Allaire Workshop in Sepia

For more sepia scenes, visit:

Mushroom Barley Soup

Ah, autumn. A wonderful time to review one’s soup recipes.

I originally learned how to make mushroom barley soup from Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook. Here is my current one-pot recipe, which I prepare now by heart without consulting Mollie:

Ingredients

• Mushrooms
• 1 onion
• 1/2 cup barley
• Flavoring: I use a tsp. of miso. You can also use soy sauce and/or 1 tsp. of red wine.
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Water
• Olive oil to cover bottom of pan

Many optional ingredients:

• Root vegetables: chopped carrots, parsnip, and/or turnip
• Garlic clove
• Chopped celery
• Chopped ginger root
• Green leafy vegetables: chopped kale or collards
• Herbs, fresh or dry: dill, oregano, thyme
• Shiitake mushrooms: make the soup all the more healthful and flavorful by using shiitake mushrooms

Preparing the Soup

Saute the chopped onion in a bit of olive oil at the bottom of a large pot. When the onion turns translucent, add the barley. Add more than enough water to cover the barley – about one inch higher in the pot. Cook for about 1/2 hour until the barley is almost tender. Add pepper and salt to taste. Add optional ingredients of carrots, other root vegetables, garlic and celery; add the mushrooms. Pour in one cup more of water. Cook until the vegetables are tender. Add optional kale, dill, other herbs and/or other fast cooking greens. Add soy sauce or miso to give the soup taste. Serve warm.

Coming soon (next week?): a list of soup recipes from around the blogosphere. Also, some suggested soup ingredients. If you have a favorite soup recipe that is on a blog, feel free to leave the link in the comments (thanks to Mrs. S., who last week did just that).

Should Women Vote?

The actors played their roles with great oomph and and in an impromptu fashion – they talked directly to the audience (there was no stage, and we were part of the show). The boy on the right was handing out blue ballots for his party, and he handed them only to the men in our party (my husband and a friend), but not to the women. I joked that I could influence my husband’s vote by telling him for whom to vote. My daughter and her friend, however, wanted the pink ballot party to win, no matter what the agenda, so they kept sneaking into the building to cast ballots for the pink party. They succeeded once or twice, but they also got caught and got a good “scolding” – all in good fun.

I wasn’t allowed to photograph the insides of the Allaire Village buildings – too bad, there was a lot of good history. We took the short train ride near the village at the end of our day. I’ll post the train another day, but here’s a great ghoulish guy at the train stop. He’s just there around Halloween time, have no fear.

For more photos with a little red or a lot of red, visit Ruby Tuesday:

Look and Tell Drawing

Welcome back to another round of What Do You See? Here is a drawing my daughter did on Thursday, and with her permission, I ask you, what’s in the drawing?

Have fun with this.

Review with Autumn Leaves

On My Blog

Famous Journeys – Thanks to all who participated.

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere

• Some fall foliage favorites: Ellie Vellie, EG Wow!, Rambling Woods, Carletta
• Can someone remind me to put this “sukkah decoration” in JPIX, the Jewish Photobloggers Blog Carnival?
• And I’ve started to put up some posts on my new tech blog, such as this one on 6 Ways to Learn jQuery. Please send your technically-oriented or small business minded friends (or yourself, if you wish to be) to my posts. In general, I’m looking for topic ideas for that blog. I tend to be a perfectionist about what I post, so you may not see me posting often in the beginning, but I’m hoping inspiration will allow me to post at least once a week.