First Soup of the New Year

Looks gross, tastes great!

It's cream of mushroom soup.  Today I polished off the last of the Christmas turkey soup, microwaved for lunch at the office.  (Soup is really the only reason for having a turkey, well, except for the stuffing and gravy, but that's just soup of a different consistency.)  So sans turkey, I attacked two huge bags of mushrooms the Wizard had scored...I mean really huge, maybe 6 quarts of Criminis and ordinary mushrooms.  He'd been hinting at mushroom soup for a few days, so I chopped all those fungi, sauteed them with onion in butter, and then the fun began.  I like Fannie Farmer's old cookbook, the 11th edition (~1965) which includes butter, cream, eggs, and sugar in practically every recipe, set in really appealing typefaces.  My mushroom soup recipe falls open all by itself, the stained page testimony to its longstanding appeal. (A peculiar sense you won't get from a recipe on epicurious.com.)

The recipe is pretty simple: to the saute, you add stock (chicken), and cream (or half and half), and for a variation, some beaten egg yollks. Throw in some Minute Tapioca to thicken it up. (Minute Rice sucks, but Minute Tapioca is useful.)  Did I say to saute the onions and mushrooms in butter? No sugar. (But if you wanted to, you could...)

But, since at this point in my life I hardly ever follow recipes to the letter...they are references and reminders... there were unscripted variations.  Pork broth!  And white wine (cheap pinot grigio).  Hawaiian red salt.  And a fresh-gound pepper blend, interesting because, not only does it include black, white, green and pink peppercorns, it also has coriander and allspice.  (Probably the floor sweepings of the pepper factory, it's a little like a men's cologne. Just needs a little patchouli and cardamom.)   I've moved way beyond Campbell's Cream of Mushroom,  to say nothing of Fannie's concept.

When I was in grade school, my  clever mother used to put Campbell's CoM in my Roy Rogers and Dale Evans lunch box thermos: I had hot soup for lunch.  But my schoolmates ostracized me.  Mushrooms were poisonous.  (Mom also sometimes filled my thermos with more conventional tomato or vegetable soup with a cooked hot dog tied on a string suspended in it.  I could pull it out and put it in a bun. The kids thought that was kind of cool.)

Those tiny delectable diced mushrooms in Campbell's canned white sauce were the only mushrooms I knew (and loved) until I got married and started to cook myself.   Then I got Fannie Farmer and found out I could outdo Campbell's...so easily.

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The Christmas cactus continues to develop.   This and the kolea are my confirmations of the tao at work.

Soup du jour, hao chi!

As I have commented before, soup is an art. Today's soup was again constructed with the broth from a stripped huli huli chicken, heavily seasoned with ginger and garlic, a few days ago. Well, a week ago, really. I added a can of Swanson's chicken broth for volume, and then the Wizard said,"There's a container of frozen vegetable and pork broth in the freezer you can use."

Pork broth? Who makes pork broth? What is pork broth? I have never seen a recipe that calls for pork broth.

The Wizard frequently cooks vegetables -- strange combinations like cabbage and beets -- with a piece or two of sliced pork loin (cut for tonkatsu) laid on top, in a clever electric steamer that collects broth in the bottom. Hence, vegetable and pork broth.

I added the frozen block of broth, nicely tinted red from the beets, to the soup, with carrots, mushrooms, a can of cannellini beans and some macaroni, and a can of canned chicken, to complete a sort of Italian/Chinese concoction what with the ginger and a flourish of Italian seasoning, and it was delicious.

I suppose I could get very Gourmet Magazine (except it's biting the dust) and create a recipe that calls for half a cup of pork broth. As for now, you can just enjoy my photo and figure it out yourself.

The Art of Soup

I love to make soup.

Being alone the past week and looking ahead to a few more days of solitude, I did my usual Friday evening routine with a store-bought roasted chicken (we call them huli huli) and some Blockbuster videos. I boiled down the carcass today for a soup base--the real reason I buy these chickens, which while tasty, are actually overcooked. Gleaning the

fridge for soup material I find a stalk of celery, an onion, a couple of carrots. In they go, with some fresh ground pepper and red Hawaiian salt. And then what? I thought maybe some rice, but the leftover basmati (delicious and expensive) has gone off, so I am left with a can of pinquitos and a can of canned chicken, to beef it up, so to speak.

Ah, and I forgot until I just now gave it a stir, the little bit of fresh rosemary, and a few chunks of fresh ginger. It's gonna be good with the Fat Cat cabernet I set aside, a decent cheap California wine that comes with a real cork.

My mother never used a piece of fresh ginger in her life, (to say nothing of garlic, we weren't that kind of people--aha, must go add a clove of garlic). Ginger meant gingerbread, and that's all. And you did that with powdered ginger, at best, or a box mix. I use ginger a lot; in an Asian rice culture it is as ubiquitous as salt and pepper, and more elegant in flavor. I use more garlic and ginger in a week than my mother used in her entire life.

On the other hand, she made the best crab cakes in the world. I grew up thinking that everyone knew what Old Bay seasoning was. And liver dumplings -- I have her recipe for those as well, but I haven't made them in years: I am afraid of liver. Too toxic. The last liver I ate was of a deer that a friend collected as road kill and then butchered surreptitiously in our barn. It was not hunting season. It was fine meat.

The soup I make is like road kill out of my refrigerator. I have some cookbooks that have traditional soup recipes that are complicated and precise. I doubt that the origins of soup making were that proscribed. Soup is cooking up what you've got on hand and being able to make it taste good. Hopefully nutritious too.

Soup is art.