SOUP!

I made soup! I suppose this isn’t much of an accomplishment, in theory, soup happens when you throw some stuff in a pot with water and apply heat. It ought to be easy. But the reality is that my favorite cooking methods all get as close as possible to charring something over a fire until it’s black on the outside and juicy on the inside (anyone up for camping next summer?). Part of me wants to learn how to hunt, so that I can have gotten that charred thing on a stick over a fire there myself. The reality with hunting is that from everything I’ve heard you spend a lot of time being cold and bored and holding very still. There’s a feminist rant in there for those who want to pry it out about the stupid tendency to teach girls that anything messy or violent is icky. And then they get to start bleeding five days out of a month. And we wonder why girls hate their bodies and don’t like to talk about their vaginas.

But Soup! I made some!!1!!11! Now, because of my aforementioned cooking method proclivities, I’m really good at knowing how plants and animals and herbs and spices will behave and react to one another when slightly browned from quick cooking at high heat. I don’t necessarily know how that same potato or carrot or onion or cube of beef will taste when gently brought to tenderness via a large pot of boiling water (or in the case of the onion and the beef, a short time in some sort of fat to soften it first). And I certainly don’t know how to spice a soup. How much is enough? When is it too much? Given that the broth I add with the water has salt in it, should I salt the onions while they get all translucent? Which spices should I use, how much of each, and when do they go in?

See, soup is hard.

But I seem to be coming down with something, so I wanted something soothing, and pre-made soups always disappoint. So, armed with the knowledge that I wanted to make a vegetable soup tonight, I went to the farmer’s market on my lunch break, and bought:

1 leek
5 small Yukon gold potatoes
1 bulb of fennel
1 bunch of carrots
2 tomatoes

I wanted turnips, but the only ones I found were $4 a pound, which is more than I’m willing to pay for a root vegetable. I spent maybe five dollars on those veggies, and not all of them made it into the soup.

By the time I got home, I 1) was very tired an sore and wanted to just crawl in to bed, 2) had realized that I had no idea what I was doing. So I crawled into bed with Circe (my laptop), and started searching online for recipes.

Hooray for the internet! Epicurious seems to think that the fennel, leek, and potatoes by themselves make a soup. The commenters seem to think this is a very bland soup. So I figured I’d use the recipe as a general guide in the land of steps of soup-making, and experiment.

What I came up with:

Chop one leek and one bulb of fennel (white and pale green parts only of both veggies), and heat, salted, in just hot-enough-to-melt butter at the bottom of a large pot with a couple cloves of minced garlic (or about 1/2 a tablespoon) until you finish chopping all the other stuff (aka: the leeks soften). Wash enough of the carrots that you will have half as much chopped carrot as potato (I used four. Oh, wash the potatoes, too!), and chop both up. Add some fluid to the pot before you put the newly chopped root vegetables in (a can of vegetable broth was not enough, so I added two cups of water and a boullion cube). Grind some black pepper over it, toss in a couple shakes of oregano, and what probably amounted to ¼ teaspoon of rosemary.

Realize that your favorite part about soup is the bread, which you are completely out of. Turn the heat off under the pot, put a lid on it, and trek to the nearest grocery store, where they will be out of sourdough rolls, so you pick up French Bread rolls.

Get home, shoo the Orange Fuzzy One away from the door, turn the heat on under the pot, and surf the internet. At some point, the boyfriend will come home and tell you that your soup is trying to boil over. Turn the heat down, take off the lid, and go back online. In ten minutes or so, poke your potatoes with a fork to see if they are done. If so, you have soup!

Sort of. My soup was really, really heavy on the stuff and didn’t have much broth to speak of (and most of that stuff was fennel and leek). So I pureed two food processor batches worth, which a) thickened the broth to opacity, and b) fixed the fluid-to-solid ratio to something more like what I wanted.

It was super tasty with the French Bread rolls to dip in it. I am very proud of myself for having made a decent soup without carefully following a recipe :)