Soup!

It was unseasonably warm and sunny the past two weeks and I was not feeling it. In mid October, I don't want to have to deal with highs of 80 and constant sunshine. I'm looking longingly at leather boots and big sweaters. I'm so over sundresses.

The weather was throwing off my cooking as well. I have about 10 soup recipes I've been reading longingly at work, refreshing the Weather Channel page trying to see when it turns into fall. French onion soup, butternut squash with cumin and coriander, curried carrot soup, southwest tomato, miso soup, lentil soup.... And a recently bought an adorable little soup tureen-


Earlier this week I made a late-summer soup, an attempt to compromise with the weather. I made a bouillabaisse with tomato and corn. The recipe is intended to use fresh-from-the-farm heirloom tomatoes and sweet corn off the cob, which is lovely, but substituting two 14 0z cans of diced tomatoes and half a bag of frozen corn didn't do any harm. Cooked a little garlic in some olive oil, threw in canned tomatoes, a cup of white wine, a can of chicken broth, and a pinch of saffron. (Yeah, saffron is stupid expensive. I wouldn't recommend running out and spending your week's food budget on it to make this soup. If you have it, awesome.) Throw in a pound of some seafood- I used cod, cut up in chunks. You can use halibut, shrimp, bay scallops, mussels, or a combination there of. After the fish is cooked through, stir in corn.


And now it's nice and cold outside. Kinda rainy too. It seemed like a good day to try out my gorgeous new Wusthof chef's knife to chop up a big pile of vegetables for a minestrone. I diced up a medium onion, two stalks of celery, a big carrot and 3 cloves of garlic to make a standard mirepoix. Nice low and slow heat lets the onions caramelize a little, giving the soup amazing depth. The Fine Cooking recipe I was sort of following called for chopped savoy cabbage, but standing in the supermarket, the kale sitting next to the cabbage looked a lot more appealing. And I didn't have to buy a basketball-sized head of it. (And I freaking love kale.) After the chopped kale cooked down I added a can of diced tomatoes and 3 cups of chicken broth. Instead of pasta, I added some barley. I love whole grains, they have that dense chewy texture and nutty flavor. To pump it up, I threw in the rinds off of a wedge of Parmesan, a really cool way to give it more flavor. After simmering for a while I added in a can of kidney beans.



With vegetable broth, this is a really great well rounded vegetarian meal. Between the barley, the kidney beans, and the kale, this couldn't really be any more nutritious.