Coconut Curry Chickpea Soup

We really enjoyed this creamy soup. I didn’t have any red bell peppers, but it was fine to leave it out. I also used beef broth instead of chicken broth. I served this soup with brown rice.

You can find the recipe at:

curry coconut chickpea soup

Horses in the yard

Horse the yard, a photo by sjzwier on Flickr.

A couple weeks ago, we left our front gate open and 3 horses wandered in! Although we live in a rural city, horses are not common. We’ve had cows wander in to eat our grass before, but never horses. I let them stay for a long time just because they were fun to have around.

Monthly Rice Field Photo #5 – April

April Rice Field, a photo by sjzwier on Flickr.

So, I forgot to take a rice field photo for March, but really March looked a lot like February. You didn’t miss much.

Now it’s pretty exciting because the rains have started. It’s not raining everyday and never all day, but just enough to get a some water into this field. People are starting to plant corn in their upland fields.

Monthly Rice Field Photo #4 – February

This photo was taken on February 16th.

Horchata – Mexican Rice and Almond Drink

Mexico has a great tradition of sweet refreshing drinks. My favorites are horchata, tamarindo, and jamaica “ha-mike-ah”. This was my first time making horchata and it turned out well. I’ll probably do it again, but I might cut back on the almonds because they’re hard to get and this recipe takes a lot of them. I also really didn’t enjoy blanching and peeling almonds by hand. Definitely buy blanched almonds if you have the option.

There’s a wide variety of horchata recipes, but you can find the one I used at the Homesick Texan blog. I liked this recipe because it doesn’t use powdered cinnamon or milk. Powdered cinnamon tends to float on top of liquids and adding milk to horchata just doesn’t seem authentic.