Clean out your fridge and make some soup
If I weren’t looking at the calendar, I would swear spring was just around the corner. OK, we got another snowfall and there’s a bit more in the forecast as I look ahead for this week as I write, but it just feels like spring is in the air.
Yesterday was Presidents Day and with the day off I had leisure to saunter around my yard and check on the state of things outdoors. It appears that my parsley is still alive under the snow!
It is supposed to die during the winter so this is hard to believe. I know, I know, winter is not yet over, but I am surely feeling hopeful!
At the end of fall, when we gathered up our winter squash and pulled it indoors before a damaging frost and dug up the last of the carrots and beets, I wondered if I might make them last all winter. However, we don’t have a cool place indoors to store squash so we just kept them at room temperature.
The butternut and spaghetti squash have fared quite well and are still defying mold, however the buttercup and acorn squash have been getting taken over by creeping rot. Confident that I could keep beets, carrots, kohlrabi and leeks for months into the winter, I carefully cleaned them, bagged them and stowed them away in the fridge.
At Christmas time, when space in my refrigerator was premium, I moved some bags to a lower level tiny fridge – which once resided in a child’s dorm room. Then I forgot about them until one day when son Logan opened the fridge and a mighty fighter was nearly knocked out by the odor of decay.
There were also bags of apples I’d planned to make into applesauce, but had forgotten about. It took myself, a pro in cleaning up after kids who were ill, to divest the fridge of two bags of mooshy brownish apples, one bag of softened carrots and another of beets long past their prime.
And the smell was so awful; it filled the entire lower level. I lighted a scented candle and turned on an exhaust fan. A week or so later I had the courage to open the door again and found the bag of kohlrabi still filled with firm bodies and a large bag of leeks, although its green leaves were yellowing, underneath the white flesh was still firm.
I’d forgotten about those leeks and had another batch in the upstairs fridge I’d used up in vegetable soup a few weeks ago. Perhaps more soup, I thought. I’d also located some plastic bags of dried tomatoes and zucchini that I’d originally thought might be used for soup during the winter. As winter is waning, the time for using this laid by produce is now!
Leeks are something new for me. I once watched a TV cooking show where the proper cutting and washing of leeks was demonstrated. Basically, heaping soil up around the plants whitens the lower portion of leeks. They look like a big, long onion. However, one cutting open a leek can be surprised by dirt that’s been trapped inside the plant as it grows.
Thus, washing this trapped dirt out of the plant is tricky. One cook showed how to slice up the lower end then wash the dirt out this way. Another, perhaps easier method might be cutting it up and then rinsing it in a colander.
All this leek talk is leading to vegetable soup. A generous supply of leeks lends themselves to creating a very flavorful soup.
Since Christmas I have been very fascinated by my new cookbook, “The Victory Garden Cookbook” by Marian Morash. Published in 1982, this book with a young Marian on the cover reminds me of an earlier time in my life. Marian had a husband who liked to garden and produced Julia Child’s cooking show. His gardening led to Marian finding ways to incorporate all his vegetables into daily meals – it also led to the creation of another TV show called “Crockett’s Victory Garden.” Marian had gotten into the habit of cooking as she, like others, learned to cook from Julia.
Her book, which is an encyclopedia of vegetable gardening and cooking, especially cooking, starts with asparagus and works it way to turnips and rutabagas, alphabetically.
The show and her book made me think back to the days I lived on a farm, gardened and cooked the things I gardened. I thought my life would go on like that for endless years, but it didn’t. However, during recent summers I have rediscovered canning and creating things from raw garden materials. Even with having a day job, I could do those things once again.
The soup I am sharing today is basically from “The Victory Garden Cookbook,” as with many of the recipes in this book there is a long list of variations of the recipe at the end. I was going to share the recipe in an earlier column but ran out of room after extolling muffin options.
If you don’t have leeks, use onions instead – lots of them. I substituted dried tomatoes and zucchini and added a cup or two of extra water to allow for re-hydrating them. I wondered how to chop up somewhat rubbery dried veggies and then picked up a scissors and found the perfect tool for chopping them into soup-sized pieces.
The basic idea is to “clean out the fridge” and not go out and buy a lot of vegetables. I didn’t have turnips, but had kohlrabi, so I peeled, sliced and chopped them instead.
Basic Vegetable Soup
2 tablespoons butter or olive oil
2 cups chopped leeks (white portion) or onions or a combination of both
1 teaspoon minced garlic
2 cups peeled, seeded and chopped tomatoes (or one 16-ounce can chopped tomatoes)
1 cup finely sliced peeled carrots
1 cup finely sliced celery
1 cup peeled and sliced turnips or kohlrabi
8 cups chicken and/or beef broth
1 cup green beans cut into 1 1/2 inch pieces
1 1/2 cups diced zucchini or yellow squash
1 1/2 cups finely sliced cabbage
1/4 cup small pasta (I used broken up whole wheat fettuccini)
1 to 2 tablespoons (or more) chopped fresh herbs (such as oregano, basil or parsley)
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Grated cheese (optional)
Heat butter or oil and cook the leeks or onions until wilted, 5 to 10 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Add tomatoes, carrots, celery, turnips and broth. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and cook gently 5 to 8 minutes. Add the beans, squash, cabbage and pasta; cook until tender, 8 to 10 minutes. Stir in the herbs and season with salt and pepper. Serve with grated cheese (such as parmesan) if desired.
Variations:
? Substitute rice or barley for the pasta, adding to broth before the vegetables.
? Make a minestrone soup by adding chickpeas, cannelloni beans or other canned beans. Drain and rinse before adding to the soup.
? “Substitute like mad.” Try potatoes instead of turnips, use kale or spinach for the cabbage.
? Add cooked meats, poultry or shellfish.
? Etc.!
The night I cooked up my most recent batch of vegetable soup, to make a light meal I added a couple of cheese bun melties. They are simple to make. Lay sliced cheese on the cut side of a bun, put them in the microwave about 30 seconds to melt the cheese.
My mom always made these by putting the buns on a cookie sheet and melting the cheese in the oven, before the days of microwaves. (I think she used up leftover buns this way!)
Soup recipes with Bill & Sheila
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