Forgive me, dear readers, for my absence. The blog has suffered from “way the heck too much other stuff going on” syndrome. Also, less time in the garden after final harvests has given me room to move in other directions. But now, I’ve been called back by the influx of cold air which has jump-started another seasonal love of mine: fall cooking.
I live in a house that could be sufficiently heated by the oven. Because of this, the modern day hearth doesn’t get much use in the summer. Once cold weather hits, I’m reminded of this seasonal toy and look forward to one of my favorite past-times – baking bread. But your title is about soup, you say. Yea, I know…I’ll get to that.
I grew up in a home where things that can be lovingly made by hand were purchased instead. My mother was at an impressionable age during World War II when her country, Ireland, tightened their belts, rationed their goods, and got out their knitting needles to help their English neighbors whom they were rooting for in the war. In school, they made socks, hats, gloves, and sweaters for the English soldiers. To hear my mom tell about it, you’d think she’d been forced to make all those things every day for the duration of her childhood and beyond. She’d moan with exhaustion at the mere mention of my wanting her to teach me how to make a sweater. “Just go buy one!” she’d say. Ah,… industry.
And yea, I know. I’m getting to the soup…
For me, the thought of making something from two sticks and a ball of yarn seemed like magic. But the first time I got to bake bread in Brownie Scouts (where I learned to knit), something even bigger lit up inside me. Most likely it was the aroma that put bread ahead of knitting in my awed esteem. I ran in the house after the bread baking meeting yelling, “Mommy, mommy! Let’s bake BREAD!”
She groaned.
“It’s hard, hard work,” was all she could manage to say.
I had just done it, like an hour before, and I guess since Brownie leaders were probably the first to discover “kid friendly” projects, it hadn’t felt like work at all. Somehow I convinced her, and we set out to bake a loaf the following Saturday, starting in the morning, because, you know, this would take ALL day.
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| I started my kids at it much younger. I needed something for them to do as an alternative to their ususal daily activity of bruising their faces which, believe me, was getting OLD.... |
I won’t bore you with the slightly comedic details. Suffice it to say that at age 7 I had experienced the first and last bread baking extravaganza in my home of origin. In addition, the lingering memory of the effort involved was spoken of well into my adult years, without any mention of the delicious bread we made. A Buddhist would suggest my mother actually slaved over the dough thousands of times with all her mournful recollections. I, on the other hand, just remembered the good part.
So, when I was on my own, I started experimenting with different kinds of bread. Believe me, coming home from college with a loaf of something unique and tasty impressed my mother to the point that she forgot about yelling at me about my grades. Clearly, I was achieving great things, and she didn’t have to suffer through watching the painful process.
And bread led to soup, because besides butter, what else goes so well with fresh baked bread than real soup? Oh, and canned doesn’t count. The acidic aftertaste is the great equalizer of any store-bought variety, and really, I’d just rather not. It’s not because I’m a foodie snob. It’s because fresh homemade soup is on the same wavelength as fresh homemade bread and to break the spell on one just screws up the other.
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| Split-Pea! Yum! |
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