#soup

[daily-deliciousness]

Creamy chicken gnocchi soup

[hotguysfugue]

[fattributes]

Chicken and Dumplings Soup

[koof]

I'M DYING

Roasted chicken, ginger, daikon, shiitake mushroom soup with lime, cilantro, broccoli sprouts, and rice noodles

[etlu-yume]

I made an unfortunate error in a journal tracker so now we have soup assassins.

You're welcome.

(Disclaimer: "You live by the soup or you die in the soup" not mine, but a friend's reaction that worked TOO well not to combine it)

[petermorwood]

Chuckling at this, because my Mum - in Northern Ireland, generally considered to be about 20 years behind whatever The Current Times might be in the Big Island - was adding multiple cloves of garlic to one particular soup in the early 1950s.

(Not huge amounts, 40-clove chicken was yet to come, but way more than that timorous suggestion of one clove, unpeeled, and remove it before serving in case it makes you in-Continental.)

That same tentative caution applies to other spices: for instance @dduane & I inherited some of Mum's old British cookbooks which suggest things like a scant half-teaspoonful of "paprika pepper" in a recipe for goulash. Hungarian cookery writer George Lang recommends a couple of tablespoons at least...

I posted about garlic and "foreign seasonings" aversion HERE, along with the recipe for Mum's soup.

Here it is.

*****

I'm hugely grateful that my own Mum was a good deal more adventurous than most Northern Irish housewives of her generation. Being chummy with Signora Battisti, an actual Italian Mamma whose husband ran the fish-and-chip shop down the street, probably had quite a bit to do with that… :->

Here’s a recipe Mum learned before I was born.

Back then olive oil was something you got from the chemist (Olive Oil B.P., meaning British Pharmacopoeia, not British Petroleum), pasta meant macaroni, tomato soup was far easier to find than tinned tomatoes, and buying garlic if you weren’t “foreign” (Mum told me) meant you were “odd”.

Well, Mum was odd…

Peter’s Mum’s “Italiana Soup” (courtesy of Signora Battisti ca. 1953) 2 x Tbsp olive oil 4 x cloves garlic, sliced very thin 2 x medium onions, chopped 2 x 400g / 14 oz tins tomato soup 2 x tins water 2 x potatoes, peeled & diced 2 x handfuls macaroni ( @dduane​ suggests 1 handful = 1 cup, so about 150g; she also points out that in the US, a 400g can of soup usually means Campbell’s Condensed. However Mum always used Heinz Cream of Tomato, which wasn’t condensed, so YMMV.) Heat the oil in a saucepan over low heat. Add the garlic and cook for a couple of minutes. Add the onions and cook until starting to soften. Add the soup and water. Bring to a simmer and add the potatoes. After about 10 minutes, add the macaroni. After about 10 minutes, check texture: potatoes and macaroni should finish at about the same time. Serve garnished with chopped parsley, and a stack of hot buttered toast on the side.

BTW, forget trying to keep the pasta al dente. If the potatoes are waxy they’ll have far more texture than the macaroni, but usually everything goes soft and unctuous and garlicky, hence the beneficial contrast of nice crisp toast. I have no idea what the original Italian soup might have been, and I’d long thought adding spuds was an Irish modification, but much, much later, when @dduane and I were travelling through Cividale and Bolzano, we discovered that dishes including both potatoes and pasta were correct for that region, right up north where Italy bumps against Austria.

Though we've never been to Southern Italy, Pasta e patate con pomodoro (pasta, potatoes and tomato) is a standard dish there, too. That link is in Italian, but Google Translate works fine.

(I can't recall, if I ever knew, whether the Battisti family were from North or South.) Better olive oil, chopped tomatoes in juice rather than canned soup, and actual cream, will make it taste more Italian and authentic, whatever “authentic” means here. You can whizz it canned-soup smooth with a stick mixer before adding the potatoes and pasta, but that's not compulsory.

However the original Heinz-based version is my preferred comfort food whenever I’m feeling down, or when the weather’s lousy, or when I have a cold…

Or when I want to go back in time to when I was young, and my parents were alive, and a bowl of home-made soup was enough to set the world to rights.

Side-note - if the weather's really lousy, add in a splash of Worcester sauce and a generous dash of Tabasco or similar chilli sauce. It works. Alternately, or additionally, swirl a drizzle of that better olive oil onto each bowl, add a dollop of sour cream to the middle of the swirl and dust that with chopped parsley.

The result imitates Italy's red-white-green national colours (Margharita pizza does it too) and also looks jolly flash.

This screenshot from a gardening Facebook group has been on my phone for several years and I'm not sure I'm ever going to be able to delete it. Apparently it comes from a British gardening book from the 80s. I know we all joke that the English are afraid of flavor, but I assure you, you are not prepared for this.

GARLIC

Until quite recently, scientists smiled at all the wonderful medicinal powers claimed for garlic, but recent research has shown that there is some truth in a few of the old wives' tales. Garlic, of course, has an important role in Continental but not in British cookery — it really isn't worth growing unless you are a fan.

Any well-drained spot will do. Buy a head of garlic from the greengrocer or supermarket and split it up into individual cloves. Plant them 2 in. deep and 6 in. apart in March. Apart from watering in dry weather there is nothing else to do until the foliage turns yellow in July or August. Lift the bulbs and allow to dry under cover, then store in a cool, frost-free place.

If you are a beginner with garlic, you must use it very sparingly or you will be put off for ever. Rub a wooden salad bowl with a clove before adding the ingredients. Rub the skin of poultry before roasting and then you can try dropping a whole unskinned clove into a casserole or stew, removing it before serving. If by then you have lost a little of your garlic fear, you can try using crushed (not chopped) garlic in meat etc. as the Continentals do.

[mic-check-stims]

Joey Wheeler eatin noodles board for anon

X-X-X X-X X-X-X

[alicemoon812]

dragon and cat

[literalmonsterrr]

maxcore

no one will know which one it is.

[oobiwoobiwoo]

hat-soup-ne miku?

-

i wanted to draw a super down to earth version of miku, and this is what came up with! now i really want soup…

[misforgotten2]

Cream of Potato: The Soup for the Clinically Depressed™

Saturday Evening Post - November 8th 1958

[alex51324]

Oh geez. If I had thought about it yesterday, I could have cast a soup spell today!

Now it is snowing, so I cannot go out to gather spell materials.

I will have to see what spells I have in the freezer instead.

the best part about winter is that nobody says things like "why are you eating all that soup?" or "you can't eat soup every single day" or "holy shit is that MORE soup?" no. they see the truth now. they come in from the cold and ask me if this kind of soup is any good. for once in my life I am a bearer of knowledge. I am the soup wizard

[fattributes]

French Cabbage and Sausage Soup

[bowlofstew]

I think we all need some soup right now. Reblog to give prev a bowl of their favourite soup.