learn how to make soup

It’s a bit tricky to make. Lots of veggies to chop (a food processor helped), and a very thick cheese sauce to make in a separate pot (a whisk helped prevent lumps). I substituted canola oil for about half of the butter in the cheese sauce, and also substituted cheddar for the processed cheese, and vegetable broth for the chicken broth. And I cooked the veggies a bit longer than suggested. It makes a HUGE pot of very filling soup.

And I still had a homemade corn muffin leftover from last night to eat with my bowl of soup tonight.

Thanks, Lauraly, and please thank your mom as well. (:

...how to make Lauraly’s cabbage soup. She passed along the recipe to Tink and me under another goal SEVEN months ago, and I’m finally getting around to trying it.

Here is a recipe for red lentil soup:

(this is the first soup I learned how to make!)

Coat the bottom of a medium pot with about 1mm of oil (maybe a bit less). It doesn’t matter which kind of oil, but rapeseed oil is awesome.

Cut up one small-to-medium yellow onion into smallish pieces.

Also cut up 1 or 2 cloves of garlic.

Make sure the red lentils are close by.

Also, have 2 coffee cups full of cold water close by.

Now:

Put the pot with the oil on the stove, and turn the stove onto high or medium high heat. You’re going to be turning the onions brown within a few minutes…in Sweden, I would say high heat, but it may be different for the US and Canada.

Now dump the onions into the pot. Stir them more or less constantly.

Once they are floppy and about 1/2 of them have turned brown, toss in the garlic clove(s)

Stir for about one minute, or until you can barely smell cooking garlic.

Now toss in just enough lentils to fairly lightly coat the bottom of the pan. Maybe about 1 1/2 handfuls or something like that.

Now stir the lentils around for a few minutes until most of them start to lose their color. You can even wait until all of them have lost some of their color. They will fade from red to a light red or a light brown.

Now carefully pour in one coffee cup of the water and stir. Pour in also about half of the other cup. You can add some more water later if you need to.

Add some salt and pepper…don’t add too much now. You can taste the soup later on and add more at any time.

Now let the soup boil for a while, until the lentils have all broken into pieces and are no longer whole, hard lentils. This shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes, MAX, and for me, it usually only takes 10 or so. Continue to check the water levels. If the soup starts to get too dry, add just a little bit of water. You’ll want it to be pretty thick later, so don’t water it down too much.

Now taste the soup. Don’t be afraid to add more salt if it needs it. Make sure that there aren’t any hard lentil pieces in your soup. If there are, just let it boil a bit longer until they break up.

Serve with large rye crisp crackers coated in a thin layer of butter.

...has been a long, slow process.

But in the past year, thanks to friends, magazines, and the Internet, I have been gradually expanding my repertoire.

Possibly my proudest moment so far was roasting my first turkey, as part of an emergency “distributed cooking” effort. A local charity traditionally serves a Thanksgiving meal to several hundred people in our community who might not otherwise be able to partake of the holiday feasting. But last October, a week before Canadian Thanksgiving, the charity’s kitchen burned down. Multiple turkeys had been donated, but there was no way to prepare them. So the call went out to 20 or 30 volunteers: could each of us take one turkey, cook it in our home oven, and schlep the ready-to-serve bird over to the school gym where the dinner was taking place?

Well, hey, what I won’t do for myself, I’ll jump to do for others who are in need. I’d already gotten a couple of roasted chickens under my belt, thanks to the patient coaching of several friends. So I figured I could handle it. Downloaded a recipe from the Web, and before I knew it, I’d accomplished something that used to seem like such a mystery – a kind of magic that certain people (my mama, my aunt, my ex-husband) could do almost effortlessly, but that just didn’t seem to be a strength of mine.

Having taken a long hiatus from acquiring new cooking skills over the winter, spring, and summer (when I allowed myself to dine out and order in way more than was strictly necessary), I now feel ready for my, er, next “course” of study. So, soup’s on … my 43T list now.

I finally understand how to make homemade soup. The broth is the important thing. There needs to be lots of flavor. For me, a good rule of thumb is: don’t use milk. At all. And garlic is always good.