Oh NO! They Are Out Of Soup!!!

Prepping the ends of a cabbage
for the "freezer bag".
I had the great fortune of spending most of my summers with my grandmother who was a teenager during the Great Depression. I spent endless summer days with her learning how to plant and weed a garden. I learned how to turn a little bit of flour, water and egg into noodles and pierogi dough and she showed me that the simplest of items could turn into amazingly yummy desserts with just a little elbow grease and love.

These lessons proved to be helpful during my college years, and during the "working in the rat race" years and now, the lessons she taught are coming in hand as the world is experiencing a virus that is halting so much of our lives and what we take for granted.

In the last few days I have read more than a dozen people expressing their nervousness online about the lack of canned goods on the store shelves. In particular, they were stunned by the lack of soups and soup stocks for sale. The cans and boxes had all been purchased leaving the shelves bare and in hearing the panic in their posts I felt maybe it might be useful to share what I learned from gramma.

I will be honest with you, the thought of buying canned soup from a store shelf is a horrid thought to me. Spending hard earned money on boxed stock is a NO GO for this gal. For me, its homemade or nothing.

Ok, I heard a few groans as I mentioned the word, "homemade" in the last paragraph. I know, no one likes to fuss, and anything "homemade" seems to have a fuss about it, but this soup stock isn't fussy, and as we have nothing but time TO fuss, why not give this simple veggie stock recipe a try. Honestly, you already have everything you need to make it. Sadly, you're probably throwing all that you need away.

Huge freezer bag full of veggie
scraps that are ready for boiling.
Big bag of veggie scraps.

Every potato you peel, every carrot you cut the ends off of and every celery end you want to toss, needs to go into a big freezer bag. That freezer bag is then placed in your freezer and every time you peel a carrot for a salad or peel potatoes for dinner all the peelings go into the freezer bag and held till the bag is full. Once that bag is full you can slowly boil all those peelings in a 8 quart pot of water for a few hours which creates a nice veggie stock.

That's it!

Seriously, that is how one makes vegetable stock. After about 2-3 hours of slowly simmering the peelings will be mush, but all the nutrient and taste will be in the now veggie stock. I like to add a little bullion cube (either chicken or beef, but veggie bullion can be added) just to give the stock an added boost of flavor.

After 2-3 hours of slow simmer the veggie peels can be removed and discarded. You'll be left with a delicious vegetable stock base for pretty much any type of soup you'd like to make and an 8 quart pot goes a long way. The liquid can be frozen and used later. From this point, the stock is the base for amazing soups. Add meat, add noodles, add more veggies for a wonderfully full and delicious soup.

So don't waste those peelings. Let them work for you in a delicious and easy veggie stock. If feeling adventurous, save shrimp shells (yep...dont discard those!) or lobster or clam shells in the freezer too and when a bag is full boil those up to make an amazingly homemade seafood stock. From there you can make an amazing bisque!

Did you buy a huge froze turkey cause that's all they had at the store the day you went looking for meat? Bonsai! You not only have enough meat to feed a small army you now have a turkey carcass which will boil down using this method to a simply decadent turkey stock soup. If you are throwing away your carcass after your meal you are seriously missing out on good food.

It all starts with the stock.



8 quart soup pot with colander
works great for making stocks from discarded peelings.

If you feel the stock needs a little "boost"
just add some bullion. One or two is perfect.
Me and my beautiful grandma
on my graduation day from Pratt Institute.

Old School Shoes

Solder wire of varying thickness
can be used for the project.
In preparing this article I realized that it's pretty simple to click a button and instantly buy a set (or several sets) of horseshoes for your model horses in a flash from an online source. Horseshoes aren't all that expensive and I would imagine they come pretty quick with shipping times being spot on these days. But, what if you don't want to wait for an order or more importantly, don't really have the money to buy them or you don't want to spend money on shoes?

This a good time to go old school.

Trace the horse's hoof
on white paper.

Bend the wire around
and onto the traced hoof outline.

Way back in the day we didn't have online sources to buy cool model horse...everything. We had to use whatever our dads or moms or caretakers had lying around in a cellar, work space, or kitchen.

I learned pretty early on that I loved seeing my studs with shoes on their hooves and I snagged a spare roll of my father's solder wire. As a matter of fact, with that worn out "Radio Shack" label on the one pictured here, you can tell Im still using the SAME wire I used as a kid! This stuff is fairly cheap and it goes a long way.

Where do you buy it? Check your local Walmart or Home Depot. Home supply stores will definitely have this item and I like to use the thicker wire and then cut or sand the shape down later.

Using a hammer and a brick
hammer down the wire.
Overall, the process is pretty simple.

1). Trace your horse's hoof shape out on a piece of paper.
2). Bend the wire over the tracings (this will also help you keep track of which shoe goes to which hoof) and cut.
3). Hammer the wire on something very solid like a brick. Do this carefully.

This wire will really flatten! You can see that in the photos, and it may be off-putting to many, but on this Halla custom it doesn't matter that there is excess on the bottom because it won't be seen. Now, if you do have a horse whose leg is raised and the underside of the hoof viewable, you will have to get creative and Dremel shape into the shoe. But, don't let it discourage you, this wire is very soft and it won't take long to get what you want visually.

4). After the shoe is flattened, use a glue such as Crazy Glue or Sinbad glue and adhere the hoof to the shoe. NOW, at this stage I let the shoe rest overnight, or at least for a few hours before Dremeling. If the glue hasn't set the shoe will pop off from the vibration.


The wire hammers easily
and flattens fast.


Glue the flattened shoe onto the
hoof using Crazy Glue or Sinbad
(as pictured).

All four hooves have
very large shoes.

Carefully Dremel the excess down.

Lastly, Dremel away all the excess. You can see I left a lot of excess, but I prefer to work this way so that the shoe is nice and flush against the hoof. Yes, the hoof may get damaged in this process of sanding, but it's easy enough to repaint. Lastly, add some nail heads and shine up the hooves with a gloss medium.

Your horse is now shod.

The end result looks lovely.

Time Warp

I think I went through a time warp. Last post here was from a year ago. How awful. Life has just been busy and my writing adventures have been done in private and quiet without public appearances. The one writing project is a hefty one weighing in at well over 20,000 words. That's a lot to say on paper. This project is also the main reason for me staying away from my blog. My silence probably have left those wondering if I had up and left for good or had gotten swallowed up by the fates. Neither. Ive just been real busy.