I often give people a hard time about the general loss of common sense today. No one tries to figure anything out for themselves anymore, what with sites like Yahoo Answers and wikihow and soyouwanna, it’s so much easier to google something and get a second or third opinion. I mean, really, really, a video on how to organize empty food containers? But yes, there it is…
But then I made a vegetable soup last week, and for the umpteenth time, it ended up tasting like *cricket sounding* nothing… I ate some of it down, because it was filled with some of the healthiest food on earth (I don’t eat nearly enough beets according to whfoods.com) but I sure didn’t like it.
Then today for lunch, I ordered an “Italian style minestrone” at a local salad/soup bar. The cook who served it to me asked me if I’d ever been to Italy. When I said “no”, he said, “Well, you’re going there now!” I told him I couldn’t wait, and damn, he was right. That soup was Capital-T-Tasty.
I got back to my desk, and despite all of my complaining about the mountains of garbage on the internet, I had to swallow my pride, realize that I had lost the ability to produce homemade soups with flavour, and went to the internet for advice.
I googled “why are commercial soups so much tastier than homemade soups?” but didn’t get anything productive… Then I typed in “Best homemade soup recipes” and came across this website: http://www.homemade-soup-recipes.com/index.html
Yeah, I know, it’s ridiculous. An entire website dedicated to soup-making. And not fancy-pants gourmet soups with food porn photos – oh no – just standard, “here are the base elements of soup-making, you silly dork who couldn’t figure it out.”
Flavour base. Broth. Main Ingredients. Are you kidding me? Well, apparently I needed it.
Of course my big problem with soups is my total aversion to fats and salt – i.e. flavour country. I found most broths were too high in sodium, and so would just use water in my soups. Well, you can’t release the flavour of your ingredients in water. Pretty common sensical, and yet, somehow, I’d lost that piece of the puzzle.
My mom actually is the queen of stock. She makes the. best. turkey. stock. And she makes a boatload!! After thanksgiving and Christmas, once the meal is done, the visitors have gone home, the wine has left it’s earmark around the glasses, she debones the bird, saving the meat for sandwiches, and dumps the bones, the fat, all the leftover bits into a huge pot, along with any leftover stuffing (yeah right!), vegetables, even the mashed potatoes are dumped into the stock pot, and filled with some raw onions and a couple of bay leaves (I think) and water. Simmer for three to four days (yes, days) and pass through a sieve. Dump liquid into single serve containers (oh, about 36 thousand of them) and freeze.
And there you have your stock needs for the rest of the year. And the soups she made, they were oh-so-goooood.
While I’m still reeling from my last pathetic attempt at soup, I do have faith, and hope, for the future. I will take the information imparted to me from the big bad web, and will do my best with what I’ve learned. I will add oil and salt to my soups, and hope that I somehow regain that bit of my logical, rational mind that seems to have been lost in the haze of my late 20s… Or something…