Do you feel that chill in the air? Do you see those leaves gently gliding down from their branches to pile up and decompose together? Do you hear that bubbling sound of some vegetables, meat, and broth simmering together? That’s right, it’s Soup Season, and I won’t let you forget it until the jingling sleigh bells of Christmas forces me to radically alter my personality again.
You may remember me as the person who got really into grilling this past summer, the person who wouldn’t shut up about plants last spring, or the person who hates the Winter Olympics. Now it is time for me to become completely insufferable and into soup, with a brief pause to go into some filthy details about proper “Gansl” roasting in November.
The world seems to be in complete chaos at this point. It is more important to gender and differentiate everybody and everything in the LGTBQ+ community while I cry myself to sleep at night thinking about gas prices and skyrocketing electricity bills. At this point, I think of that as a delightful Parmesan cheese garnish on the butternut squash soup that is my new autumnal lifestyle. When I get home, I leave all this insanity outside and cook myself into my own little food heaven.
Did I hear you sniffle? Don’t deny it, now you are going to get approximately twenty servings of chicken noodle soup, but I replaced the chicken with mushrooms, the noodles with beans, and the chicken broth with a flavourless vegetable stock that I made with veggies that by all rights should have been composted long ago. It is a family recipe. If I say that enough, it becomes true.
Oh, you broke your leg? Well, a hearty stew should help with that. Stew is like soup, only I save money because I can just throw in all that bulk steak I bought last summer during my Grill Phase. It has been in my freezer long enough to earn tenure, but some cultures love to age their beef, so this stew is actually rather exotic if you think about it.
Are you going through a divorce? Now it is a bit bad of me, but I just made a big pot of Italian wedding soup, so why don’t you swing by my house for a glass of wine and a big bowl of soup? I recently managed to imprison the ghost of Joseph Albert Campbell, founder of Campbell’s soup company, in my kitchen so we can get a bit rowdy and chase him around for a bit.
I would love to talk more, but my bulk order of chicken bones is about to come in. If you want some stock, just let me know; I have two chest freezers at work filled with the stuff. You’ll have to move quickly, though. Once the dulcet tones of Mariah Carey fill the supermarket air, I will completely forget everything I know about soup in favour of exceedingly elaborate tree and house decorations, painstakingly crafted gingerbread houses, and presents that you will just love (based entirely on the one piece of information about you that is stored in my brain in a sort of panic room, endlessly attempting to stay alive against the onslaught of seasonal personality shifts). Or like simple parenting is an oxymoron.
