Zucchinisuppe (Germany)

I'm a bit of a planner. I have a feeling if I looked over the last year of blog posts, that same sentence would appear more than once as a theme in my life. This weekend, we went camping to Blue Mounds State Park in south western MN, a 4+ hour drive from our home, in our quest to visit all of the fabulous parks in the state. I enjoy camping, and it is an activity where the best of my planning skills are put to use in gathering supplies necessary for living out of a tent around a camp fire all while accounting for the wild weather of our state. A planner's dream.

But about 90 miles into the trip, I realized I forgot to bring along our state passport kit, which gets stamped at all of the parks. And the chocolate bars for smores. And my medication. And a can opener. And my husband realized that he hadn't packed the boys' sleeping bags. Or his shower shoes. Or any newspaper to light the fire. Or our camp chairs. As we realized the failures in our planning over the course of that four hour drive, we floated from disappointed, frustrated, angry and irritated at ourselves until with each realization we finally just started giggling at the whole lot of it.

And then we embraced the adventure of it all. What did we actually need? (Sleeping bags!) What could we do without? (Shower shoes!) Where could we be creative? (Coloring book pages to light the fire!) And it freed us to step away from all the gear and layer of clothing and prepackaged food to simply enjoy being outside, with our kids, in a beautiful prairie with cliffs and bison and trails. The weekend turned into one of the most relaxing I've had all summer.

And I am determined to live in this relaxed state as long as I can! Tonight with no plan for dinner, went out amidst the wild sweet potato vines and towering zucchini plants and came back with peppers, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, and a cabbage to join the zucchini and cantaloupe already waiting on my kitchen counter. One loaf of Italian herb bread later and the end result was Zucchinisuppe, a thick and tangy zucchini soup, bread for dipping, sliced cucumbers and diced cantaloupe.We lingered well past the time we normally clean up, relaxed, full, content to just be together.