Tuesday, February 26, 2008

weekly soup feature!

I had this silly idea last night that I should share the soup I make each week. It does say in my bio that I make delicious soup, so maybe I should prove it. My husband thought this was a good idea, since I've been lacking interesting things to talk about lately.

As a bit of background, I make a big pot of soup at the beginning of each week. We eat it for supper on workdays, so I don't have to take time to make supper every night. My husband loves soup, and usually I'm too hungry to care what I'm eating, so it works well for both of us. There are a couple hitches in the plan, though. First, my husband is mostly vegetarian (he will eat some fish and humanely-raised meat) so that limits the kinds of soup I can make. Second, I'm allergic to garlic and onions, so I need to modify most recipes. In spite of these limitations, I do manage to make something pretty tasty each week, and because I dislike repeating recipes too often, I make quite a variety of soups.

I recently bought myself a copy of "The Joy of Cooking" which seems to be a very good all-round cookbook. It's possible to get recipes on various websites, but I find they often lack good basic recipes, and you can't always trust that they'll work and be tasty. "Joy" has been around for years, so I can trust the recipes and information in it. On the downside, nearly every soup recipe in it has onions, so I'll need to modify any that I want to try.

Okay, if you're still with me after that dissertation on soup, here's the one I made last night: mushroom and barley. I added carrots and parsnips, and seasoned it with thyme and bay leaf. The recipe called for beef broth, but since I can't get good broth at my grocery store, I substituted free-range chicken broth plus some red wine and tomato paste. It turned out very tasty, although I only made enough for about 3 meals. I didn't want to go overboard with a new recipe.

If you would like me to share my recipe for anything I post here, just let me know. I'll try to remember all the changes I made to the original!

3 comments:

Jackie said...

Love the idea of sharing your soup receipe. I love homemade soups but I am not good at it but I keep trying.

dcoombs said...

Yay for soup! Joy of Cooking is a fantastic book, too, yes. I've borrowed it in the past, and have been meaning to pick up a copy, but never quite did so.

For broth, I like to get the organic cubes that they sell at Papillon.

Catie said...

Sounds great, I'd like to make soups sometime. I would also like to see pictures of some of the soups that you make. Allergic to garlic?! That sounds horrendous (I'm Italian, we put garlic on a lot of things...). Though allergic to chocolate would be worse.