This week’s soup began like so many others in this blog, at Caputo’s. This ethnic Italian grocery store has some of the best produce in town, even better than Whole Foods most of the time. Their stuff is interesting too. It reminds me of the Jon’s in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles. Jon’s had […]
My brother-in-law’s turning 50 yesterday reminded me of the beginnings of my culinary education. I was still in college then, working on degree number two and teaching myself to cook by plowing through all the recipes my mom had made when I was growing up. I made tamale pie (rechristened “tamale slop” by a crew […]
The soup this week was something of a command performance. My wife and I are co-hosting a fund-raising dinner with another couple on Saturday and we wanted to offer jars of soup as a take away for the attendees. To be honest, co-hosting may be too generous a term. The couple we’re working with are […]
I was looking through the blog archives this week (Oh, the memories…) and discovered that I’ve categorized twenty-two of my thirty soups as vegetarian. (Sorry, I haven’t gone so far as to classify which are vegan (some), or ovo-lacto vegetarian (most), or even pesco-vegetarian (none, yet). Please bear with me.) Now, before you start asking […]
I always hear about parents who can’t get their kids to eat vegetables. Then they discover soup and everyone lives happily and healthily ever after. Fruit, on the other hand, is something kids already love to eat. So there’s really no justification for making it into a soup. Unless, of course, your world doesn’t revolve […]
Everything I know about rhubarb fits into a tin or a diamond—from the sweet-tart pie filling that out-sours both Pippin and Granny Smith apples to the everyday scuffles that used to define baseball before money did. (Did somebody say sour?) So when my sister-in-law walked me through the early part of her garden clipping rhubarb […]
I wasn’t feeling very well this week so I didn’t make any soup. Not that I’m leaving you without a recipe. I’m not inhospitable. It’s just that, after a few days of feeling a bit like a slab of meat, I decided to go with a favorite meatless entree. It’s a vegetarian chili from my […]
At our house mushrooms are magical, not in a crazy Timothy Leary kind of way, but because of fairies. As any parent of daughters knows, mushroom circles are known as fairy or pixie rings and serve as portals to the supernatural world. European and American folklore is filled with stories of mortals witnessing fairies coming […]
When I was growing up, the kitchen was the domain of the mothers and sisters. The males would wander in occasionally with their ham-fisted attempts at cooking such family favorites as fried chicken and tamale pie (the only known use for Green Giant Mexicorn), but for the most part we stayed out of the way. […]
