In The Soup - 10in10 3

On a ski Sunday soon after discovering the 10in10 blog, I attempted to make soup. Specifically, I tried to make the cabbage soup that forms the foundation of the 10in10 diet. We already had all of the ingredients in the kitchen, with the exception of the vinegar, which I picked up at PCC after walking the dog in the morning. I also picked up a loaf of rosemary bread, to make sure we had something to eat just in case the soup turned out to be awful. (Or to fill us up if the soup left us hungry.) It was, as promised, a fairly simple recipe to follow. When Dad and Red got home from skiing, there were bowls of hot soup waiting for them. And it was, well, not delicious, but entirely edible. We ate a lot of it, and with some bread, it was enough for dinner and lunch for a couple days.


We agreed that it was worth making again, with some tweaking. Next time I would use less vinegar, less sugar, and more carrots. In fact, it would be worth experimenting with adding whatever vegetables were on hand. And I would measure the water, to see if I was actually making the same amount of soup the recipe was designed to make. Over the course of the week, we noted that the soup had a strangely, um, cleansing effect.

Although it was dubbed a success, we weren’t ready try again the very next weekend. After all, there had been a lot of leftovers to finish over the course of the week. And we were just trying the soup, not trying to make it the foundation of our diet. Plus, there was that um, cleansing, effect.

After another week, I had already kind of forgotten about learning to make soup. But the next weekend after that, I noticed some squash sitting on the counter that had been there for what seemed an awfully long time. So I pulled out The Bold Vegetarian and found a squash soup recipe. This one called for 3 specific kinds of squash and Granny Smith apples. I had two unidentified gourds, and had to go to the grocery store anyway.

The squash soup recipe was not as simple as the one for cabbage soup, and since it was not a ski day, I had two girls to juggle while I tried to make it. This resulted in a few awkward moments when ingredients I hadn’t chopped yet were supposed to be added to an already hot pan full of half cooked onions and other items. Daddy came home, not to hot soup, but to a trashed kitchen and a wife who needed someone else to stir the aforementioned onions and put the bread in the oven while she desperately chopped Granny Smith apples.

But the soup was good with chili flakes on top and warm bread and Elysian ale on the side for the grownups; with Trader Joe’s seaweed snacks on top and pink lemonade for Rose Red. Snow White (aka Goldilocks) proclaimed it too hot and refused to ingest anything but chochit milk, but who cares what she thinks. All in all, I think I could get the hang of soup. It’s a great way to use up a lot of fresh food, and relative to other foody endeavors, it’s pretty simple. It’s certainly more practical than last year’s attempt to learn how to make pie.