Fall Weather Food

While it has been warm for far longer than I had expected, it is finally going to cool down and get into autumn weather. This means I can start cooking food that I wouldn’t early just because I don’t want to heat up my house in hot weather. I am excited because I want to make various soups and bake bread. I really enjoy baking bread and trying out different substitutions. Basically, my choices when cooking get bigger during the cold months. Let me explore that a bit more.

Soup is a cold weather food. While it can be eaten during the summer and hot weather, usually this is not done. When good soup is being made, it takes hours to cook. Generally, you have to boil a soup for a while for the flavors to develop. Proper, from scratch chicken noodle soup, requires long cooking of chicken and then cooking the veggies and eventually putting all the ingredients together. Some people parboil whole chickens while I have a tendency of using bone in/skin on chicken legs. I cook them in a crock-pot for hours on end. I then cook the veggies and put the soup together. It generally takes me one day to cook the chicken and then another day to put the soup together. Mainly because I am too lazy to do it all in one day. The chicken usually sits in the refrigerator overnight so that I can get the ambition to make the soup. Chicken soup is not the only type of soup that I try making during the fall.

Last weekend, I have tried making a copy of the Olive Garden pasta e fagioli. For those who aren’t aware, Olive Garden is an Italian American restaurant chain. Pasta e fagioli is basically a soup with pasta, tomatoes, a couple of types of beans, and some veggies. So I have not yet gotten the hang of cooking pasta in the same pot as everything else. I vaguely know the amount of water I need for making pasta but not so much for soup with pasta in it. Like I said, I tried making soup with pasta in it but I ended up making pasta. Good tasting pasta but pasta nonetheless, which is not what I was going for. Oh well, I am pretty sure that I will have plenty of opportunities to practice making similar soups. I don’t plan on making only soup this fall and winter by the way. I will make other foods as well.

So casseroles are another easy food to make as far as I can tell. Most of them tend to be throwing everything into a casserole dish. Its usually pretty simple but just like soup, it tends to heat up the house quite easily. So there are various versions of casseroles. One that I have created was a version of ham and potato casserole. I say a version because I used a deli meat called honeyloaf. So yeah, not really ham and probably not made from only pigs. Oh well. I had bought it at one point because it was 10/$10. So I had to use it up some how. Either way, the resulting casserole was pretty good. So yeah, casseroles are probably going to be cooked a lot this winter.

Soup and casseroles are the types of foods that I know how to cook relatively easily. I can also bake bread to go with the soup. I am hoping to expand my skills with cooking food. The other food that I know how to make and heat up my house tend to also create a lot of dishes to wash. I try to cook one pot meals so that I don’t have to do a lot of dishes. Blehh…yeah I don’t mind doing dishes I guess but I prefer not having to wash them. Oh well. So basically one pot meals are the goal and now I don’t mind nearly as much if they heat up the house. So what do you like to cook in the fall? Soup? Casseroles? Do you also prefer to cook certain foods in colder weather? If so, what? Please answer below with your comments and thanks for reading.