When I was a junior in college, I spent my first summer away from home with no cafeteria.  In preparation, I picked my father's brain for instructions on making my favorite vegetable soup, pinning him down on a specific number of onions, potatoes, tomatoes, and more.  But it was a struggle to turn Daddy's words into a recipe, because that wasn't the information he was trying to impart.  Over a decade later, I've finally figured out what my wise father was saying.  Yes, I am a slow learner.

Daddy was teaching me the trick of cooking in season with the easiest in-season recipe --- harvest catch-all soup.  He was trying to get through my thick noggin the notion that meals should begin in the garden with what's fresh and numerous, rather than with a detailed shopping list at the grocery store.  Clearly, this soup had been his mother's way of using up odds and ends --- bits of browned carrots, wilted greens, anything that wasn't rotten but wasn't prime enough for being served plain.  And, in essence, the soup was simple --- make a stock, then throw in whatever vegetables you have lying around.

The first step was to make a soup base. Daddy's method involves one onion, some garlic, and a cup and a half of cabbage all sauteed in a bit of oil, then simmered for a couple of hours with two stalks of celery, an 18 ounce can of tomatoes, and enough water to fill up the pot.  My method (at the moment, and ever evolving) starts with three quarters of a pot of halved tomatoes, enough chicken stock to submerge the fruits, two onions, six big cloves of garlic (minced), a big handful of parsley (chopped), and about half a cup of dry beans (pre-soaked.)  This is the part of the soup where you'll want to follow a vague recipe, but you'll notice that parsley is a great substitute for the much harder to grow celery, and that if you start with stock you don't need to bother with the sauteeing step.  This is also where you can tweak the flavor to suit your particular tastes.

After simmering the soup base for two or more hours until it has halved in volume, you can pretty much throw in whatever you want --- preferably whatever's in season that you're sick and tired of freezing.  Vegetables will cook in a bubbling pot of soup stock at about the same rate as they cook in a pot of boiling water, so add the veggies a minute before you eat (for sweet corn), ten minutes before you eat (for beans, okra, summer squash, etc.), or forty-five minutes before you eat (for potatoes.)  You can make the soup into a stew like Daddy's, chock full of so many vegetables that it should be eaten on a plate, or you can keep your soup more Cambell's-like and just add in perhaps a quart of vegetables in the final step.

Daddy concluded his lesson with these words of wisdom: "Use a big pot.  Your soup will expand to fill the space provide."  Nowadays, I make two pots of soup at once during harvest time, the better to concentrate summer goodness for winter delight.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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