Cooking Stone Soup
Cooking is Essential.
It is a Life Skill and an expression of Creativity.
And soup - it can make something out of a little.
And yet many are just rediscovering cooking, especially in 2020 among my generation.
During the pandemic, a lot of people have learned to cook 'for the first time in their lives.' That seems so odd, but I do understand it having seen so many others in my generation with vastly different upbringings. Some got to have frozen microwave meals and fast food. We didn't. Even when we lived in the house 'in town' and not miles and miles out in the forest (the rest of the time) we cooked from scratch most of the time.
I've been doing a lot more cooking this week just trying to sort out some of the things I use to cook on a regular basis. The family cookbook I am working on contains things we all like to eat and also a variety of things like the Stone Soup recipe at the end of this post that I learned to cook from scraps and bits growing up.
balsamic kale with curry to be served over mashed potato
How I learned to cook
I was a latchkey kid. Mom worked at a resort WAY out of town cooking and cleaning. My stepdad did a morning paper route and then slept most of the rest of the day. My brother worked at a sawmill, also WAY out of town. My sister had moved to Oklahoma after graduation. And here I was the youngest, home and trying to be quiet so stepdad could sleep.
I was allowed to cook anything I wanted, as long as it didn't use up all the bread, milk or involve raw meat. Mom had a 'thing' about raw meat. I think she didn't even like to really cook it because of the 'when is it done and safe' issue. She boiled and overbroiled everything until it was good and dead. My husband shudders at the thought today. Almost everything I have learned about cooking meat has come from him and a few experiments in college after pulling an arm out of the socket and being told to consume X # of grams of protein every day for it to heal.
But those years of poking through the backs of cupboards looking at random things Mom got at the food shelf or relatives passed to us etc. prepared me for the real world quite a bit better than coming home to packages of cookies or even Mac n Cheese. Those first few years I was a young teen, and it was mostly ramen noodles, canned vegetables and instant potatoes. I experimented with spices and learned that lentils, dry beans and rice were my friends. We had a large garden every year, and Mom did put up canned vegetables in the basement. I poked through the health food store where Mom sometimes sold spinach and broccoli and other things we grew in the garden. I learned to bake simple biscuits, make quinoa and a certain concept called 'stone soup' where you use a little of this and a little of that until you have something that is edible.
a walnut soup I made once... experimentation is key to learning
The Story of 'Stone Soup'
There is an old fairy tale about Stone Soup... where in a very bad year for food the old woman in the middle of town is boiling a big pot of water and puts in a big stone. Her neighbors see this and shake their heads at her. They ask her what she is doing and she tells them 'It is Stone Soup, it will be so good' and scatters a few little herbs into the pot. They pity her for thinking she can eat 'stone soup', but then one offers a potato, for a share of the soup. And another adds some salt, and another a carrot, one a handful of barley and on and on until they actually have a decent soup brewing. Then they all sit together and eat bowls of their collaborative effort and end up with a much better and nutritious meal than any of them could have made on their own.
I still keep a big shelf full of things that my husband and child would probably not eat until it was the last thing in the house. There is brown rice, buckwheat pasta, lentils, split peas, several kinds of dry beans, barley and oats in there, along with a small collection of vinegars, oils, dried currants, seaweed and guajillo peppers. I have sometimes too much kept over in the freezer from the garden the year before. With the pandemic, I've been keeping bags of potatoes and onions on hand as cheap easy food extensions. We often throw some potatoes in with meat roasts or make fried onions to go with rice or eggs. Those things, at least, my family will eat.
But then there are things like this soup I will tell you about, which come straight out of my latchkey past, that I know they won't eat but I make anyway. My husband usually just shakes his head and says 'I'm not even going to ask...'
The last few nights I've made a version of 'stone soup' that went something like this:
A bit of a recipe, changeup the ingredients as you wish
1 small onion
fresh cabbage
water (about 2 cups here)
red lentils (about 1/4 cup or a small handful here)
olive oil or butter (I used butter)
salt
pepper
spices (celery seed, fivespice, pepper)
frozen vegetable (okra, but chopped summer squash would be great)
frozen meat (meatball or kielbasa or poultry)
if desired - 1 egg
The process:
1 onion chopped, a few leaves of cabbage, chopped and shredded, a handful of red lentils (rinsed and drained). Wash the lentils by placing them in a container, pouring clean water over them and 'scrubbing' with your finger tips. You do the same thing for rice before it is cooked. Drained all the water away while not losing the lentils down the drain. Scrubbing them a few times like this takes away a lot of excess dirt and chaff remnants that may still be in the bag. It's a simple thing - but I have met a lot of people who still don't know how or why to wash their rice.
Spices: celery seed (not salt) and five spice powder which contains cinnamon, star anise, fennel, peppercorns and cloves. Sometimes I will add some coriander as well.
I take a little butter and melt it hot in a pan, then add the onions and the cabbage. Once they have started to soften I add the celery seed and stir it up really well. I let that stir fry just a bit, once the vegetables soften, then add the other ingredients
Then add the water and washed lentils, the five spice and extra salt, pepper or garlic. I might add a chicken bouillon cube into it. I turn it down to the the threshold of bubbling and let it cook the lentils while stirring every 3 to 5 minutes.
When the lentils have begun to become soft, then I will add in other frozen or canned vegetables (okra, in this case, from a postal route customer this summer) and any bit of meat I might have as a seasoning, a meatball or kielbasa sausage or leftover chicken etc. If you didn't like using meat, you could put in half a can of beans or peas. Once the broth reduces a bit more and everything has warmed through, I will turn the heat up just a bit and put an egg in the pot. I put the lid on the pot and poach the egg right in the soup.
Eat soup with bread or crackers!
The whole process usually takes about 30 to 40 minutes, so it isn't 'quick'. It wouldn't feed a gang of rampaging teenagers. But it is satisfying to put something together and have it be your own. I know that just from this little store in my cupboard and a few vegetables I could probably make up something like this almost any night of the week.
Save some for the Hounds
And I get some validation from these eyes here... even if my husband and child would rather have chips and a hamburger there are five of these noses that appreciate and usually eat almost any leftovers I have. I usually sit at the table or couch with a ring of them around me hoping they are going to get to split the last spoonfuls.
She loves anything with spices in it, even if it also has vegetables.
Sometimes I have to laugh out loud when I'm beginning to cook, open up the spices and turn and see this face. Minerva, the dog who loves curry (and five spice as well, it seems)
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