Making soup is magical

To me, soup is a sacred, magical teacher.  It is medicine.  It is cost effective and healthy for body and spirit.  It can be stretched if an extra person shows up for dinner.  It is entirely possible that yesterday I made homemade chicken veggie soup and my daughter, back for the long weekend from college, made homemade pumpkin soup. Our family does soup.

Onion, carrot, and celery, the holy trinity.  Start with these three everytime.  It helps to use your grandmother’s fifty year old, (seventy year old?) wooden spoon to stir it.  One can never have too much magic.

Virtually every time I have ever made soup I have gone through the same couple of phases, “why do I have to chop so many veggies?”, “did I add too much water?”, and “is it really going to taste good?”  Soup preparation for me always involves self-doubt.  It is rather silly as my soups nearly always taste pretty darn good.  It is not me, it is the ingredients.  Just listen to them, they’ll tell you what you need to know.

I’ve even upped my game recently.  Now, any time I am cutting up veggies I save all the scraps in a plastic bag in the freezer.  They last a long time there.  When I later cut up more I throw those in the same bag.  When I get enough and I have the hankering for soup I toss all those frozen scraps and stems and peels into a small pot of hot water and boil it for an hour or so on low heat.  I then strain the liquid into a big pot to begin the soup prep.  I just discovered that I can reboil those same scraps a second time producing a second batch of stock, albeit a bit weaker than the first, but better than water of course!  For this chicken soup I also added the carcass of a whole deli chicken (those 3 lb. birds from Costco are just too good to pass up) to the veggie scrap pot.  By the time that I was done with the second boil, that pot of stock with some salt and pepper tasted delicious all by itself, without anything else added, but of course I was not done yet.  I went on to add tons of veggies and a bit of the leftover chicken cut up into small pieces.

Learn from your soups. Once you have made a few you get the basic feel for what goes well with what.  But above all, trust.  It will be good (if you add enough love).  Start with a familiar recipe and tweak it a bit.  Make it spicier or creamier.  Puree it part way through.  And serve with good bread and or grilled cheese sandwiches.  Use plenty of cheese.  Put a topping on the soup of nuts or sour cream or grated parmesan or croutons, something to give it a crunch.  Textures are important too.

And the smell.  The whole house smells like a bygone era.  I secretly think it keeps the respiratory system clean and healthy.  If possible, maybe on a weekend, start the soup early in the day or start the night before.  My whole family is convinced that the soup always tastes better the second day, after the flavors have a chance to “get married” as my grandmother would say.

Soup somehow makes me slow down.  It also seems to need jazz as an accompaniment.  Conversations are improved magically as well.  Someday I think researchers will understand the science behind it and a whole new field of medicine will emerge, soup-medicine.  

Oh, and it tastes damn good too!