When I cook, I try to use mostly seasonal, local ingredients. However, there are times, when say I’ve just come back from a trip where I’ve been eating mostly sausage and potatoes, when all I want to eat is the vegetable soup that my mom used to make from a recipe that came from Weight Watchers some 20 years ago. In such as a case as that I might just buy zucchini and some tomatoes that were grown in some far off place where it’s currently summer and call it a day. After the starchy excesses of Berlin I was craving this soup something awful. It’s super simple, easy to make but feels really good.
We touched down in Newark at 6:00 Saturday morning and were in our double-wide matchbox of an apartment in Brooklyn by 7:30. After a breakfast of turkey sandwiches we settled in for a long winter’s nap. . . . that lasted two hours.
I went through the rest of the day feeling like I had a hangover without having had any of the fun that usually leads to one (unless a red-eye flight from L.A. to New York is your idea of a good time). Both Amir and I agreed that we were in need of a detox.
I had bookmarked this recipe before we went away because it seemed like a perfect post-thanksgiving meal, and it was. It was worth dragging myself to the market to get kale and a big bottle of chestnuts. It was worth soaking the beans. It was worth chopping the onions that always make me cry. It is surprisingly creamy, tangy, rich, nutty and sweet. It will cure what ails you, even if it’s just too much turkey and too many tacos.
I wish I had a nice glamor shot of the finished soup to show you. I wish I had more than just these images of of tomatoes ready to be roasted on baking pans, but that’s not the way it worked out.
It was cold. And rainy. We were hungry and tired. We’d been shopping for Bosnian food in Astoria all day (Klas flour!). What’s more, this soup was really, really good.
