I only had

one trick or treater tonight by the time I got home from work.  Tony only gave out six pieces of candy before I came home.  We were even sitting on our deck, bowl of candy in sight, and people walked right by us!  So since I thought we’d be sitting outside, and I really didn’t feel like cooking tonight, we ordered a pizza!

Yes, I know, I make good homemade pizza, but we did order deep dish, which is something I can’t make.  I ended up having 1 1/2 slices – um, sausage and bacon!

Tony did the grocery shopping today, and got me the ingredients for my Blogger Secret Ingredient recipe – this weeks ingredient is PEARS!  Here is the link to this week’s host: www.itzyskitchen.blogspot.com.

At first I was going to do a baked pear with goat cheese filling with a balsamic glaze, but www.fitnessista.com beat me to it!  So on to plan B!

But we tossed around some ideas and came up with this SO simple soup that I think would be an awesome first course for not only a dinner party, but for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Pear Blue Cheese Soup with Blue Cheese Crostini

• 14.5 ounce chicken broth (can easily be substituted with veggie broth to make vegetarian)
• 2 medium sized pears, peeled and sliced
• 2 ounces blue cheese
• 1.5 ounce pancetta, diced and pan fried (then cooled)
• salt and pepper to taste
• sprinkle of Paprika

Put broth in pot and add sliced pears.  Cook until pears are soft enough to blend with a stick blender – mine took about 10 or 12 minutes.  Remove from heat, stir in blue cheese and add salt, pepper and paprika.

Tony got this squash from the store for a dollar – I think its called delicata squash?  It makes a nice presentation!  Pour soup in squash (or bowl!) and sprinkle fried pancetta and serve with crostini.

For the crostini, I just lightly buttered a piece of french bread, added about .3 ounces of blue cheese and put under the broiler.  This would be a simple make ahead recipe, because you would only need to warm it up to serve.  EDIT:  I forgot to add that this soup is not overly sweet – extremely savory with just a hint of the sweetness from the pears.  We were both pleasantly surprised not having any kind of soup like this before!

pears simmering

After loading the final pics on picasa, I decided I liked two:

So I hope everyone had more trick or treaters than us!  My mom is coming over tomorrow and we are going to our first Christmas craft fair!  Um, I might see some snowmen I just have to have!  See you at breakfast!