Soups

Dad Ringler and Soup

My father loved a good soup.  Make it hot and salty and chunky – chicken soup filled with carrots and bites of chicken, hearty mushroom barley, split pea soup with fat studded flanken and suckable bones.

I often start my meals with soup, especially in the winter months.  To make life easy, I keep quart containers in the freezer filled with chicken stock, (either home or butcher made) to use as the base for meat soups.  My friend and cooking mentor, Katja Goldman, taught me to keep the unused portions of vegetables – like the stems from parsley, once the leaves are removed, or the scrapings from carrots and bottoms of mushrooms – in a Ziploc bag in the freezer.  Boil up those remains and you have a quick vegetable stock and the basis for a vegetarian soup. The stock will add a depth of flavor to a vegetarian soup, much better than just using water or even packaged vegetable stock.

Some soups, like the Libyan or the Moroccan Harira soups, are veritable meals in themselves.  More stew than soup, they are colorful, flavorful and filling.  Perfect for those cold days.

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