Stuffed Pepper Soup with Chicken Instead of Beef

When I think of spaghetti squash, I think of my Grandpa Northrup. He had a huge garden covering an acre or two around the edges of a swamp. He used to pay my cousin Jim and me a penny for each potato bug we picked off his plants. We'd show him a jar full of bugs, and I kind of doubt he really counted them all, but he'd get an estimate. I'm pretty sure we got paid, because we did it more than once, and we're weren't chumps. Grandpa also likes to point out that there's this squash that tastes like spaghetti, if you cook it and shred the inside and pour spaghetti sauce over it. The shreds look like noodles. Also good with just some butter, if you like squash.

Spaghetti squash photo by DocteurCosmos from commons.wikimedia.org licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Genericlicense.

Now Jim's wife Ame asked me to write a post about Spaghetti Squash. My first request! I am utterly stoked. And that's going to be a corker of a good post, probably next week.

Tonight I made Stuffed Pepper Soup from a recipe I found on Pinterest. Which doesn't actually host any recipes, it just redirects to other places. You probably knew that. Anyways, you can find it on a site called cookingclassy dot com. That's where the link on Pinterest pointed to. It took forever to load. Maybe it's just my wifi or something. Then when I tried to look at it on a different day, because I first pinned it like three days ago, today it was taking forever. I closed that browser tab and reopened and tried different things. Then it's crusted up with so many pictures and ads that it would load like two pictures, then I couldn't scroll down the screen any more. When I finally got down to the recipe, I was sick of friggin around so I copied the text of the recipe and pasted it into Notepad, then shut down the damn browser tab.

I don't get a lot of ground beef except for chili, because that stuff is expensive compared with chicken and pork. Depending on what cuts you get, you can still get bony chicken for $1 per pound, and bony pork for a buck and a half or two per pound. Beef is like pffeeeewwwww, $3-$4 per pound just for ground beef. What's the kind that everyone says you're supposed to get because it's higher quality or whatever? Ground chuck? I think they used that at Domino's twenty years ago when I worked there. We ran out and I had to pick some up from the grocery store, and the manager said make sure to get ground chuck instead of ground beef or whatever the other is called. Higher quality.

That stuff costs more. But the cheapest stuff is like $3 per pound for a roll that looks like an obscene sausage.

Is there a law in the food service industry that managers have to be assholes? Cuz he was. Not because of the ground chuck thing, I mean because he'd get stressed and throw things, slam the peel on a table. A "peel" is that thing that looks like a giant spatula or a flat shovel for pulling the pizza out of the oven.

So I had some chicken in the freezer, from a big ol' family pack I bought to save money. Why not, I thought, make Stuffed Pepper Soup with Chicken Instead of Beef? And take pictures? For my new blog which is called "Eat My Professional Photographs of Food Blog" which I started today and already I'm doing my second post. Enthusiasm!

Okay, I was half done before I started taking pictures. No big deal. Surely you know what it looks like to dice veggies and sautee them. Cook some chicken. I kinda browned it for ten minutes, then cooked it in two cups of water for like thirty minutes. You should probably only do that for fifteen or twenty, I guess. Make sure it's cooked enough. With a thermometer or something.

Chicken on a plate before I picked it off the bones.

Everything in the pot except for rice and the first few pieces of chicken.

Picking up some of the soup on a spoon makes a more dynamic photograph.

Nice composition here too.

These are honeydew melon seeds that I toasted in a skillet with garam masala.

Not part of the Stuffed Pepper Soup, just something I made a few days ago.

Thought you'd want to see it.

Instead of two cloves of garlic like the recipe calls for, I took like six little cloves. I cut them in tiny pieces in my fingers and put them back into the little bowl where the rest of the cloves are sitting. When I went to toss them in the pot, this one was uncut in there under a layer of minced garlic. Oops.

This is the plate after I picked the chicken bones clean.

Only parts left are some gristle and sinew.

I put the lid back on the pot for thirty minutes like the recipe said to do.

This is the pot of soup as seen from above.

Lens got steamed up on my Coolpad Arise phone from Scratch Wireless.

It's so cheap, you have to download a separate app if you want to block someone.

Oh well.

I realized that my flash wasn't working before, because I have a phone case made for a Motorola or something and it has a hole for the camera lens, but not for the flash. So I took off the case and here you can see the blue reflection from the flash.

Spoons are dynamic. Yum! Tomorrow I'll post a picture of the finished bowl of soup, if I can get my phone to finish sending the damn photograph. Or maybe it's my wifi router, I don't know. Technology is frustrating even when you are Eating My Professional Photographs of Food Blog!

Share and enjoy, please.

Not the food, I mean share this post with other people,

so I'll get on Food Network's Next Blogger or something.

I should start centering all the text on here, shouldn't I?