The Holy Trinity: Soup, Chili and Puree

It is supposedly winter, though you may not know it from the sunny California weather out here. But the nights are chilly and we are periodically pounded by bouts of rain that at least give us the vague impression that we have changed seasons.

Thus my body has taken on a love of cold-weather food. I’ve had cravings for the warming sensation of soups, perhaps a leftover from the wonderfully warming soups that my host mom would make.

So over this quarter I have hit pretty much each kind of soup that you might imagine. I was inspired by my host mother’s potato-leek soup into searching my favorite food blogs for a similar recipe. I stumbled upon that of David Lebowitz and after haphazardly cutting down the amounts (really does one person need to make 6-8 servings of soup) I had a lightly green puree to cozy up with. Ok, I will admit, with all my tinkering the recipe turned out rather bland, but with some generous shakes of the pepper shaker, a pinch of red pepper flakes and some croutons it wasn’t half bad. And as a bonus I got to use my favorite Christmas gift; my immersion blender.



My second craving was for a more standard soup. Actually, I wanted home-made chicken noodle soup, but I am still nervous around raw meat as a result of my stint as a vegetarian and thus I ended up with a vegetable soup. No recipe this time, it was a blending of my own imagination with a few ideas taken from about seven different recipes in the soup section of my Betty Crocker cookbook. This is essentially what I did: sauté up some onion, celery and carrots. Then add vegetable broth and various other cut up vegetables to the pot along with some fresh parsley, a bay leaf, some brown rice and beans; let cook for as long as you can last before hunger gets in the way. The only things I would recommend for this are to not use chickpeas as I did, some other bean would be far more interesting, and to only add things like bell peppers in the last few minutes so they don’t lose their crispness. And of course, salt and pepper to taste, lots of pepper if you are anything like me.


Last night got me to the most successful of my endeavors. I got over that horrible block I have of making things alone that I’m sued to making with my mom. I got the recipe for her vegetarian green chili, which in my family is more like a thick stew than the sauce you see in Mexican restaurants. I don’t know that I can reveal the family recipe but suffice to say that it does involve green chilies, jalapenos, diced tomatoes and fake ground beef which went unnoticed as an imposter. The spices you’ll have to work out yourself. It was quite a surprise that despite my nervousness the chili actually tasted just-like-mom-makes (sorry, Mom, I’ll try not to do so well next time! I’ll still make it with you.). It is always better with crème fraîche rather than sour cream, but after two grocery stores, there was no way that I was going to make a special trip to find it. My only regret is that there wasn’t much in the way of leftovers!

So, if the winter is getting you down, I think the best way to counter the blues (be it blue lips or just the midterm blues) it a nice warm bowl of soup.