Posted on 10/18/2009 3:15:45 PM PDT by SJackson
I make really good soup. The only reason I'm thinking about it now is that we're going from hot, dusty haying to cold and wind-blown leaves. That brings out the need for warm, homey food, and nothing fits the bill like soup.
I make such good soup that complete strangers have asked me for my recipe. That's where the problem arises. I don't have a recipe, and there's no way that this week's soup is going to be anything like next week's soup, no matter how hard I try.
If that statement sounds familiar based on other things I've written, it's because it's my trademark in the kitchen. No darned recipe is going to get in the way of my cooking.
Now, about my soup.
There are five types of ingredients - meat, liquid, vegetables, spices and some kind of starch - and I choose specific items within those categories haphazardly. Maybe it's dumb luck, but I haven't had a bad soup yet.
I start by selecting the meat du jour. The current choices from the freezer are beef, venison, pork, turkey, chicken, bratwurst, goat, ham and that unlabeled-chunk-of-something-in-the-Ziploc-bag. I haven't been brave enough to do a fish soup, although I stewed bear and elk in my young and wild days.
A quick look in my pantry tells me the starch choices include four kinds of rice, six shapes of hard pasta, Kluski noodles, barley, couscous, lentils, a cute polka-dotted bean I grew last year and three varieties of potatoes.
The soup usually gets a single starch, but if I'm short of bowtie pasta, I have been known to add a few veggie spirals for color.
My take on vegetables is a little odd because I grow so much in the garden and don't have room to can or freeze it all. Much of it goes into the dehydrator and comes out looking unappetizing but perfect for soup.
The pantry holds plastic bags of miniature pieces of blanched corn, celery, onions, parsnips, eggplant, beets, green and wax beans, green and red peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, carrots, sugar pea pods and jalape~os. I usually make a selection of three or four.
The cool thing about dried vegetables is that you can start with a dish for two, toss in the vegetables, and by the time they have rehydrated you have enough food for the whole neighborhood.
Spices are in alphabetical order on two rotating racks above the stove. I give them a spin and pick four of something. It's amazing how well ginger goes with chicken.
My secret ingredient comes from a half-gallon plastic ice cream container in the freezer, and I haven't the foggiest idea what's in it.
At least, I didn't have an idea until last week when the thermometer started spinning counter-clockwise and everything in the garden went limp. That was the annual signal to start making soup.
The beef was already browning when I reached for the secret ingredient. I ran a little hot water over the outside of the container and skidded the frozen contents into the stock pot. It looked like a core sample of glacial ice with telltale layers of culinary events.
At the bottom was the frozen milky water from boiled potatoes, followed by a thin stratum of dark brown mud. That was the juice left over from broiling hamburgers several weeks back. Then came a thin green layer - frozen pea juice with a few peas still intact. Atop that was a yellowish layer with translucent wormlike things. I'm guessing that was the beer and onion juice from a Sunday bratwurst cookout.
The next layer was bright red tomato ice from juice that didn't fit in the final canning jar. Above that was another thin mud layer scraped out of the cast-iron skillet with a little water after fried pork chops. The top layer was some more frozen vegetable water.
By the time it all melted and melded with the meat, a couple of handfuls of dried vegetables and a tangle of Kluski noodles, it was just about perfect.
Obviously, my secret is that I empty nothing liquid down the drain. Everything goes in the freezer container. (Almost everything - tuna juice goes to the dog, and pickle water goes on the garden. Fruit syrup gets mixed in with orange juice for breakfast, although that might go well with chicken too. Just a thought.)
I'm not as neurotic as my cousin, who used to collect bones from guest's plates and boil them for the soup pot. But I am not wasteful either. Even a tablespoon of juice left from cooking beans gets dumped in the freezer container.
This isn't intended to be a cooking lesson. There is actually a moral to the story, but I'm not sure how to say it without being heavyhanded with the symbolism.
Where soup is concerned, I could be unimaginative and pour it out of a can, but that would be someone else's soup, not mine. It would be unmemorable, and probably unhealthy.
The reason my soup is always good is that it brings together something special from each day that has passed. It carries forward the spice of an exciting event or the calming comfort of an old favorite.
There is joy and wonder in knowing that the secret ingredient this week will be vastly different from the secret ingredient next week.
If I accidentally get a bitter olive in with the mix, all of the good flavors surround it and make it right.
Even the occasional burned bit of meat or excess salt is eclipsed by a more pleasant flavor. There is always enough to share with others and it's never so bad it's wasted.
A good soup is like a good life. Take a big ladle full.
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not the chicken’s
I like to make soup too.
I got started on making soup because when I was a youngster, a buddies dad made some really basic poor man hobo type soup and I loved it. It was plain old boiled garden fresh veggies with a half pound of left over raw hamburger thrown in. Tomatoes, potatoes, celery, carrots, onion, garlic, and that may have been about everything.
It was mostly water
No seasoning. no salt. You seasoned each bowl yourself as you ate it. potatoes were cut into cubes with skin left on. same with tomato. It’s been 20 years and I can still remember the first bowl.
I still prefer plain watery soup. My favorite flavoring is plain old black pepper. Celery seed comes second. I prefer pheasant as the meat, or ground turkey.
I am a pretty thrifty person. I tell people I have the cleanest garbage around. No food residue left on anything that goes in the trash. Food does not get thrown out. what I don’t eat the dog will eat with pleasure.
but I’ve never thought of saving the tuna water for the dog. I’m gonna start doing that.
Sara, wonderful recipe. We are zone 5 in Western PA. We can’t grow all the things you do. However, deer are over running our gardens fields and even the yards and shrubs of the suburbanites.
Support the second ammendment as we so badly need more hunters, these vermin are eating us out of house and home.
PA Lurker
Or get a cat.
Don't stop me. I discovered copy>paste.
I see it as perfect to pour over the top of dry dog food. Let it soak in then serve the dog.
I used to do that with leftover soup too. It’s been a long time since I had any leftover soup. I eat it all.
It sounds a little gross, but I even let the dog have what I dump out of the kitchen sink strainer. And when making soup or stir fry with fresh veggies, I save all the peels and stems and trimmings off the veggies and mix those up with a pinch or two of powdered milk and oats and boiled water. Sometimes scrape the pans and skillets off and dump in the scrapings too. If I got a quarter can of warm beer sitting around, I dump that in as well.
My dog loves veggies. even onion skins. The only thing she has trouble choking down is the big stumps off a bunch of celery, or off of cauliflower or broccoli or cabbage. Those I gotta dice up small and mix with something oily or she just carries them around the house without eating them.
Good thing I didn't try to make beef stew!
My chicken soup is so good my wife’s mother raves about it. She’s been making soup for fifty years.
Nice article. I love to cook, but my soups are boring, probably because I try not to load them up with fat. The best soup I ever had was from the Soup Nazi in New York.
Several years ago, I had an elderly Jewish friend, that was close personal friends with Einstein. He told me, one time that Einstein had a girlfriend in Berlin. He then went on to ask me if I knew how Einstein measured a good woman? He said by her CHICKEN SOUP! So I would have to bite my tongue, every time I passed a girl's room with a Poster on the wall, to keep from sticking my head in and yelling, learn how to COOK.
Many years ago a friend who was an excellent cook left the rubber bands on the parsley while boiling chicken for broth. Since she admitted it later, she knew her mistake, but went ahead with the soup presuming there would be no foul taste. She was wrong, don't ever cook with rubber bands.
My dogs love vegetables too, right in the garden if no one is looking, off the table is fine and they wouldn’t turn up their noses at a strainer. That’s what it’s for, isn’t it. With a couple old ones, it’s more store bought dog food, but if you can keep up a real food diet, that’s great. I wouldn’t want to eat those nuggets. Tuna, though, the dogs would devour it but that’s the cat’s domain.
I love soup.
The crock-pot is my friend. Knorr brand bullion cubes are my other friends. Get my “friends” together with some leftover meat and variable veggies, and some garlic and seasonings, and usually good things happen.
But not always. I have been known to get flavors off balance or textures not right. My DH gamely finishes his bowl anyway, and hopes for better next time. (The kids take little courtesy slurps and become very interested in what’s for dessert.)
But I’m game to keep doing it, because usually it’s much better than canned or restaurant soup. True comfort food.
no such thing as a cat’s domain in my home.
My dog would eat any non human/non canine, and would kill any canine...hmmm...at least I hope she wouldn’t eat another dog. She decided all humans belong to her. and all non humans that get close to a human must die. Her exceptions are cops, mailmen, garbage men, salesmen, and homeless people. They don’t count as humans in her mind and they also must die if she sees them get too close to a human or too close to her.
I don’t know how she differentiates the people. but somehow she does. I don’t know how she got this attitude. But it’s the reason why I got her free. No one else would put up with her. i’m the third owner.
she’s incredibly smart but with an incredibly short attention span. For 0.9 seconds she just might be the smartest dog on the planet. But then it’s all downhill after that. in 5 seconds she’s at the level of a gerbil.
I’ve known people like that too.
“cops, mailmen, garbage men, salesmen, and homeless people”
______
I like my mom’s theory about why dogs don’t like mailmen. They come up to the mailbox, often right in front of the door, and yet they are never let inside. So, to the dog, it looks like they are not friends; they are would-be intruders. They need to be vociferously repelled every time.
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