Time and money

The last soup I made for soup swap -- Miso with onion and tofu-- was quick and cheap. This go around, I thought I was making something simple, but it turned out to be one of the most expensive and time consuming simple soups I've ever made. It's ramps season. I love the little wild leek that the food writer Jane Snow described as "like fried green onions with a dash of funky feet." I've sauteed it up, I've scrambled it into eggs, I've made hand pies with it, but I've never cooked it into a soup. Turns out it is a time consuming endeavor. First, you separate the greens from the bulbs. Then you wash each -- the bulbs being the most time consuming, because you have to cut off the roots, wash off the dirt, and peel off the slightly gelatinous caul. Then you chop up the greens and slice up the bulbs, and keep them separate. You sautee the bulbs with Vidalia onions in vegetable oil, til soft, and then add a bunch of dry white wine, and boil that off til the onions and ramps are even more tender. Then you add chicken stock and simmer for another half hour, til even more tender. Then you add the greens, and boil for one minute.

Now, puree the soup in small batches, and pour it through a fine mesh to press out the solids -- until you have a big pot of thin, delicate ramp soup. Now, you heat it up again, and just as it's hot, you whisk in some butter and grated Parmesan cheese.

It's helpful to listen to This American Life and call friends while you're cleaning the ramps bulbs, because that can take a couple hours if you're making enough for 8 quarts. But in the end you'll be left with a delicate, musty, Spring-green, delicious soup -- full of vitamins and purported to ward off the illnesses of winter.

Plus, you gotta love a soup whose name is plural. Ramps!

"If everyone ate more garlic, the world would be a happier place." (Ruth Reichl)

The thing about 44-Clove Garlic Soup is that while 44 cloves of garlic for 4 servings is totally reasonable, 44 cloves of garlic soup multiplied for 8 qts of soup swap soup, is (very decidedly) not. But since my mottos for soup-swap are "keep it simple" and "go big or go home," I decided to go for it. It didn't hurt that I've made this soup before, so I knew it wasn't that hard of a soup to make.

264 cloves of garlic and the realization that I didn't own a blender yet later, my sous chef and I were not sure I'd made the right decision. Thank god for the dollar store and its 15$ blenders: the 8 quarts of shit-ton-of-garlic soup came out perfectly. There is really no way to go wrong when the ingredients of your soup are: onion, butter, a shit ton of garlic, thyme, and cream. It's a soup from heaven, and on these last days of winter/first days of spring, it is exactly what is needed.

Miso Soup

When I lived in Portland, I had a wonderful housemate named Sally, who owned a sushi-making business. Her parents, Lily and Hamilton lived next door, and Lily -- who grew up in Japan -- made sushi too, and Ham helped deliver it.  I also worked for and with Sally -- both making and delivering sushi (and also we were in a band together.) Looking back, I can see that that was one the happiest times of my life. While we all lived in that configuration, Lily, who was an excellent cook and seamstress, having gotten her degree in Japan in home economics, taught me how to make a basic, simple miso soup, starting with her favorite no-MSG dashi. She also taught me that miso soup makes a most excellent breakfast. She also taught me that you should never boil the miso, so you don't stop its health-bearing fermentation process. She also sewed one of my bridesmaid's dresses, but that's another story entirely. Here's her recipe: Slice an onion very thin. Sautée it in a small pot in some oil, but not too much oil, until soft. Pour in 2 quarts of water and a packet (1+tsp) of mutenka hon katsuo (bonito and tangle mushroom extract) dashi. Bring to a boil, let boil for a minute or two. Turn off the heat. Mix some of the hot broth into 2-3 TBS miso. Mix into a paste, and then pour back into the hot water, stir to mix. Add some cut-up tofu, and a few leaves of any kind of greens (but usually spinach.)

Coconut Red Lentil Soup

Heath's soup reminded me of hot curry ice cream.

Honey's French Onion Soup

Second go-round for me on the Soup Swap, but this time it crept up on me. Pre-occupied with being a brand-new realtor, and exhausted from the endless walking, I needed a recipe that was not-too-elaborate. Something I wouldn't have to stand up too long to make. Also, something not too Winter-y (weather's changing!) and yet not Spring-y, either. I'm from South Louisiana, where it's not only Spring already, but also Mardi Gras season. Parades, family get-togethers, costumes, beads, funny floats, excitement... I'm deeply homesick right now. While pondering my family & what I was missing, I hit upon making my grandmother's French Onion soup.

We called my mother's mother 'Honey', because that's what my grandfather called her. One of us kids picked that name up & it stuck. She was a fabulous cook, known for her crawfish bisque (took days to make, starting with live crawfish in the bathtub), shrimp etouffee, cornbread, and this soup. I got her to tell me the recipe over 35 years ago, and have made it almost every winter since then. It involves vermouth, molasses, and a lot of black pepper. Like, make-your-nose-run-it-has-so-much black pepper. But it's fairly quick to make.

Besides picking out a soup, one of the hardest things about Soup Swap is figuring out how much to cook for 8+ people. Technically, you only HAVE to make enough for 7 people, but of course I want plenty of leftovers. My first Soup Swap venture, the calculations I figured for my old "little of this & that" pozole recipe barely made enough for the promised 7 quarts. This time would be different. About half-way through chopping (by hand!) the 7 pounds of onions, I was already sorry I was making so much. But I cried my way through it.

Then I discovered it was verrrry different to make this recipe in bulk than the usual way. Tons of onions don't 'smother' down easily in one pot! ('Smothering' is a Southern term for cooking onions until they're limp.) I broke it all up into 4 different pots, then threw it together into a big gumbo pot at the end. Put sliced French bread and grated parmesan & gruyere into baggies. Added what I HOPED was enough black pepper to be true to the recipe, but mindful that Yankees can't take that much heat. Made a funnel from tin foil & filled my soup swap jars.

Hope the Soup Group likes it. I recommend eating it, as I cooked it, while listening to Mardi Gras music: Iko-Iko, Big Chief, Carnival Time, and Mardi Gras Mambo are the classics. Put on some bright & shiny beads. And if you dare, put in an extra grind of black pepper, the way Honey liked it.

And now I like borsht

This post is written by One in Ten, and I totally filched it from my other blog.

I never liked borsht. I tried it hot, I tried it cold. I tried it home made, I tried it bottled. I tried it with sour cream, and without. I didn't like borsht. Then Sally, who is a spectacular cook, made it for dinner when I was in Portland, and I loved it. Loved it like it I wished I had a bigger appetite, so I could have had seconds. Loved it like I asked for the recipe. Which she gave me. Which I quadrupled. Which I made for Brooklyn Soup Swap. Which took forever. Which came out great. Which looks gorgeous in the glass jars. Which I served at a potluck with fellow swappers Mich, Abigail, and Melissa, and with guest slurpers Josh and Jane, who I've just met for the first time, who designs toys, and has an Etsy store called Hazel Village, and who brought a gaze of empty raccoon kits she had sewn, and stuffed them after dinner while I sewed some more flaxseed lavender bags. (Yes, I just wrote "a gaze of empty raccoon kits" -- a phrase for which I had to look up not one but two words. A group of raccoons is called either a nursery or a gaze, and baby raccoons are kits.) But this is about borsht.

Here's how I made it. I cleaned 16 beets, and rubbed them with oil, and put them into a roasting pan and baked them at 350 for what was supposed to be an hour. Only I left them in for 2 hours, because they were not at all soft after 1 hour. In a big soup pot, I melted two sticks of butter over high heat, and sautéed 8 diced onions until soft, and then added 20 cloves of diced garlic, 6 sliced carrots, and four sliced parsnips. I lowered the heat, and let those vegetables get soft. Then I added two 15 oz boxes of chopped tomatoes, 16 cups of vegetable broth, 8 tablespoons of honey, and I was supposed to add 8 bay leaves, 4 teaspoons of dry oregano, and 4 teaspoons of dry basil. Only I didn't have any bay leaf or basil, so I used 8 teaspoons of herbes de Provence instead, which means there was some rosemary in there too, and some thyme, and probably some savory as well. I brought all that to a boil, and then let it simmer while I peeled the cooled beets, and julienned them. Which is the part that took forever, and was also the most satisfying part -- knowing how well these little strips of beets would fit onto a spoon, and knowing how tender they would become. Then I added the beets to the soup, and was supposed to simmer it for 30 minutes, but mine needed about an hour to get the beets soft. Then I added a lot of salt, and waited for it to cool down enough to spoon into Ball Mason jars.

It came out great. As good as Sally's even, which is something of a full circle, because it was Sally's mother Lily who taught me how to make matse balls almost 20 years ago. Lily is a wonderful cook and seamstress from Japan, where she learned to make matse ball soup in her post-graduate home ec studies. It always delighted us both that my very authentic and fluffy matse balls are courtesy of the Japanese educational system. And now Sally's gone and taught me how to make borsht. What's next? Will Mayumi (Sally's daughter, who is also a good young cook who made lychee sorbet by simply blending lychees and ice) teach me how to makekreplakh, which I tried to make once, and which came out like with meat wrapped in in glue? (If she is going to, she's going to have to do it soon, because Mich and Abigail and I talked about having a kreplakh party, and I bet between us, we will unlock the secrets of the Jewish dumpling.) Or pickle my own herring?

But I think it's different. I don't think there's a trick to making borsht, the way there's a trick to getting matse balls light and fluffy, or ungummy kreplakh. I think my rite of passage isn't so much that I made borsht, but that I liked it. That I can hold my head up high now, proud and Jewy, and ask for seconds of the sweet red soup of the Slavs.

The communal cauldron will now blog.

An Introduction / I love jars.

The Brooklyn Soup Swap was started about two months ago by the brilliant Jenny Levison. Jenny will further  be known in this blog as "One in Ten". We are an exclusive but not elite group of cooks and community-seeker. Exclusive because we only have so many stock pots, New York kitchens could almost routinely double broom closets, and there are only so many weeks one can keep track of. Mason jars, however, one can never have too many. That is a non-issue.

For about two weeks we worked out the distribution plan, the necessity and arithmetic of jars, the itemized, prioritized review of our dietary needs, preferences, allergies, and what we each consider to be a reasonable amount of soup to swap. And it began.

I believe we all came to the swap from different places. We have not had a big existential discussion about this. I still have not met some of the people in it, actually. But I feel nonetheless like it has helped to foster a sense of community that I have been feeling lost to at times lately. This blog is another opportunity to work towards this larger goal, as well as simply share who you are, about your soup, and other related thoughts.

For instance, I would like to share this:

From Full Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice:

Everything we do on a daily basis--from what we eat to how we treat the stranger in the checkout line to how we get to work--is an opportunity to reverse this trend, to salvage our true beings from their sense of homelessness and alienation. When we buy eggs from a local rancher who lets his chickens range freely, we build a relationship and a community, a place where we belong, a home. When we soak our grains or brew our own herbal ale, we are doing something that is indigenous, natural, subtle, and hard to explain. When we ride a bike to the local farmer's market to do our shopping, we are making a change that is generous, gradual, and village-oriented. Not only do such activities help heal our hearts, but they create networks of support, ingenuity, and cooperation that will help us solve the problems we may soon be facing. Our survival may depend upon re-creating the village.

 Time for me to watch the sun set from my big office windows facing the Hudson.  Good night.