Italy, you've done it again. I've heard people talk about Italian Bread Soup before and I've always thought, "How could that be good?" What was I thinking? This is the greatest soup ever! I'll never make my old Tomato Soup recipe again. The parmesan and bread take place of a Grilled Cheese Sandwich and you'll never need a single cracker, if that's your thing. It's thick, it's delicious and it only took me maybe 15 minutes to make. Now the world is just begging me to try this whole "bread salad" thing I've heard about.

What other wonderful things can I say about this soup? It made use of a baguette that's just been sitting half eaten on my counter all week and had dried out to nothing. The torn crust pieces were the best part because it still had a bit of chew to it in the soup. I imagine that would have softened by the time it was to eat leftovers though. If you can somehow get hold of a bunch of baguette end crusts, perhaps by eating a bunch of baguette middles, then I recommend using that. It's also healthy! Tomatoes, garlic, onions and beans are super nutritious. Alright, I'm off to have seconds.

Since the only vegetation I still have in my fridge is bok choy and mixed greens after spilling chicken juice all over the place a couple of days ago, I made another bok choy dish. This one was the best of the lot so far, though still not particularly impressive. Basically, it's just Bok Choy with Sauce and the sauce is just thickened chicken broth with soy sauce. It's salty and thick and much more like something I've actually eaten in a Chinese restaurant.

After the Tea Marbled Devilled Eggs, I wanted to try a few more recipes with tea. The tea recipes don't seem to be turning out nearly as well as all of the coffee ones, which were definitely favorites. Technically this didn't really work out because I ran out of propane on my barbecue and couldn't get it hot enough to fill it full of all that much smoke. The Tea Smoked Chicken was more like grilled 5 spice chicken with a sort of odd smoky flavor that left my tongue a bit numb. I couldn't really eat very much of it at all before throwing it all away. I thought it tasted sort of like a dry licorice spice tea. Here's hoping I get a chance to go grocery shopping soon so I don't have to make a mixed green casserole tomorrow.

One of the last time my mom visited she bought me a Bison Roast from the farmer's market. It's been thawing in the fridge for the last couple of days and tonight I finally cooked it. I didn't really want to do anything too fancy to it, but still do something different than just a simple salt and pepper rub, so I used up a bunch of my herb garden with some mustard and gave it a bit of a crust.

Bison has to be roasted at a comparatively lower temperature than beef; 275 degrees versus 350 degrees. This is what the handbook that came with the roast told me. It's kind of fun getting a cut of meat that comes with its own handbook, even if it most of it is an order form and catalog to buy more meat. The roast was perfectly cooked. It was tender enough that I could cut it with my fork and eat it like butter. The only difference being that I'd rather not just eat butter. The rub made for some flavorful juices as well, which I used to make Yorkshire Pudding.

Yorkshire pudding is typically made with beef drippings, but I don't think it's really that forbidden to substitute in this case. I've actually never made a Yorkshire pudding with beef before. I used to make it somewhat often when I was a vegetarian, just using butter and loading it with carrots and broccoli. I suppose it's sort of a guilty pleasure to me now. I've made this particular recipe quite a few times with much success and it turned out well yet again. I had to use half butter in place of drippings because I didn't have enough. I still found that there was some extra flavor imparted from the roast rub. If you've never had this before, it's a very simple dish to make and a very nice roast accompaniment to take the place of biscuits or bread. The remainder of the plate is filled with some mixed greens with a bit of Ranch Dressing.

The best pasta I've ever had was when Shannon and I stopped at some place in Montreal where Dickens apparently penned the outline of A Tale of Two Cities. They served me some carbonara dish and it was the most delicious thing I've ever tasted. If I could match that in my own kitchen, I'd become fat and Italian. Instead, my pasta skills have waned miserably after low-carbing and I can barely make a pot of spaghetti to save my life.

I have made carbonara a few times in the past, but apparently I've never properly prepared it, since I've always thought it was nothing more than Alfredo Sauce with bacon. This is not so, because true carbonara is prepared with egg yolks and pasta water and not with cream. Now that I know this and have prepared otherwise, I will still continue to cook alfredo with bacon since that just seems so much easier.

My Linguine Carbonara may have failed slightly since I prepared it at 1 in the morning after a few drinks at a birthday party. Shannon and I both agreed it was "just okay". Carbonara and spaghetti appears to be the typical route to go, but since I had linguine in the cupboard and not spaghetti, I went the linguine route. My egg curdled slightly and threw off the sauce and it failed to have any sort of wow factor. Since the ingredients are so simple, I imagine my lack of carbonara skills attribute to the outcome and not the recipe itself. Not using pancetta and substituting it for American smoky bacon probably didn't help much either.

I assisted in a horrible black forest cake yesterday, for the birthday outing I briefly attended tonight. His girlfriend and I spent over 4 hours preparing this thing, only to end up with a lopsided and inedible cake separated by layers of whipped cream that was more like churned butter because it's been so ridiculously hot lately that I couldn't keep things could enough to whip up properly. I've never had a problem with whipped cream before! It was unreal. Anyhow, since I had some whipping cream leftover in the fridge and chocolate shavings we were going to garnish the cake with, I made Strawberries and whipped Cream for dessert tonight. Such a simple, yet delicious dessert.

Previously on A Food Year, I attempted to make Sweet and Sour Pork with poor results. I decided to try a completely different recipe with a mostly different preparation method that was recommended to me back then when I failed. Unfortunately for me, I'd lost that recipe over the months between then and now and I was once again winging an attempt at sweet and sour pork. The only part that I remember is that a slice of cucumber was wrapped around it after cooking, so I went with that.

With the Sweet and Sour Pork Tenderloin the results were much better. I also like the idea of using ketchup to turn the sauce red instead of food coloring, which was what I had in the original recipe which made it more pink than anything. I suppose that tomato paste, vinegar and sugar could be substituted for ketchup with identical results, if you were looking to use up a half used jar of tomato paste or didn't happen to have ketchup for some reason. The sauce nicely combined both sweet and sour and really, that's about all you can hope for when making sweet and sour sauce. My only complaint is that I didn't make my cucumber slice long enough and therefore had much difficulty wrapping it around my pork.

The Stir-Fried Bok Choy was not very good. It was sort of spicy and bitter and bland. Bok choy is a really difficult stand alone vegetable, I find. When thawing chicken in the fridge the even salmonella juices escaped and ran into my vegetable crisper, so I'm at a loss for vegetables right now and likely for the next couple of days. This makes for a difficult stir-fry, unless I'm going to make one of soy sauced apples and bananas.

Beforehand I made Marbled Devilled Eggs. I was reading about marbling eggs using tea a bit ago and had to try it out. It did not work as well as I expected, since most of the marbled pattern ends up on the shells, but you can still see a decorative shading on the outside of the eggs. I can see myself doing this again just for kicks, but it doesn't impart a single bit of flavor on the egg itself. The rest is basically just a devilled egg recipe with sesame seeds and green onions. The sesame seeds really didn't add to it at all, but I thought that they'd look pretty.