I really love making different dishes all the time.  I’m not the kind of person who likes to make the same thing over and over again, even if it’s something I like a lot.  Tonight, I tried a soup recipe that I pulled out of one of my Gourmet magazines – Barbecue-Rubbed Scallops and Creamy Sauerkraut Soup.  I was in too much of a time crunch to make my own sauerkraut, not that I would know how, and I couldn’t find sumac but it still turned out to be really delicious.  I did a quick search for sumac substitutes, and the only thing I could find said lemon zest and salt would be a decent stand-in…so that’s what I went with.  Turns out sumac is a Middle Eastern spice, and I’m sure I could find it locally, but I was too exhausted to make the attempt after Christmas shopping for 4 hours yesterday.  I don’t normally care for sauerkraut, and I think it smells awful, but after it’s been cooked in a bit of white wine it’s not so bad.  This is part of my ever-continuing quest to expand my food horizons.  The other thing this soup has in it that makes me happy is bacon.  And heavy cream.  I have started buying Kunzler’s thick-sliced bacon, which comes out of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  It’s the best bacon I have been able to find so far in a grocery store, and shockingly they sell it in our small-town Giant.  My next bacon experiment is to order some from Surry Farms, which raises Berkshire pigs.  There was nothing complicated about this soup, and didn’t really challenge me, but I needed something easy and elegant.  Sydney had Girl Scouts this evening so I didn’t have time to be doing something crazy in the kitchen.  We finished this off with some baby arugula and a decent bottle of white Bordeaux.

I love wine, and would like to figure out the landscape a little bit better, maybe take some classes.  Oh, right, that would be after finishing my cooking classes, re-learning French, finding property in France, and navigating the tricky legal waters that surround a move to a foreign country.  And I didn’t start up on my Rosetta Stone this past weekend like I intended.  I’m thinking that will have to go on my New Year’s resolutions list now.