Soup Night (4 page)

By the way, be careful with whole spices; don’t add them, intact, to soup — or any other food, for that matter — without some way to easily remove them. Some whole spices can be unpleasant to bite down on (think peppercorns), but there can be more serious problems. People can choke on whole cloves. And don’t try to break bay leaves into small, edible pieces; they will stay firm and the edges are sharp: there have actually been reports of people getting cuts in their throats and even along their digestive tracts. Always leave them whole, count how many you put in, and take care to remove them all.

Now for freezing. First of all, if your freezer space is limited, simmer all the prepared stocks until they are thick. This reduces the volume, so they take up less room in the freezer. It also provides you with a handy concentrate, ideal for those times when you want to add flavor but not a lot of extra liquid.

To store the concentrated stocks, you probably know the trick of freezing them into ice-cube trays, and then storing the frozen cubes in a ziplock freezer bag. If you have a large quantity of stock, another method is to place the cooled liquid into quart-size freezer bags and lay the bags flat in the freezer. Once frozen, the bags are easy to store upright in a freezer basket. Label the bags near the top, and you can easily flip through them, like those of us of a certain age used to do in record stores.

Finally, be sure to label the bags. You may think you can remember, or tell them apart by looks, but trust me, after a while you can’t.

In many of the recipes in this book, you will find suggestions for specific garnishes that complement the flavors of the soup itself. But in fact, a garnish or two enlivens just about every kind of soup. Use your “good cook” sense to imagine which ones would go well with which soup. Think about color as well as taste: something white or creamy with dark red soup, for instance, or a bright green garnish with a pale soup. Here are several reliably delicious garnishes:

• Crème fraîche.
  An alternative to sour cream and easy to make (see
  page 237
  ).
  
• Pesto.
  You can make your own, if you have a lusty crop of basil, but several commercial versions are available, and they freeze well, so you can use just a small amount.
  
• Parmesan lace
  (see
  page 37
  )
  
• Croutons
  (see
  page 248
  )
  
• Grilled bread.
  If you have your outdoor grill going in the summer months, spread thick slices of a hearty artisan bread with olive oil on both sides, and grill — heavenly.
  
• Herb butters.
  Mix softened butter with an herb that complements your soup, chill until firm, then slip a half teaspoonful into each soup bowl.
  
• Red pepper purée.
  Dump a jar of prepared red peppers into the blender, liquid and all, and process to desired texture. Easy and delicious.
  
• Goat cheese.
  Slice crosswise into thin rounds, and float one on top of the soup in each bowl.
  
• Goldfish crackers.
  Kids love them, but so do adults.
  
• Roasted nuts.
  In a 350°F oven or in a dry skillet, toast whole nuts until fragrant; watch carefully, they go from fragrant to burned awfully fast. Cool, and then roughly chop.
  
• Seeds,
  such as pumpkin, sunflower, and sesame.
  
• French-fried onions.
  Yes, those crunchy bits your Aunt Grace uses for the green bean casserole on Thanksgiving are delicious with soup.
  
• And of course,
  the standards: chopped chives, parsley and cilantro, scallions, sliced radishes, diced avocado, celery, tomato, cucumber, grated cheese.
  

It’s become something of a cliché in recent years: fresh and local is always better. But is it really?

Local, absolutely. Something that came from a farm seven miles from your house is bound to be fresher than something that traveled for three days in two separate refrigerated trucks halfway across the continent. Besides, those local farmers need our support. And of course, if you are lucky enough to have a vegetable garden yourself, or smart enough to make friends with someone who does, that’s best of all. That’s about as local and fresh as you can get!

What about “fresh”? That one’s a little more complicated.

Of course, no one in their right mind would deny that the summertime wealth of fresh vegetables and fruits is a huge blessing. I happen to live in an area with a rich agricultural heritage, and I consider myself extremely fortunate to have so many family farms and U-Pick fields nearby. Every year, I start counting down the days until they open.

However, it is possible to get so entangled in the “fresh” mantra that we lose perspective and common sense in favor of culinary political correctness. Is “fresh”
always
best? In my opinion, not necessarily.

To grow vegetables that can withstand days of travel and handling at several stages along the way, growers have created cultivars that look great but suffer in taste. A “fresh” tomato that was picked green, then treated with gas so it turns red, can taste like cardboard. On the other hand, green beans transported to a frozen-food processing plant within hours of being picked are in fact fresher and more nutritious than their “fresh” counterparts that were trucked from someplace like California and then stored in the supermarket chain’s distribution center for who knows how long before you bought them. Fresh pumpkins are great for jack-o’-lanterns, but something of a pain to cook and not appreciably better tasting than canned pumpkin.

So don’t automatically reject frozen or canned vegetables. Unless you have your own garden or a nearby farmers’ market, frozen or canned veggies may be your best bet for quality and nutritional value, especially in the off-season. And they’re super-convenient to have on hand. Many of the recipes in this book call for canned tomatoes, for instance, and frankly I can’t imagine my pantry without them. On the other hand, I’ve never seen frozen or canned eggplant; frozen bell peppers are very disappointing; and there’s no way to preserve fresh cucumbers except as pickles, which is not always what you want in your soup. It’s all a question of how to get the very best of what you need when you need it. And it’s also a question of common sense.

With all that said, there is still nothing like a vine-ripened tomato that really was allowed to stay on the plant until dead ripe. You’ll be hard pressed to find them anywhere except your own garden or your local farmers’ market, but once you taste one, you’ll never be satisfied with supermarket tomatoes again. An old country song claims that homegrown tomatoes are one of only two things in the world that money can’t buy (the other being true love).

The other local treasure is fresh corn. And I mean
fresh
. The sugars in corn start to turn to starch within hours of picking, so if you don’t have a big vegetable garden, try to find a farm stand or U-Pick place near home and go on the same day you’re having your party. By the way, I have no real scientific evidence, but I’m quite certain that fresh corn you freeze yourself maintains its “country” taste much more than commercial frozen corn. So when you go to the farm stand, buy lots, and freeze half.

The fresh/canned debate doesn’t apply to beans as widely as some other vegetables, but it does have its own decision seesaw: should you use dried beans or the canned versions?

Here are the pros and cons.

For convenience, canned wins hands down. And since the fundamental idea of a soup pantry is to enable you to whip up a nutritious soup on short notice, you probably want some of your favorite types on hand.

On the other hand, canned beans often are high in sodium, and the liquid in the can might ruin the look and taste of your wonderful homemade stock. To deal with both these drawbacks, rinse the beans thoroughly before adding them to your soup.

Working with dried beans is the opposite of convenient, but very satisfying in other ways. You save money and feel virtuous, while completely avoiding the sodium problem. Plus, many natural food stores and food co-ops carry unusual varieties (cranberry, Anasazi, adzuki, yellow eyes, and other heirlooms, for instance) that you won’t find in any can.

There are two common ways to prepare dried beans for cooking, both of which require some preplanning. Easiest is to cover your beans in about three times volume of cold water, and soak for 6 to 8 hours, even overnight. If you forgot to do that, the second method is something of a shortcut: bring the beans and water to a hard boil, remove from heat, cover, and let stand for 2 hours.

In both cases, drain off the soaking water, transfer the beans to a pot, add fresh water to cover by an inch or two, and cook, unsalted, until almost tender, so they finish cooking with the rest of the soup.

One-third cup of dried beans produces 1 cup cooked beans.

The leaves are turning glorious colors, the air has a little bit of a bite to it, and where I live the rains have started. It’s time for soup!

Autumn brings delicious holidays — Halloween, Thanksgiving — that are opportunities for wonderful soup parties, and the grocer’s shelves and late-season farmers’ markets are stocked with ingredients: pumpkins, winter squashes, sweet potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, and the many wonderful winter greens like Russian or Tuscan kale, mustard greens, or mizuna. Soup in autumn needs to be hearty, rich with vegetables, beans, and noodles — all the stuff that soothes our tummies and warms our hearts.

Canadian Beef Stew (
page 83
), Peanut Butter–Chocolate Chip Cookies (
page 96
), and Onion-Bacon Rolls (
page 88
)

Tonight’s event is hosted by Becky and Lisa. They have lived on the block for eight years and have been together much longer. Back in 2006, when for a brief period Multnomah County allowed same-sex couples to marry, they took advantage of the opportunity. Even though the legal status was short-lived and the marriages ultimately were overturned, today both women still wear their wedding rings, and still consider themselves married. “Our certificate still hangs on the wall,” Lisa says. “I don’t know how you unmarry someone.”

Both are in their late 40s, with the calm beauty that comes to women who know who they are, and both are professional educators (a teacher, a principal). They have one adopted son: four-year-old Sam, currently zipping around with little-boy energy and the special pride of being the host.

By 6:15
pm
, the small Craftsman bungalow is bubbling with chatter. About 30 people attend this evening, a typical turnout. On the stove is a huge kettle of chicken noodle soup made from a recipe in the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook; on a counter, in a large slow cooker, is a creamy vegetarian soup featuring butternut squash. Both are delicious, but there is a clear favorite: in what seems like minutes, the chicken soup pot is empty.

In the living room, people sit on couches and chairs, on the piano bench, and on the floor. The dining room is a tad more formal, with eight chairs pulled up to the table. This spot is popular with the children, for the table is where the desserts are laid out. It is also where, by unspoken agreement, chairs are reserved for the block’s elders. A clump of people stand chatting in the kitchen, another in the hallway. The edges of all these clusters constantly move and shift, like amoebas viewed under a microscope, as folks change seats to catch a visit with someone else.