Guest post: Italian wedding soup

This “recipe” comes from my friend Lee (@mr_butlertron), who is an amazing cook and wrote this… recipe? essay? stream-of-consciousness story?… about the soup he made for dinner the other night.  It’s full of improvisation (if you’re a regular reader, you know I’m all about improvisation) and I love how he captures both the excitement of inspiration and the “oh, crap” moments where things don’t go quite as expected (but somehow work out anyway). If you cook a lot, this will probably sound very familiar!

italian wedding? soup.
(it’s not minestrone, because no tomatoes, but it has beans and a bit of pasta in it, so, italian wedding? sure.)

ingredients:
-one of the massive onions from costco
-a potato from the farm share. wait, it’s rotted. two potatoes from the grocery store.
-those curried carrots leftover from shabbas. what, you don’t have curried carrots laying around? why aren’t you making more mildly curried carrots? they’re delicious!
-three big cloves of garlic
-you know how housemate c made stuffed cabbage, so she left behind the center of the cabbage when the leaves get too small to really stuff? that cabbage.
-a can of beans. which ones aren’t people using? oh, the roman beans. no one knows what the crap those are good in.
-the cup and a half of veggie broth left over from the last time [housemate] made risotto
-the handful of pasta left in the box on the shelf. you know the one.
-the stuff that’s in the kitchen. you know, olive oil, water, salt, pepper, spice drawer.

process:
take out the big saucepan and start heating olive oil in the bottom of it on medium-low. small-dice the onion and throw it in. in the time it’ll take you to small-dice the potatoes, the onions will be ready for company, so toss them in. realize there isn’t enough olive oil, so add some more. slice the garlic thin and set it to the side, then get started working on the carrots. they’re already in fat rounds, but you don’t want to puree the soup, so cut them down into small-dice, too. this’ll take a while, because they’re slippery. every couple of carrot rounds, stir the potatoes and onions. wish for a celery stalk, and consider adding celery seed, but decide against it. keep cutting and stirring until you’ve broken down the carrots, then throw them and the garlic slices in. now it’s time to get to work on the cabbage. slice it into very thin slices, then turn them 90 degrees and do it again. you want those leaves small and unrecognizable. throw them in as they’re ready, then stir some more. realize you’re stirring too much, that you want something to deglaze later, so cover the pot and walk away for a minute until it becomes too unbearable and you have to stir it again. (i’m a hoverer, can’t you tell?) once you see the veggies starting to stick to the bottom and turn into delicious brown stuff, you know it’s ready, so turn up the heat and deglaze with the broth, quickly adding also the undrained beans and three cans of water. stir stir stir. contemplate that onion soup you love, and go to the spice drawer looking for tarragon. lament the lack of tarragon, but espy some smoky paprika. add a generous amount, along with some malt vinegar. red wine vinegar would probably be better, but you don’t have any, it’s too hard to find. add salt and pepper, cover it, turn to low, and walk away. go upstairs, gchat with a cute boy, watch a tv episode. dinner’s not for another hour, so let it go. when you come downstairs half an hour before dinnertime, it’s not even boiling. go back upstairs, that’s where your email lives. come back down at fifteen to dinner, turn the heat up to boiling, and throw in the pasta. serves one, plus five housemates who were expected but didn’t show up.