Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup

With November’s hint of winter in the air, I’m thinking a lot about soup.  Paul and I made two different kinds this weekend and I just bought the ingredients for several more batches today.  Soup is comforting and delicious, it comes in a variety of flavors and styles (thick or thin, chunky or smooth) and it’s not that hard to make. Even Nana K. who was never much of a cook (See “A Tale of Two Nanas”) could fill her blender with chopped up celery, cucumbers and onions and V-8 juice and immediately serve her favorite summertime treat, “Gestapo” soup. 

When I was sick, I always could count on my mom to make a soothing batch of chicken soup, aka Jewish penicillin.  She also made a terrific vegetable soup with soft meatballs which I was hoping she would bring over when I had my wisdom teeth taken out. Instead she made her chunky ham soup, which didn’t work out that great. (Mom doesn’t relate to any physical ailment which she has not personally experienced – she still doesn’t believe my sister really couldn’t walk with a broken ankle.)

Paul and I started soup production on a grand scale when we lived in our first house and had a kitchen big enough to make it and a freezer big enough to keep it over the winter.  Our minestrone soup recipe was hearty and tasty with enough vegetables to meet the required 5 servings a day and then some. We bought storage containers and a 28 quart soup pot from a kitchen supply store and turned out huge batches every fall. When I saw that array of full soup containers lined up in my freezer, I felt like a contented squirrel.

After a few years, we teamed up with our neighbors, splitting the work and the end product, although the work was more of a three-way split.  Gail would cheerfully tackle any assignment from onions to parsley to carrots, and, unlike me, she wasn’t annoyed by Paul’s lesson in correct carrot peeling.  Tim, however, had a history of work-related injuries and, after dealing with a particularly tough bunch of celery, he retired to the couch to nurse his blisters.

Minestrone remains a winter staple at our house but we’ve branched out in many directions.  Split pea soup was our first venture. David loved it so much, he learned to make it himself and, as a second grader, offered it for sale in his school auction.  When we reach the end of the Christmas HoneyBaked ham, it’s hard to decide whether to use the bone in split pea, black bean or navy bean soup – a problem that I often solve with my friend Jean’s 12 Bean Soup recipe which gets the post-holiday season off to a roaring start.

Of course, when it comes to tomato soup, it’s hard to beat good old Campbell’s and now it comes “Heart Healthy,” which means you can have Graeters double chocolate chip ice cream for dessert.  I wasn’t even looking to make my own tomato soup when a neighbor brought hers to our Halloween street party.  WOW!  I’ve been using her recipe ever since although I do toss in a can of Campbell’s which keeps me from feeling guilty and disloyal.

Like Sir Galahad, I conducted a long and arduous quest for my personal Holy Grail – a good mock turtle soup recipe.  Mock turtle soup is primarily a Cincinnati German dish and there are as many variations on the mock turtle theme as there are for chili or turkey stuffing.  Vinegar, catsup, Worcestershire sauce and ground beef are in most recipes but the additional ingredients vary wildly.  Mock turtle soup can be flavored with cloves, marjoram, pickling spices, Ginger Snaps or savory, bolstered with dry sherry, Bordeaux, white wine, whipping cream or canned gravy (yuck!), and finished off with lemon peel and/or hardboiled eggs.  Needless to say, mock turtle soup does not contain turtle meat or any other authentic turtle parts (If you wonder what a Mock Turtle looks like, see the drawing on the left.)

While I’ve been successful at making everything from Carrot Orange to Minted Spinach and Green Pea to Potato Leek Soup, I do remember one spectacularly disappointing failure.  I wanted to do something special with the big tin of prime crabmeat my parents had brought back from the Outer Banks of North Carolina so I tried a recipe for Crabmeat Gumbo. After most of the ingredients were in the soup pot, the gumbo looked and smelled wonderful.  All I had to do was add the final, authentic touch – okra, fresh from Findlay Market.  One second after the okra was in the pot, however, my Crabmeat Gumbo turned into a steaming cauldron of rubber cement, hanging in gluey strands from my big wooden spoon – a prime candidate for the garbage disposal.  Nana K, a native of Alabama, always talked about how great okra was so there must be a better way to prepare it but I have no idea what that would be.

You wouldn’t expect a post about soup to end with a confession but this one does. The night everyone brought a different soup to dinner club, we were the ones who brought the container labeled “Latin Fiesta Soup.”  Nobody could figure out where it came from; and, although it looked pretty funky with its uncooked macaroni, banana peppers and green olives floating in a “broth” the color of Mountain Dew, I think several people tasted it to be polite - they’re all still alive so, no harm done.  Anyone who knows Paul will believe me when I say this was not my idea.  With Thanksgiving almost here, I also have a second, small confession to make.  I will have to throw away the turkey carcass again this year unless somebody can rescue it by sending me a good recipe for turkey soup ASAP.

“Alice In Wonderland” is the source of this post’s title – click below to hear Gene Wilder as the Mock Turtle singing the praises of soup.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDG73IAO5M8