Fall is here....

I have been gone a long time and I have no good excuse but I will try. I moved to Brooklyn (big adjustment) and was training for the marathon, then ran the marathon, and really, even to my ears, lame excuses, but I am back and with it the recipe that was really the main reason I started this blog. Yes, it sounds big. Huge in fact. This is it, the ultimate recipe, which I guess implies it all goes downhill from here but I hope not as that would mean the end to my little blog.

The recipe, as many of you have fondly heard me call it over the years, is known in the family only as "Mama's Soup." Someone, my guess is my brother or myself, dubbed it a long time ago and the name stuck. It is the soup we grew up on, particularly delicious in cold weather, but eaten year round in our household. I probably ate a bowl of this soup once or twice a week my entire life, which if you do the math... well, it's a lot of mama's soup.

I decided to make it this past Friday night (perhaps the social life needs a pick-me-up if I am staying home making soup on a Friday evening) to accompany the most perfect dinner - boiled fingerling potatoes with butter and herbs, an assortment of delectable treats from Russ and Daughters (smoked whitefish salad, herring in mustard and dill, herring in cream sauce, chicken liver, etc.). Sometimes the Russian Jewish girl in me just has to come out. It's a good thing Patrick spent years in Norway and can appreciate a good pickled herring with a plate of Mama's soup.

So back to the soup: it is the chicken soup of my childhood, a chicken broth base (homemade of course), with pastina, potatoes, onions, carrots, cauliflower as the substance, and a sprinkling of fresh dill to finish it off. Mama starts with the broth. Chicken (she uses large pieces and then saves the meat for chicken salad whereas I use soup bones as I despise the taste of boiled meat), a quartered onion, garlic, carrot, celery, fennel, really any scraps of root vegetables can go into a large pot with cold water, salt and pepper. It's brought to a boil and allowed to simmer until you have a lovely broth. Strain out the vegetables and the chicken and discard (or save the chicken for chicken salad if you so prefer).

Then a phone call is usually put in to Mama as to the exact order the rest of the ingredients must go in in order to ensure the soup is exactly like hers. This time I interrupted her while she was having dinner on vacation to make sure I got the order right. First, drop a handful of pastina into the soup, then peel and cube a large potato and parsnip and throw them into the pot. Separate the cauliflower into florets and tough white stems. Cube the white stems and add to the pastina, potatoes and parnsip. While those cook saute shredded carrots and onions in a little olive oil until they are sweet and slightly cooked through. Once the cauliflower stems have softened a bit add the florets and carrot-onion mixture to the simmering broth. Season with salt and pepper, let cook until the cauliflower is just softened, then stir in a large handful of dill and enjoy.

This makes a large pot of soup for almost nothing (I think I paid $5 for all of the ingredients) and will last you for days. It is the Jewish version of minestrone (particularly when Mama adds tiny matzo balls to the broth), a humble peasant-style soup, a soup that can be eaten with a hunk of buttered bread and some boiled potatoes, a soup that will leave you asking for seconds and thirds. Which, if you grew up in my house, was forced upon you whether you liked it or not. This soup is my mother's legacy, a tribute to her heritage and more importantly, the love she bestows on all of us, through the kitchen. It only took twenty-eight years and countless tupperware containers brought back to college dorm rooms, but I finally perfected the recipe...or at least as close to it as I can get without actually going home.