I realized that quite a few of my highlights for the weekend revolved around food. There’s nothing wrong with that, right?
Well, let’s get going on this Soup-er Bowl weekend, then, shall we?
Friday:
Might as well kick off this Super Bowl weekend with some super soup, right? My boyfriend made a nice big batch of Butternut Squash soup (using a recipe from America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook). It’s a fan favorite, as we discovered when we hosted a party with multiple soups back at our housewarming a year and a half ago. And it’s such a great soup for those times where you just want to curl up on the couch.
Which is what we did. After seeing an ad for yet another installment of the Die Hard franchise (opening on February 14th, what a romantic Valentine’s Day!), I admitted to my boyfriend that I’d never seen ANY of the movies. So we settled down to watch the first Die Hard movie. Yippee-ki-yay! Can I just say, Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman look like babies in that movie?!
Saturday:
The big event for Saturday was the MIT Club of Boston Annual Ice Skating Party. I look forward to this event every year. It’s usually very well attended by fellow MIT students and Alumni. We get the ice rink at the Johnson Athletic Center on campus for an hour with help from the MIT Figure Skating Club, plus we can stick around for the free-skate afterward. We got in 1.5-2 hours of skating! Lots of fun.
Check out the evidence of fun below. I’m the girl in the brown fleece (you can see my new haircut from last weekend). My friend Jeff is in red, and my boyfriend Aaron is the one in the navy sweatshirt and awesome hat. This is just one of many photos taken by a fellow MIT Alum Clinton Blackburn. You can see some more pictures from the event at his website.
Sunday:
Headed to morning Mass with one of my good friends. Especially enjoyed hearing the Second Reading, the very well-known “Love is Patient, Love is Kind…” reading.
Then I had some baking to do. I was headed to a Super Bowl party later, and I had promised to bring some dessert. So, with an insane number of very ripe bananas tucked away in our freezer, I knew it was time to make banana bread. Two batches. And even though a few of my twitter/blog friends disagreed on my decision to add chocolate chips to the mix, I ended up making 2 dozen chocolate chip banana muffins (plus 14 mini muffins…I had a lot of batter to use!) I used the recipe for the batter from the same ATK Family Cookbook we got the soup recipe from. They have an option for adding chocolate to the bread, where you add slightly less sugar (by 2 Tbsp) then add a heaping half cup of grated bittersweet chocolate to the dry ingredients. In my case I used a half cup of semisweet chocolate morsels. As for the baking time, I had to adjust it for a different pan (they recommend a loaf pan) so I baked the mini muffins for 15-20 minutes and the regular sized muffins for 25-30 minutes.
The results:
And I wasn’t kidding about a Soup-er Bowl! My friend Jeff (the guy in red at the skating party) has hosted a Soup-er Bowl party for watching the Super Bowl for the past few years. He serves up delicious home-made soups that always impress me. This time we enjoyed a hearty chicken noodle soup. So delicious!
Oh yeah, and I guess there was a football game? And a power outage at the game? I guess that happened, too.
What was your favorite part of this weekend? Did you watch the Super Bowl (or the ads)? Stuff yourself with snacks (and then recoup the next day)? What are your favorite recipes to share with family and friends?
Haha, we spent Super Bowl Sunday working on the budget. And then playing with dogs while friends watched the game, time delayed. I wasn’t allowed to mention any of the Twitter updates I’d been seeing, obviously.
How easy were the muffins to make? I’d love the recipe if you can share it. PiC refuses to let me make banana choc chip bread because he has an aversion but since I don’t have a bread pan anyway, that doesn’t matter. Muffins, however…!!
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