I've accomplished remarkably little at work so far this week, mostly deleting some old email and barely starting on my organizational nirvana project. And I haven't been a model of productivity at home, either. So I am reduced to writing about soup.
There is almost no meal quite as satisfying as a bowl of soup and some homemade bread. I'm particularly fond of bean and barley soup, which takes hours to make but is worth is, especially since most of that time you're not really doing anything. Beans (kidney beans, white beans, chick peas) soak overnight. Drain the soaking water and put the beans in a pot with green split peas and yellow split peas and lentils and barley. Cut up some onions and potatoes and carrots and put them in the pot. Cover it all with water, add herbs and spices (pepper and parsley and thyme and bay leaf and fenugreek if you have it but it's not so important to bother with so if you don't have any don't go out and get it just for the soup and cayenne and garlic) and cook it at the lowest flame your stove can sustain for hours. It makes lots but it freezes well so you can have it all winter whenever you want.
Lentil soup is even easier. Lentils, onions, pepper and a dash of ground cloves. Yes, cloves - trust me. You can add carrots or spinach if you have them on hand. It only takes about 45 minutes.
Soup isn't only for winter. Is there a better summer meal than a bowl of borscht with sour cream and boiled potatoes? It's easy to make, too. Peel potatoes, cut them into chunks and boil until soft enough to cut with a spoon. Open bottle of borscht, pour into a bowl, add gobs of sour cream, stir until the borscht turns from purple to pink, add warm potatoes to cold liquid and enjoy. I hear that one can make borscht, that the beets don't grow in bottles, but I want it to be just like Mom used to open.
You can make gazpacho in the blender in the summer. Well, you can make it in the winter, too, but one just doesn't seem to. You can also do things like heating up a can of store brand vegetarian vegetable soup which is good to have on hand for when you've been traveling and you're exhausted and you don't really care. Or you can have conch chowder, for which the recipe involves a flight to Denver, a drive to Boulder, and the hope that Rhumba hasn't run out of it.
Chicken soup is medicinal. The best is mother's, but if your mother is anything like mine, she's not likely to come all the way to Virginia just to make soup and will just as soon tell you to buy a can of Manischewitz. (The frozen Tabatchnik brand is better, by the way, but all boughten soup is too salty.) What you really want to do is take most of a chicken and put it in a pot with onions and carrots and celery and what my mother calls "the white things that look like carrots". Learn from my error and buy parsnips, because the other white things that look like carrots are things like daikon and they may look sort of like carrots but they taste like radishes and do not work in soup. You can also put in soup greens, which are mostly parsley I think. There must be garlic, too, because my mother has never knowingly cooked anything that doesn't contain garlic. You put in water and simmer this until the chicken is entirely inedible. You can chill the broth overnight so the fat congeals and skim it off that way. When you reheat the broth, you can throw in noodles or matzoh balls. (Our family recipe is the one on the side of the Goodman's matzoh meal box. I cannot vouch for other brands.)
You needn't miss out on the medicinal aspect by being a vegetarian. Just make your broth from the odds and ends of veggies, instead of chickens. Carrot tops, potato peels, ends of green beans, and so on. If you collect this in a container in your refrigerator, it's best to live alone, because whenever I had roommates they made fun of me for freezing my garbage. They ate the soup anyway, mind you.
There's also stuff like carrot and ginger soup and butternut squash soup and cauliflower soup and some day I will find a recipe for hot and sour soup that I like but I haven't managed to yet. The place up the street from where I work has decent pho, which is Vietnamese beef soup (or chicken soup, if it's pho ga) and, in Vietnam, it's very cheap and you can eat it for breakfast. You can eat miso soup for breakfast in Japan or California, too.
And now, instead of writing about soup, I'm going to eat some.
Copyright 2005 Miriam H. Nadel