Not-Too-Bad Soup - a Recipe, of Sorts

Yummy Squash

I am a pretty good cook, not to toot my own horn, or anything. I think I became a pretty good cook because I like to experiment with recipes and ingredients. Nothing pleases me more than to go to my cupboard, a'la Mother Hubbard, and try to fix something edible from what I find there. I grew up cutting my culinary teeth, so to speak, in the gumbo pot of cooking that is New Orleans, where home cooks are famous for not measuring ingredients (except for baking, which is different from cooking), but just throwing stuff in a kettle and adding a pinch of this or a dollop of that, and sometimes using their cupped palms to measure things. I learned to be fearless in my cooking experimentations. This worked out very well, usually. (My family would be only too eager to regale you with horror stories of my "mishaps," given the chance, however.)

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In the previous post, I mentioned that I had intended to blog about making tomato soup, inspired by Plutarch's recipe. I didn't have exactly the list of ingredients that Joe used, but the soup I made was tasty and nourishing. I used canned (tinned) tomatoes, boxed chicken broth, garlic and pepper. I didn't have any cardamom on hand, but I did have a jar of a very good pesto in the refrigerator, so I used a healthy dollop of that. The basil in the pesto was a beautiful complement to the tomatoes, with the pine nuts adding an unusual, but delightful, uh...je nais se quoi in both aroma and flavor. (Yes, I had to Google the French. I can say it, but I didn't know how to spell it. Hope I picked the correct spelling.)

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Today I went grocery shopping. My food budget is extremely low, so I was looking for inexpensive things to use for my supper tonight. It's soup weather here in south-central Pennsylvania; rather cold out. (As my dear old daddy used to say, "It's colder than a well-digger's butt in Idaho out there!")

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One of my favorite soups is a bean and sausage concoction I learned to make from watching one of the cooking shows on television. It calls for chicken broth, white beans, Italian-style fresh sausage, spinach or rabe, onions, garlic, diced tomatoes and oregano. I was on the prowl for sausage and the rabe. Couldn't afford either of them, but I found some dandelion greens and half a butternut squash as inexpensive substitutes. I've never used dandelion greens in anything but salad or mixed with other greens in a "mess o' greens," so this was going to be one of those 'mad-scientist-in-the-la-BOR-atory' cooking sessions. (Try to imagine you hear Boris Karloff saying that - sounds so much better in my head than when I say it aloud.)

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Back to tonight's repast. I think one of the reasons the dandelion greens were so cheap (32-cents for about a pound of them) is because the grocer figures you're going to have to spend an hour washing all the sand from the leaves, so he dare not charge more for them. I mean, nothing is worth that much effort, and I wouldn't have bothered, except I wasn't going to throw away thirty-two cents! I could have bought a stale cookie from the bakery for that thirty-two cents, for heaven's sake, so I was going to wash those leaves if it took all afternoon to get them clean.

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The squash had been peeled in the grocery, so all I had to do was cut it into chunks. Ever try cutting a butternut with a paring knife? Doesn't work too well. I speared it with the fork I use for lifting the turkey onto a platter, then went in search of my kitchen-grade chainsaw. Of course, I kidding. No one has invented one of those chainsaws yet.

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Once I had the greens, squash, onion, garlic and broth simmering, I rummaged through the spice rack for things to dress up the soup. I used thyme, cumin (yeah, I know - odd pot-fellows, aren't they?), black pepper and the slightest pinch of salt. Then my eyes befell the bottle of chipotle chile (that's how it is spelled on the label, so blame McCormick) on the shelf with all my other peppers. Chipotle is a stealthy assassin, in that it doesn't take much of it to set your mouth afire, but I do love its smokey-sweet, almost bitter, taste. Reminds me of burnt sugar, the odor that used to waft upriver from the sugar refinery near our house in Chalmette, Louisiana.

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I pulled what I thought was a small pinch from the bottle and dropped it into the simmering broth. Immediately, the heat released by the broth climbed out of the pot on the back of the steam and torched my nose hairs. I made the mistake of rubbing my nose with the same hand that owned the pepper-laden fingers, used to extract the deadly pinch. Well, duh, Martha! Aren't you glad you weren't scratching your tender bits with that hand?

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I tasted the broth and was surprised at the level of heat from so small a pinch. Yet, it was good. I let the soup simmer for several more minutes and tasted it again. The chipotle dominated the pot, which is not what makes a good soup. My lips were hot from tasting the liquid, almost painful. I had read somewhere that sugar tames the heat in chili peppers, so I added about half a teaspoonful to the soup, let it simmer a couple of minutes, then tasted it again. That worked, or else the heat had already dissipated on its own.

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When the squash was about half tender, I added the beans and diced tomatoes. Because the soup was thin, I added a potato, diced small, thinking it would soften to mush and help thicken the broth. Now my soup was becoming a vegetable stew, and it was becoming more complex in flavor. The cumin needed something to balance it, so I added a couple of tablespoons of green mole to two cups of the stew and pulsed all in the food processor until a smooth paste formed, which was added to the pot. A few minutes more and soup was on. I ended up with a couple of gallons of yummy experimental stuff, creamy without adding cream or roux, very low salt (my blood-pressure likes that), and a new flavor combination that I like very much.

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Wish I had written down exactly what the heck I did!

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore