"SoupRecipes" news and stories

There are few holiday dishes so polarizing as green bean casserole. If it was part of your usual Yuletide feast growing up, the stuff is sacrosanct and utterly essential to holiday joy. The bulk of it -- the french-cut green beans, cream of mushroom soup and French-fried onion strings -- must come blopping and clattering from cans and be baked in a casserole until it resembles a roiling green bog topped with a dry moss of frizzled onion straws. There are always seconds, and there's hardly ever any left over for a midnight refrigerator picnic.

If you didn't grow up with it skulking on the holiday table, good gravy, does that stuff look ten-foot-pole nasty.

Each week, I link up eight food-related stories and blog posts from the previous week that somehow caught my eye or tickled my fancy (this week, it's mostly sweets, soups and eating on the cheap). Here's the list for this week:

1. One way to save money in the kitchen is to do the processing yourself. Culinate breaks down the difference between cutting up a chicken yourself and buying it pre-skinned and quartered.
2. On Minimally Invasive, Amy uses inexpensive pork necks to make a deeply flavored and warming ragu.
3. For those of you who like lots of mashed potatoes (or applesauce), but don't like the work of peeling, invest in a Peel-A-Meal electric peeler.
4. Need a good, professional way to get your knives sharpened? Try doing it by mail!
5. Orangette serves up a Tomato Soup with Red Onion and Cilantro Stems. Sounds delicious and economical.
6. Deb at Smitten Kitchen makes a batch of Salted Butter Caramel Sauce. There are no words for how good that sounds to me right at the moment.
7. Want to eat less meat and but still eat well? Here are some quick and simple vegetarian dishes to check out.
8. CityMama's Best Split Pea Soup ever has me adding ham hocks and dried peas to my shopping list.