About

Sillisoup is a generalist blog.  As has been my curse all my life, I want to do it all.  I love photography and want to share my photographs.  I love to write as a means to expand, clarify, and express my thinking.  I love cooking, reading about, talking about and sharing food. And I love to get feedback from others on all of the above.  Pretty simple, really, at least in concept.

Origins

It all started, though, with a series of conversations with my daughter about how much fun it would be to have a shared creative outlet for food matters, intergenerational family lore, and other artistic expression. And since all of us love to eat and to talk about and read about food, we thought we’d make a blog called Sausage Soup, named for my family’s signature culinary creation.

Sausage soup the food originated during my childhood when resources were scarce in a family of five children headed by a single mother working as a secretary.  It began as a way to make tasty dishes from meager ingredients.  Its basic ingredients have remained the same over the years and generations, but their quality and quantity have been improved and refined with practice and improved circumstances.  It is now firmly entrenched in family traditions. When I had a family of my own, sausage soup became a staple of our Christmas Eve celebrations.  I’ve never seen it duplicated anywhere else, so cherish its uniqueness.  We’ve shared the recipe with friends over the years, but I like to think that those who make it think of our family while they’re enjoying its comfort and yumminess.

So, I guess you could say that sausage soup is a metaphor for creating something wonderful out of whatever you have.  Take the yummy stuff, the happy stuff, the painful stuff, blend them together with imagination, tweak them, improve them, add to them.  Then share.  Et voila! SausageSoup.

Evolution

As things evolved, the collaborative aspect of the blog never really materialized.  Also, since Sausage Soup as a WordPress address was not available at the time I began the blog, the name gradually morphed into sillisoup, a combination of  part of my last name with the original title and intent. [The adjectival meaning implied in that first syllable is not lost on me.  And while I’m hoping that my thoughts won’t be considered silly, I’m open to the irony of allowing the misinterpretation.]

One thing has not changed, however. This site and all its past and future iterations are dedicated to Jeanne Mae Parks Thrall Croxton – mother, Grandma, G’ma, G-money –  source of love, source of sausage soup.

The Recipe

And if you’ve come this far, here’s your reward: the recipe for Sausage Soup!

The Author

And here’s the “for what it’s worth” data.  My name is Jeanne Silliman and I’m a retired college educator.  I worked for twenty-five years in a community college system as a professor of developmental reading and in faculty development.  My work was interesting, challenging, and rewarding but extremely demanding of my time and energy.  So, I’m very excited at the opportunity to, as I told anyone who would listen when I retired, do whatever I want.  One of those things is to write a blog.

I have two grown daughters, one living in San Francisco and one who lives in Albuquerque with my son-in-law and my four beautiful and amazing grandchildren.  They are far away, but they did mange to pick interesting places to visit, which I do as often as possible.

As you will discover if you explore my blog, I also love to travel.  In addition to writing, my creative outlets include photography, sewing, decorating, reading, and small scale gardening.  I am a docent for the Evansville Museum of Arts, History, and Science and am passionate about art.  I tend to measure the desirability of travel destinations in proportion to the quality of their museums.

Update

In February of 2018, I moved to Albuquerque, NM, to be closer to family both here and in California.  The San Francisco daughter now lives in Oakland.