Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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The sky is the limit

Even though we still see summer leaves, now burnished burgundy and gold, stubbornly clinging, once the first snowfall touches down, once that long, incessantly rainy gloomy day lasts into the night, you know it’s here. Soup Season. It’s upon us.

There is something so comforting once the cold weather comes and you feel that chill in your bones not only to cook or eat warm foods, but to fire up the stove and see that hot flame flicker.

Sure, I prepare refreshingly cold soups in summer time. There are the apricot hues or verdant bright greens or roasted red peppers or classic gazpacho.

But blended produce using a sterile piece of metal? That’s not quite true-soup, if you know what I mean. There is something about the warmth of turning on the fire, of hearing that zzz of a sizzle as an onion strip hits the pot and splatters dots of oil everywhere. For as we all know, it’s those caramelized onions (and a roux) that build the base of any warm soup worth eating. So here we are at the threshold of November . . . soup’s on!

I’m stocking up on butternuts and buttercups, legumes, grains, broths, canned tomatoes, crusty breads and other soup essentials. I foresee a lot of soup ladling in my near future.

On these shorter, darker days, lacing velvety autumnal ripening squash soups with the warm trifecta of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, lends a certain aromatic depth and comfort to the simmering soup process that permeates our evenings.

There was a time that I aimed to infuse my soups with coolness factors, complexity of flavors or creativity. Then there was the phase where I classified soups by color coding them: orange, ivory, green.

These days, for a while now, not only have I returned back to the basics of preparing classic, hearty, simple soups, but if there is a hack around that can potentially abbreviate the cooking process, I welcome it.

In the culinary fantasies of my past, I’ve already had an ice cream shop. It was called Scoops. The shop was decorated with floor-to-ceiling wallpaper made up of black and white newspaper sheets. Scoops, get it? There was an imaginary sweet bake shop. A bread bakery. And a niche breakfast place, too.

Well, once upon a time, there was also as it’s called in Israel a “marakiyah,” a “soup-ery.” Because in the brutal frozen-ness of winter, who would not want to step into a place that cocoons you in the warmth of steaming — I’m talking fogging up the windows level of steaming — hot pots of soup?

Let’s face it, while it might be true that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” (I won’t argue with Mary Poppins), it’s a spoonful of hot soup that helps chase the brutal chill of winter away!

The truth is that soups are a perfect vehicle for layering multiple levels of flavor and texture. It’s all in the fixins. I know, normally you associate the word fixins with all the extras you pile high on a hamburger. But it turns out, a cozy bowl of soup is the perfect food to dress up.

Before serving a bowl of hot soup, you can accent your bowl with anything from chunky croutons to pickled onions, herbs, a dollop of sour cream, limes, legumes, sliced browned coins of sausage or smokey toasted nuts and seeds. The sky is the limit. My mom once sprinkled popcorn atop a bowl filled with one of her magical nurturing elixirs.

Of course, let’s not forget the knaydlach, matzah ball dumplings, which are delicious in any and every kind of winter soup, whether chicken is present or not.

Those wet matted leaves can cling away — and I empathize! But deep down we know, it’s a hot pot of delicious soup on the fire that, in winter, as the famed British vernacular goes, keeps us calm and carries us on.

Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News



Tehilla Goldberg

IJN columnist | View from Central Park


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