With the arrival of severe breezes and falling leaves, the coming of winter is becoming more evident every day. We start looking to more reassuring foods -- dishes that warm us and make us feel at home. Barbecues and beer are eschewed in favor of hearty meals and apple cider. Among my personal cold weather favorites are soups and stews.
The advantage of soup and stew is that they can be made cheaply and easily. Virtually anyone with a stove and an appropriately large pot can make some sort of successful meal without too much fuss. In a sense, making these foods is the quintessential experience of uncomplicated cooking. You only need to consider time and ingredients, as the cooking method itself is almost invariably just throwing things into a pot of hot water.
Since soup and stew are such forgiving dishes, we can experiment with herbs, spices, vegetables or whatever else we think might work. The spirit of improvisation triumphs, because it is nearly impossible to ruin a soup to such an extent that it is inedible. Feel free to raid the mysterious ingredients that you may have in your pantry for a bold departure from the ordinary.
A cooking novice can use this as a way to learn how flavors interact and how a delicate equilibrium of flavor can be disrupted or adjusted by adding other ingredients.
Using store-bought stock, a delicious soup can take as little as an hour to make. I highly recommend buying this product if time is an issue -- no one will really notice, and even celebrity chefs on the Food Network praise today's commercial stock as acceptable. You can produce a very suitable Maryland Crab Soup in this manner with guidance from the Old Bay Web site, and I am certain that other such recipes exist.
However, sometimes one is engaged by the muse of impractical, romantic whims, driving him to do something more.
On some idealistic level, store-bought stock will never make a good soup simply because it is store-bought, and this is cheating. It is sometimes far too simple to rely upon the nuclear rays of the microwave to heat a pre-packaged product for a pre-ordained time, for predictable results.
Instead, one resolves oneself to create something in the purest way possible, with unprocessed ingredients, love and patience.
Truly homemade food carries with it a sense of nostalgia and family, a wistful look back to the time when you couldn't buy great prepared foods at supermarkets. It instills in the cook an appreciation for the modern life, and a love of the bygone one.
This past weekend at my house, my friends and I cooked chicken soup -- from scratch. Conceived to brighten the spirits of an ill housemate, we launched on the day-long process.
This involved making chicken stock, which by itself takes six to eight hours.
The process is time-consuming, and is spent laboriously boiling chicken parts, steeping herbs and spices, and carefully skimming fat and grease away.
With so much time devoted to merely making the base of a soup, the process became an epic affair.
Friends came together with a common concern for soup, spending hours together and taking turns checking the momentously large pot on the stove. A veritable soup micro-community congealed.
We were all focused on the novel endeavor, emotionally engaged with the challenge, anxiously awaiting the outcome.
Soup became the central focus of our lives -- we smelled soup, we saw soup steam, we talked about soup and we dreamed about eating soup.
Approximately 24 hours after beginning cooking the stock, the soup was ready, laden with chicken, noodles, celery, et cetera. How was it, though?
Mediocre.
Yes, all of that time went into making a relatively lackluster chicken noodle soup. But, by this point, the taste was secondary.
The labor, the singular vision, and the commitment made eating the soup a small victory.
The fact that a group of people spent that much time working together for one silly objective easily forgave any culinary misgivings of the final product.
I urge those with a kitchen to harness the incredible power of soup. Allow the slow, steamy process of making soup to decelerate your life to a relaxing and pastoral vision of the past that may have never existed. It matters not, for when soup is slowly simmering on the stove, a certain idealism overtakes even the most hard-nosed realist.
Who can resist the steamy aromas, the tangible warmth, the refreshing gurgle of boiling?
Fall is the perfect season to gather with
friends, wear sweaters (perhaps even scarves) and congregatd over food.
The great quantity and low cost of soups and stews makes them perfect for entertaining large groups without an incredible amount of effort.
You really can't go wrong, and you'll end up impressing a few people if you're lucky.
And don't forget how good chili tastes while watching a football game.
