you pulling here, Mr Steinbeck. I’m still not over it. Who kills a baby?! Jesus!
So yeah, I love the book but I also kind of hate it.

November is my birthday month, so I figured we’d read the Stephen King book that I’ve been thinking about reading for a few month now. Carrie.
I’ve seen the new version of the film, so I haven an idea of what I’m going into this month. I never saw the original film, but I’ve heard it has John Travolta doing weird things, so sounds like I may have dodged a bullet there.
I hope you guys will join me in the reading and I hope you all had a great Halloween.