Stone Soup

I am sure it seems a strange topic for a warm summer day. With this pregnancy, soup is one of the few things that actually sounds good to me. It started with a Campbell’s chunky soup that AB picked up that was a tomato base with pepperoni, pasta and mushrooms. Then I moved onto the Italian Wedding Soup a few times, which I have always really liked. Today I headed off to a local specialty soup café for lunch.

Many people I work with rave and rave about this place. I realized its popularity when I arrived at 11:30am and within 10 minutes, the line was out the door. I do have to say though, that while it is good. It fell short of what I was expecting. Part of this is my typical foodie nature, I love good food and I seek out really good food. The other part of this I fear, was my reading the menu.

I envisioned a wide selection of soups and breads, where I would struggle to decide which to have and would probably end up having to try more than one. In fact, the menu was comprised mostly of sandwiches with two options for soup, the weekly soup (a corn chowder) and the daily soup (chicken and rice). I knew in an instant that with my sensitive stomach that the corn chowder would be a no go, but the chicken and rice sounded like the just the thing. Where my skewed view of the café probably came in was seeing the Friday soup of the day: “Ivar’s Clam Chowder”.

I immediately started wondering if the soup that I ordered was homemade or out of a can. It was good soup. It was very plain. Exactly what my stomach needed. I gobbled up every drip of the bowl I ordered and felt amazing afterwards. But let’s go back to the Ivar’s thing… and I love Ivar’s clam chowder… from Ivar’s. If you are familiar with Washington State you probably know that Ivar’s is a pretty famous and tasty chain that specializes in fish and chips, other fried seafood delicacies and clam and salmon chowder. It really is quite good. But I just have a mental block when it comes to a specialty soup joint serving someone elses soup! (Or chowder as the case may be.) Especially when you can get said chowder at the mall, the grocery store and Costco.

I grew up with homemade soups. My grandfather’s ham hocks and beans was the first soup I can remember gobbling up. Simple soup, soak your Great Northern beans overnight and pick them over. The next day sear your ham hocks in a large stew pot. Pull them out and add a diced onion. Saute until translucent. Dump in a bunch of water, replace the ham hocks, add the beans and simmer all day until beans are done and salt to taste. This is my ultimate comfort food and one I make every single year where inevitably I buy ham hocks (or shanks) and the checker wrinkles their nose and asks what I might be making with THOSE! Make it even better with a batch of homemade corn bread. My grandfather was a back woods Southerner.

I grew up with my mom making a homemade chicken noodle soup straight from a chicken carcass and with thick doughy noodles. I can reproduce that soup to a tee, and it is spectacular. AB keeps every chicken carcass with the hopes that I might just get an inkling (like every month) to make homemade chicken noodle soup.

Every Thanksgiving I make my cream of mushroom soup where (since I am not a huge turkey fan) I could just eat bowl after bowl as my main dish. I make a mean red chili with beans and AB makes the most heavenly pork green chili each fall. Seriously yumm. AB also rocks at clam chowder. And my favorite soup out? Two of them… a local Italian restaurants minestrone topped with a dollop of pesto (it’s the pesto that sends it over the edge for me) and I will admit to drooling over Olive Garden’s Pasta Fazziole. The best soup I have ever tasted in my entire life? Bistro Jeanty's seafood bisque. Too.die.for.

Soups are really easy to make, incredibly versatile and yummy. I need to expand my soup repertoire. But for me, soup isn’t something you just make from a recipe. I get ideas from recipes. In my house, with the exception of my very basic ham hocks and beans recipe, soup is a big pot on the stove where you throw everything that sounds yummy.

Oh and the absolute best part of my lunch? The lemon poppy seed shortbread cookie. Now that, I need a recipe for.