Un-Sausage and Potato Soup

Another reason to love winter:  Soup!  I am a big soup gal.  I don't have many soup recipes that I feel I have mastered, but this is the one that I really KNOW how to do and it comes out delicioso!  

Here's what you'll need:

4 cups Chicken Broth (preferably homemade)

2 cups milk

2 tbs butter or 2 tbs beef grease

2 tbs wheat flour

coconut oil

Ground beef - 1/2 pound (preferably grass-fed)

2 large potatoes or 3 medium-sized

1/2 onion

1 head broccoli

dried sage to taste

dried dill (optional) to taste

garlic salt to taste

salt and pepper to taste

As with all recipes, I like to make mine fit our tastes...season until you find it just right, add more or less potato,beef or broccoli...totally up to you.  If you like more broth just do more of the milk mixture.

I don't know all the cooking terms...so bear with me.  Cut up potatoes (cut it in cubes as big or small as you like - just remember the smaller they are the faster they cook and they may get mushy - but again, your preference).  Put them in soup pot with chicken broth and add salt and cook on medium.  While it is cooking,  dice onion (use the food processor if you have one) and saute on medium-low heat for at least 5 minutes.  Then brown your beef and season with garlic salt, sage and pepper.  I like to go heavy on the sage (it gives it a sausage flavor).  If you don't get much fat from the beef, add butter and flour and mix in then add milk and bring to a soft boil, stirring often.  Cut up the broccoli into florets and I don't like to waste the stalks so I cut them up in tiny bits for the extra nutrition and add it to the chicken broth/potato pot.  I like the broccoli to stay al dente so I don't let it stay in long before adding the milk mixture.  Add dried dill or keep it as is.  But taste it and see if you think it needs more sage. Enjoy!

Fat Vultures

We recently started watching Man vs. Wild with the kids...what a fascinating show!  If you've never heard of it, it's about a guy that can be dropped in any environment (Amazon, Antarctic, Rocky Mountains) and can survive in the environments against wild animals, hunger, and life threatening situations.  Antony loves it because the guy is from England...anyone that cool and that happens to be British is a winner in Antony's book!  He's my British Bulldog.  :)  Anyway, in one of the episodes, a zebra had been killed and Bear (the name of the adventurer) was so hungry he was going to go and see if he could make a meal of it... but the vultures had gotten to it first.  You could see them in the background trying to walk up the hills.  He explained that they had eaten of the carcass, the dead,  until they were so full, that they could no longer fly.  When I heard that, it hit me.  I can feast off the dead things in my life:  old hurts, disappointments, regrets, broken dreams, habits, paradigms and failures and they will fill me up enough so that I'll never fly.  The dead things will fill me enough to stop me from reaching my dreams.  I can be filled with life that will lead me to my dreams or I can choose to be filled with dead things that will keep me on the ground, struggling to even just make it up the small hills in life.  Then I began to think about how that relates to my thought life.  During Jesus' ministry, there were times where the Bible says that Jesus answered their thoughts.  Their thoughts were the truest part of what they believed.  They could've acted on the outside as though they believed, they could've said the right things, but it's the heart, the thoughts and intents that God sees and that determines what we truly believe.  As a man thinks he is, that's what he is. (my paraphrase of Proverbs  23:7).

 Just think, it's not the disappointment or regret or hurt or whatever that stops us.  It has already occurred.  It lasted for a specific time.  But it's our thoughts regarding the negative situation that we relive and "eat" from.  Scientfically, it's shown that our thoughts can even cause our physical bodies to react negatively - increase in blood pressure, heart rate, sweating, even disease - all just by thinking something!  It's our thoughts that we have to take captive.  (2 Cor.10:5a We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ).  My thoughts are what goes against the knowledge of who God is.  What He stands for.  If what I think about goes against anything that would come out of God, then those are the thoughts that I must take captive and replace them with the knowledge of who God says He is.  The other day Luke came and told me that Jonathon had done something naughty.  But I knew it was completely out of character for Jonathon to do such a thing that I could NOT even believe Luke.  I briefly entertained the possibility that maybe Jonathon did the wrong action but I quickly disregarded it because I have knowledge of who he is.  I know him and from my knowledge of him, my thoughts dictated only the truth of the situation.  Past failures are speaking through our thought life.  But they are lies when they try to dictate who I am today and go completely against who God says I am now.  If I know Him, if I know what He says, and what He stands for, then I will have no problem differentiating between His truth and the thoughts that say otherwise and try to lift themselves up higher than that truth.

I have called myself unorganized.  I have allowed failures in housework, financial and parental decisions that were a result of a lack of organization keep me unorganized by my believing that I am so.  But God says I am complete in Christ.  That means that I have what I need in me to have a life of order - not chaos.  God did things in order when He created the world...He didn't create man without  first creating all the things man needed to survive.  The King of Order has His Spirit living in me.  So I must reprogram my thoughts with the truth of who I am - the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus!  I am just now beginning to really understand what that means.

So, forget the dead stuff...I've got to fly!