Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-09-30 - 8:41 a.m.

Change of Seasoning

Soup! I want soup!

It's a soup morning.

I don't mean I want soup this morning...soup for breakfast, that would be wrong. I want soup to look forward to, end-of-the-day soup. I don't get this weather, it's such a tease - wake up at six and it's definitely a soup morning, but then it all burns off and by afternoon there's definitely a cold cuts evening coming on.

But the leaves are turning, and I have a bottle of red wine in my refrigerator. Red wine - don't ask me how I came by THAT, it was happenstance; but I don't drink the stuff, so it's definitely the harbinger of Italian Sausage soup. Either that, or I have some strange company coming that I don't know about yet.

Them Campbell's people got it right - soup is good food. Of course, they put way too much salt in theirs, but their hearts are in the right place. I eat their Bean with Bacon, and sometimes their Green Pea if I have any Cheezits to float in it. That's childhood food. That's what you had after swimming for hours and hours, so that you still felt like you were floating while you sat at the table and ate. It came with a sandwich, maybe even cut the special way, in triangles. I'm a grown-up now, though, so I dump Tabasco in it, like my mother did.

I don't want canned soup, though. I probably have canned soup in the pantry - I think there's a jumbo can of chicken noodle, and I can't even remember what possessed me. Nobody here is going to eat that. That's Food Drive food, right up there with tomato aspic. There's a huge can of enchilada sauce that's gonna figure big in someone's Christmas dinner, too. I did have a plan when I bought these things, but I lost it somewhere along the line. Canned Chicken Noodle does not appeal.

I could make a homemade chicken noodle, with the noodles I learned to make from my mother- big chewy egg noodles. She'd roll the dough into a tube and we'd get to cut the noodles and unroll them. They were kind of elongated dumplings, really. But I didn't get my kids started on them early enough, and they wouldn't touch them now. My kids are Fornicalians, they don't even eat noodles - they eat "pasta." You can say a lot of things about my mother's soup noodles, but there is no way you're gonna pass them off as "pasta."

I could make minestrone - that has pasta. I make a way kewl minestrone. Make it in about an hour. Sacrilege. You can't make soup in an hour! Well, I can. It's good, too. I just found the weight to the pressure cooker - yeah, it was in the bottom of the dish drainer, what can I say, I looked there a hundred times and it WASN'T and then it was - so I can make minestrone if I want to, but then that would leave me with this red wine in my refrigerator. Don't tell me the refrigerator is no place for red wine, I know that - YOU come drink it. I haven't got any counter space for that sort of thing.

You can make soup out of most anything, that's what I like. I have recipes for it - the Italian Sausage or my minestrone or a wonderful borscht - but really, all you need is some broth, and you've got soup. Lessee, I got one slice of corned beef, and part of a tomato, half a cold baked potato and a jalapeno - I got soup! You can do this, you know. You can't serve it to company, but you can feed yourself. You can curry damn near anything, too. I have only a few soup/curry exceptions. You can't curry kiwi. Nope, can't do it. Cucumbers are problematic, and throw that bologna away. Stuff like that. But mostly, soup is forgiving. Tolerant. Warm, even.

So I had this soup discussion with a friend over the weekend, and now I want some. Gonna have to do it; gonna have to hang up the pool key and maybe take down the table umbrella and make some real fall-is-here food. I can put the cold cuts in soup. Glad we're out of watermelon, though.

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