Vegetable Soup

Wednesday afternoon, I put together a big pot of vegetable soup. I love soup, but with only two of us, it's hard to go through a big pot of it. We tend to get sick of it long before we reach the bottom of the pot. Still, we need to use up some of the huge haul of vegetables we have here at home, so I spent an hour or so peeling and chopping and cooking.

Here's what I put into our soup:

One and a half onions. I love cooked onions. We get onions in our CSA box and we also buy them at the co-op. We put them in everything. Whenever I chop them up, I'm always reminded of that scene in GoodFellas (one of my favorite movies), where they're all in prison cooking a big Italian dinner and the guy making the sauce is warned not to put in too many onions. Do you remember that scene?

Henry Hill: I felt he used too many onions, but it was still a very good sauce.
Paul Cicero: Vinnie, don't put too many onions in the sauce.
Vinnie: I didn't put too much onions, uh, Paul. Three small onions. That's all I did.
Johnny Dio: Three onions? How many cans of tomatoes you put in there?
Vinnie: I put two cans, two big cans.
Johnny Dio: You don't need three onions. 

Two big handfuls of baby carrots, cut into chunks. We bought the three pound bag of baby carrots at Costco, as you do, even though I don't think we've ever made it though an entire bag. Dave takes them for lunch, we eat them on salads, we cook with them, but we never never make it through three pounds of carrots before they start to get slimy or dried out.

Here's a story from my childhood: When I was about four or five, I watched my brother choke on a bite of raw carrot. It was really scary. For a long time after that, I wouldn't eat carrots. Everyone thought I disliked them because of the taste, but it was because I was terrified of choking on one. Even now, I'm wary of eating raw carrots. Strange what stays with us.

One red pepper, seeded and chopped. This was one of three that came in our CSA box. I love red peppers, Dave is less convinced. He says they give him a stomach ache, especially raw, though he can tolerate them slightly better when they're cooked.

Three stalks of celery, diced up. Do you "de-string" celery? I did for awhile, but then I stopped because it seemed like an overly fussy thing to do and because I figure all those strings must have some fiber in them.

Celery is the one vegetable that I had worked over my lifetime to learn to like. As a kid, I hated it raw or cooked because it made my mouth feel numb and I hated that feeling. I remember telling a friend about it, asking him if it made his mouth feel numb too. "Yeah," he said, "but I don't think it's an unpleasant feeling." I thought about that for about a decade and a half and, when I was in my late 20s or early 30s, I decided that numb mouth or not, it was a waste of energy to dislike celery. After that, I started trying to eat it from time to time. It's probably taken another decade or so for me to get used to it, and I still approach it with some hesitation, but I can eat it now. In fact, in addition to putting it into the soup, I also had a few celery sticks with my salad for lunch.

One sweet potato, peeled and chopped up. I've been trying to eat more sweet potatoes since they're so darn healthy. We bought two from the co-op. One went into our roasted veggies last night. One went into our soup today.

In Japan in winter, there are men who go around selling sweet potatoes from carts with roasters attached. Roasted sweet potatoes are considered to be a winter treat, especially appealing to women. You couldn't find the carts in Ginza (where I worked) but during O-shogatsu I traveled to Miyajima and there was a man with a cart selling roasted sweet potatoes near the ferry. I don't know if he thought I couldn't understand Japanese, but I expected to pay three hundred yen (about three bucks) for one, the same as he charged the young Japanese women in line before me. Nope. My price with the foreigner mark-up was five hundred yen (five dollars). It was one of the few times in Japan that anything like that happened to me.

Five cloves of garlic. It seems like a lot, but it's a huge pot of soup.  I love garlic, but I find it tedious to peel and chop it. We also have a garlic press, but I find it equally tedious to clean. Despite that, I've never been tempted by the jars of prepared chopped garlic that you see in the store. There's something not quite kosher about that stuff.

Three Parmesan rinds. Have you ever saved up Parmesan rinds to add to a soup or sauce? I read about it in a cookbook and the first time I tried it, I expected them to just melt into the soup. Of course, they're tougher than that; they just got soft and a little flabby and I ended up fishing them out--but you really could taste their influence. The next time I tried chopping them up before I added them to the soup since I knew they were going to soften up and I thought they might be good to eat. But have you ever tried to chop up Parmesan rinds? It's like trying to chop up hard squashes. There's a reason they sometimes have to use an axe for that task.  Now, I just toss the rinds in at the beginning and then fish them out later and throw them away.

Five red potatoes of varying sizes, washed and chopped up. A small bag of these came in our CSA box. I love potatoes, especially in soup. Or roasted. Or mashed. Or made into french fries or chips. Or baked or made into hash browns or latkes or tater tots. Potatoes are not particularly good for you, but I rationalize using them by saying that they've got a fair amount of potassium, which is an important nutrient.  I grew up on beans and fried potatoes, seems like, and I still love both. I used a couple of them last night for our roasted vegetable dinner, but I purposefully held back since I knew I was going to be making soup today and I love it when they kind of squish into the soup as it cooks. It's a comforting texture to me.

About five baby zucchini and ten baby yellow and green squashes, chopped up. A bag of these jumped into our cart at Costco. Some I roasted last night, some went into the soup today. We used to buy baby squashes to feed to our turtle Percy Shelley, who went to live with friends of ours quite a number of years ago. That turtle was so spoiled while we had him. I hope he has a good life now.

A big handful of haricot verts. This was also a Costco purchase. Dave likes them in his bag of lunch veggies, but they come in such a huge bag that we never seem to use them up before they go bad. Maybe I'll blanch and freeze them this time before that happens. (No, I won't do that because I hate blanching vegetables, but it's nice to think I'm the kind of cook who would.)

Sometimes when I throw away vegetables that we bought with good intentions but then let go bad in our fridge, I think about a short story called "The One Sitting There" by Joanna H. Wos. It's a frightfully deft story, six spare paragraphs that fit on a single page. It begins:

     I threw away the meat. The dollar ninety-eight a pound ground beef, the boneless chicken, the spareribs, the hamsteak. I threw the soggy vegetables into the trashcan: the carrots, broccoli, peas, the Brussels sprouts. I poured the milk down the drain of the stainless steel sink. The cheddar cheese I ground up in the disposal. The ice cream, now liquid, followed. All the groceries in the refrigerator had to be thrown away. The voice on the radio hinted of germs thriving on the food after the hours without power. Throwing food away was rational and reasonable.
      In our house, growing up, you were never allowed to throw food away. There was a reason.

Of course, you find out the reason a bit later in the story, an older sister who starved to death in Poland during the war.

A half a bag of frozen peas. These have been sitting in our freezer for awhile. I figured they would be okay in soup.

A half a bag of frozen baby lima beans. These have also been in our freezer for awhile. They are from Whole Foods, from a frozen vegetable buying binge that I went on a couple of months ago. I don't know why I tossed these into our basket; we never eat lima beans. I have nothing against them, of course, but they're not high on the list of indispensable beans in our household. I figured they'd work in the soup, but I am prepared to be wrong about that, too.

Half a bag of spinach, washed. I'll save this to add in at the last minute, when I'm heating up the soup for dinner. 

A box of chopped Parma tomatoes. You have to have tomatoes in vegetable soup, right?

After most things were in the pot, I added some seasonings:

Granulated garlic, Better than Bouillon, soy sauce, oregano, dried thyme, celery salt, black pepper.

The soup is simmering away on the stove now and I'm getting up to give it a stir from time to time and to taste it to see if I have to make any adjustments as it cooks. As I've been writing, I've been trying to think of and add in something about the ingredients, or about the process of cooking, or what I think about while I cook. Here's one more:

Sometimes when I cook, I think about my grandmother and the long darkness of the Great Depression that cast a shadow over her all her life and how that manifested itself in what and how she shopped and cooked. Even when I was a child, I could see it in the way she hoarded food and other things, too. It wasn't like we see hoarders on TV now, with houses packed full of useless and horrific things, but she hated to throw anything away and she had a pantry that was always full and she shopped with an eye toward buying the cheapest food and making it stretch as far as possible. Most of the time it worked. Beans are cheap and good to eat, as are chile and homemade tortillas. I think about how she could stretch a forty-cent can of tuna into lunch for herself and me and my brothers, by mixing it into a batter and frying up tuna fritters. I think about how she cleaned and cooked the crawdads that my brothers and I fished out of the irrigation ditch using our own fishing tackle cobbled together from string, washers we found in the yard, and bent bobby pins baited with baloney. I think about how she waited for summer to dig up the verdolagas that grew wild in the yard or along the ditchbank so that she could cook them like spinach. There was something magical in that--and something dark too, a kind of creativity driven by a fear of scarcity.

But there's more, and I think too about my grandmother reading the weekly grocery sales ads religiously and sometimes shopping in dollar stores for food, and signing up to get government commodities like blocks of salty, rubbery cheese and cans of grapefruit juice so sour that nobody could drink it. I think about how she would buy Bar S hot dogs when they went on sale three packs for a dollar and store them in the freezer to fry up with potatoes and onions for breakfast, then reheat them again for lunch. A lot of the time it was not quality stuff she was living on, it was processed food with lots of fillers and salt and sugar, and I wonder how much that contributed to her eventual health woes.

But whatever was there, there was always something. There was always something to eat on her stove or on the kitchen table and that was one thing she prided herself on, being able to feed any and everyone who walked in the door.