soup

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Soups galore: We've got one for every winter mood

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By Leslie Brenner

You can say what you want about Gen Z, but here’s what I love: They know a good thing when they see it. And then they immortalize it with memes.

Take soup, for instance. My favorite four-letter meal has conquered the internet!

I couldn’t be happier about this development. In college, I majored in Soup. Soup is my middle name. Soup soup soup soup soup.

Here at Cooks Without Borders, we’ve got a soup for every winter mood. Gen Z, I’m talking to you.

Mood: Stop (all day) and smell the roses

Persian Chicken Soup with Chicken-and-Lamb Meatballs

When you’re in the mood for a major project — one that will fill your living space with the dreamiest fragrances you can imagine — this transporting soup adapted from Najmieh Batmanglij’s Food of Life delivers. Called abgusht-e morgh ba kufteh-ye nokhodchi in Farsi, it’s garnished with grated garlic, fresh herbs and dried rose petals.

Mood: Get me back to a clearer space

Miso Soup

In a perfect world, you can have miso soup anytime you want it. But hey — you can even have it in a highly imperfect world! Take ten minutes to make a batch of dashi, keep miso and tofu in the fridge (both keep for a long time) and the foundational soup is yours practically on demand. Stir in miso, garnish and enjoy.

Mood: Navel-gazing

Maria Elena Machado's Sopa de Ombligo

Sometimes you just need to stare at your belly button. Or you could stare at the belly-button-like dumplings in a sumptuous pinto-bean soup — and then eat them.

Mood: Get me outta here!

Tom Kha Kai (Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup)

If you’d rather be somewhere warm, sunny and far away — Bangkok, for instance — this irresistible Thai soup will take you there. Ours is adapted from Leela Punyaratabandhu’s seminal Simple Thai Food.

Mood: Virtuous vegan fridge-clearing brawl

Sunday Super Soup

This bad boy clears your crisper drawer, empties fridge shelves of veggie leftovers and helps you achieve zero waste — all while filling your kitchen with warm and spicy smells. Our master recipe is fully customizable according to what you’ve got. It’s also devastatingly delicious.

Mood: Snowed in, feeling nice and lazy

Classic Split Pea Soup

Make this once, and you could probably do it blindfolded next time. I keep split peas in the pantry and a ham hock in the freezer all winter just in case the mood strikes.

Mood: Fed up with fundamentalism

Ab Ghooshte Fasl (Iranian Bean and Vegetable Soup)

There are many ways we can support the brave women of Iran — starting by continuing to be engaged in the struggle for their freedom from tyranny. Make this soup in their honor.

Mood: I want to join Club Nixtamal

Heirloom Corn Pozole Rojo

If you’re nixtamal curious but don’t happen to own a molino to grind corn, I invite you to make heirloom corn pozole from scratch. If you’re serious about Mexican cooking, consider doing this once in your life — it’ll be the best pozole you’ve ever had. Recipe links to a shortcut version, too.

Mood: Wish spring would hurry up!

Ridiculously Easy Minted Pea Soup

This beautiful bowl is made from lettuce, butter, salt, pepper, mint and a bag of frozen peas. My take on a classic French soup called potage Saint-Germain, it’s simple enough for a weeknight yet elegant enough for a big-deal dinner. You’d swear those peas were fresh.

Mood: Spa retreat

Vegan Spring Beauty Soup

Here’s another one to help you channel spring. There’s already asparagus from California in the markets, and this is another that offers a frozen pea-cheat.

Mood: Pass the penicillin

Joan’s Chicken Soup

Of course winter is chicken soup season, and my mom made the best — of theJewish penicillin-variety, anyway. I’m so happy to share the recipe with you. Feel better.

Mood: Winter greens wonderland

Chloé’s Vegan Gumbo Z’herbes

Gumbo Z’herbes is a Louisiana tradition more associated with the season of Lent than the dead of winter, but our friend Chloé Landrieu-Murphy’s delicious version is packed with a ton of winter greens, so please be our guest!

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Classic split pea soup, stupid-easy and satisfying, will keep you cozy and happy all week

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Classic split pea soup

There’s something almost magical about classic split pea soup. Sweat some chopped onion and carrot in oil, dump in a bag of dried split peas, add water and a ham hock, and an hour and half later, you’ve got soup.

OK, there’s a tiny bit more work involved. You had to cut up the onion, peel and slice a few carrots. You might have to skim a little oil off the top as it cooks. You need to remove the ham hock, shred or cut up the ham and put it back in, and add salt and pepper.

A ham hock cooking with split peas

But really — can you imagine a soup that requires less of the cook? You don’t have to purée it to get that lovely thick texture: The peas purée themselves, breaking down as they cook, but magically retaining just the right amount of integrity. A marvelous alchemy turns just those four simple main ingredients into something beautiful and soul-sustaining.

You could probably add all kinds of things to it, but none of them would make it better than it already was. On top of it, it’s highly affordable, and requires no special equipment. It’s so nutritious and satisfying, it’s a meal in itself.

As it cooks, it fills your living space with beautiful aroma.

We love split pea soup. Make a pot early in the week, and it’ll sustain you and your family for days.

Want in? Here’s the recipe.

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Fridge-clearing and fabulously flavorful, Sunday Souper Soup will set you up deliciously for the week

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Sunday Souper Soup with lentils, carrots, celery, onions and greens in a white bowl on a green Tiffany basket-weave plate. In the back ground is harissa from a tube.

When a nation of restaurant-goers turns (almost overnight!) into a society of captive home cooks, the stresses caused by fridge management can be monumental.

Keeping everyone in comfort food is easy: There’s pasta and cheese for that. Rice concoctions galore. Potatoes are a no-brainer in any form. Pizza is a track-pad click away.

Still, you diligently keep the fridge stocked with healthy fresh things: broccoli and kale, carrots and cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, salad greens and herbs.

So that by Sunday, the crisper drawer is stuffed with stuff that’s not so crisp, and you’re left beating yourself up about waste. Meanwhile, what are you going to put on the dinner table in the coming week?

If besides all that stuff you can rustle up a few basic staples, I’ve got great news for you: You can turn those hapless refrigerator victims into a Sunday super-soup that’s so incredibly flavorful that no one would ever suspect you of anything so nefarious as using up tired greens. It’ll solve the coming week’s lunch question and provide a dinner or two — all while saving money and helping you dodge a food-waste bullet.

It gets even better: You can pack the soup with an arsenal of life-affirming, enchantingly aromatic spices and herbs that turn the whole project into an anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, flavonoid-rich powerhouse. It is vegan and gluten-free, and therefore sends you into the coming week feeling vital and positive. That gigantic pan of bacon-enriched mac-and-cheese you devoured on Thursday, washed down with three glasses of wine? It is vitamin water under the comfort-food bridge. Today is a new day.

The essential staples you’ll need: onions, carrots and celery (diced together they make what the French call mirepoix); lentils; a can of tomatoes; olive or other oil; salt and pepper. These, plus water, form the base of the soup. And if you follow our master recipe, that’s all you really need for a delicious one. The basic outline is sweat the mirepoix in oil, add lentils, tomatoes, water, salt and pepper, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer till it’s soup — under an hour.

Our master recipe — which we first wrote about pre-Covid, in a story back in January — explains how to incorporate all those vegetables crying for rescue from the fridge: everything from root vegetables (turnips, parsnips, celery root, beets) to Brassicaceae (broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and whatnot) to fresh legumes (string beans, peas and such) to leafy greens. The veg can be raw or cooked, so that small dish of roasted cauliflower with Punjabi spices left over from Friday dinner can find a new life in a lush (and zero waste!) soup, and the lonely cupful of sautéed greens from four days ago may gain delicious new purpose.

And you’ll want to spice it up: turmeric, coriander seed and cumin seeds are great places to start; ginger and garlic are your aromatic allies; fresh and dried chiles are always welcome; nigella seeds and flax seeds add nutritional heft; so do mushrooms, dried or fresh. Herbs — fresh and dried — are superb additions.

Again, our January story gives a lot of the health background and zero-waste benefits. Give it a read first if you’re interested in making the soup as powerfully healthful as possible. Otherwise, I invite you to explore the recipe.

And then take a deep dive into that crisper drawer and make soup!

MASTER RECIPE: Sunday Souper Soup

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How to fool your friends into thinking you shelled 9,000 English peas

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When spring rolls around – and even before – I start craving asparagus. And strawberries. And English peas. 

Unless you live near a farm, grow them in your garden or have access to a great farmers market – and depending on where in the world you live – finding sweet, tender English peas can be a real challenge. If you're lucky enough to find English peas at a supermarket, they're likely to be hard and woody, or if they're still small and tender, they'll likely have lost their sweetness. 

The solution? Frozen peas. That's right – they're actually really good, especially if you pick up the tiny ones sometimes called petits pois. I usually have a bag or two in my freezer – even in springtime, when we're all focused on what's fresh. 

And nowhere do they show better than in this wonderful soup, based on traditional French potage Saint Germain. 

 

It's the easiest thing in the world to whip up. Wilt a head of soft Boston or Bibb lettuce in butter. (Hey, this is like a salad within a soup!) Add a couple bags of frozen peas, stir and cook 10 minutes. Add water, and a few fresh mint leaves and simmer for 20 minutes. Whirr it up with a stick blender, et voilà. Garnish it with a dab of crème frâiche. Or not. That's it!!!

It's vegetarian. And it's a knockout. Serve it to your friends, swearing you shelled 9,000 English peas for their pleasure. 

Or tell the truth. And get ready to hand over the recipe.

 

 

 

 

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Chicken soup is the most soothingly delicious (and supremely restorative!) thing in the world for what ails you

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How are you feeling? Not so great? Yeah, I thought so. 

When someone sneezes chez moi, I reach for a chicken – to make soup. It's what my mom always did. And I've always used her recipe.

And if the husband or the son or whoever happened to sneeze isn't actually under the weather, all the better: The chicken soup idea has been planted, and I can't shake it. As the soup simmers, it fills the house with wonderful smells. Chicken soup was the fragrance of my childhood (along with Chanel No. 5, but never at the same time). And I always find diving into a big bowl of chickeny broth with carrots, celery and noodles to be supremely restorative. No one needs to be ailing for chicken soup to be a splendid idea. 

Lots of cultures celebrate chicken soup. There's Chinese wonton soup, Thai thom ka gai (with coconut and lemongrass), Mexican tortilla soup and many more. I love them all. 

Jewish penicillin

Jewish penicillin

But for Ashkenazi Jews, no matter how far-removed we are from the old country (wherever in Eastern Europe that may be), it's a primal dish, a cornerstone of Jewish culture – right up there with bagels and chopped liver. And like bagels, it's one of the few Ashkenazi dishes to have infiltrated mainstream American culture. Campbell's Chicken Soup: Is that Jewish, or American? You get my drift.

Fragrant, delicious chicken soup is very easy to make – easier, I'd say, than running out to a deli to pick some up, should you happen to be in possession of a chicken, celery and carrots. In fact, if you've never made it before, once you try it, you'll wonder why it took you so long to make your own.

It goes like this: Cut up a chicken, ask the butcher to cut one up for you or buy one already cut up. The benefit of the first two are you can keep the back and neck to put in the soup -- they add lots of richness. Cover it in cold water, bring to a simmer, and skim. Add aromatic vegetables: onion, carrot and celery. My mom always added parsnip, too, so I follow suit, but it's not essential. If you skip it, add another carrot. Throw in a bunch of dill. Let it simmer an hour and a half or two hours. 

Add salt and pepper, and it's basically done. My mom always cooked fine egg noodles separately, put some in each bowl, and then strained some soup directly into each bowl, along with some carrots and celery. She would give us a plate of the chicken separately, and I shudder to think now that we often ate it with ketchup.

 I usually strain the whole soup –– reserving the chicken meat, carrots, celery and parsnip and adding them back into the clear soup. Put some cooked noodles in each bowl, and ladle it in.

My recipe includes measurements, but you don't have to measure things to make chicken soup; it's a soup made by feel. My mom never put garlic in hers, but I often do – especially if the soup is serving as Jewish penicillin; then I throw in a whole head, separated into cloves but not peeled. Sometimes I add a leek, or parsley. Have extra chicken parts in the freezer? Throw those in, for sure, and add a little more water. 

OK. That is my mom's gift to you. Wear it in good health.