What About Noodles?

I am not the world’s most sophisticated cook, but I make soup.

I don’t make the world’s most sophisticated soup. I have limits. I don’t use meat. I don’t use chicken, which may or may not be meat. That depends on how you feel about chicken being meat. I don’t use fish. My chicken soup has no chicken, and my chowder has no existence.

I have 4 soup recipes, and I alternate among them. All of them have beans. Besides those four, I have more. That means, doing a quick calculation, that I have more than four soup recipes. But I have four that I keep on an Excel spreadsheet, because they came from a cook book to which I no longer have access. I typed up the ingredients into an Excel file, without quantities, but that matters little, because I have no use for quantities. I don’t believe that quantities have any real meaning in soup. In cake, yes. In soup, no. The four recipes have names like white bean soup, black bean soup, Israeli bean soup. There is nothing, as far as I can determine, Israeli about Israeli bean soup. It doesn’t spit sunflower seeds on the bus or speak Hebrew or drive like a psychotic orangutan. It is tasty, which it has in common with many fine Israeli dishes, but it does not taste like hummous or bamba or chocolate lentils or noga bars.

One of the four is called Caribbean chicken soup. As the astute reader may have guessed, I don’t put any actual chicken into it, which is particularly fortunate, given that I have never seen Caribbean chicken on sale here. I put curry powder into it.

One of the soup recipes that I’ve been using the longest is for chickpea soup. I found it on the back of the label on a can of chickpeas. I don’t have that can anymore, but I remembered the recipe. It’s an easy one because you don’t have to fry anything. The onions, you could fry them if you want, but the recipe doesn’t call for it. Just chop them up and throw them in. Me, I fry the onions. I didn’t used to. I do now. Someone convinced me once that frying them brings out the flavour. If there’s one thing I like to bring out, it’s flavour.

Another one I like a lot is minestrone. I’m not sure if it’s ok to say "minestrone soup," because minestrone, as far as I know, is soup. It could be like saying "tuna fish," which is ok, or "salmon fish," which isn’t. Minestrone [soup] is really just chili, without the meat, and wetter. And with macaroni. And with some other different stuff. Minestrone isn’t really anything like chili.

The thing though, to think about, is soup powder. Soup powder is powder that you mix into water and heat up, and it becomes some kind of faux soup. It’s usually very salty, and full of MSG. And it’s a cheat. I buy chicken soup powder and vegetable soup powder and beef soup powder. None of it has any meat in it. None of it has anything with any nutritional value in it. Each flavour tastes like every other flavour. And I always add some to my soup. I do that because if I don’t do that there is never enough flavour in my soup. I’m still working on that, trying to wean my soup off of soup powder. And when I say always, I mean sometimes. Soup with tomatoes doesn’t need powder so much, because the tomatoes give it enough flavour. If I put soup powder into soup that has tomatoes, it could kill you.

And so I have soup for supper every day. I feed soup to my kids; some eat it; some don’t. Some of them are big soup eaters, meaning that they are small people who eat a lot of soup. Big soup eaters are small. I am a big soup eater. And I shall continue to make soup until I can make soup no more…