The Comfort of Homemade Soup

I call it Soup Therapy and you need some.

It’s a gloomy day outside — the wind is howling, snow is gently falling and I have writing deadlines I need to meet. I’m missing some friends who live far away and I know there is really only one remedy for this kind of malaise.

So what do I do? I make soup.

Do I search recipes first and then head to the grocery store? Hell no. What’s in the fridge will dictate what kind of soup I will make.

My husband and I held a family dinner last night and our fridge is stuffed with leftovers. I know there is a small mountain of mashed potatoes I can nab.

A ragged hunk of blue cheese is left from the salad. And I know a few slices of cooked bacon from a couple of days ago are hiding behind the pickles.

Plus I’ve got a few yellow onions patiently waiting to be put into service, some garlic that’s on the shriveled edge of madness and a bunch of chopped celery from my garden sits in the freezer.

Chicken broth? Check. Hell would freeze over before that’d be in short supply. Chicken broth is like toilet paper in our house. You never want to run out.

I confess I have a bias about soup. If you can’t make a good soup or scrambled eggs — I’m probably not going to want to eat that heavy-handed, too-many- ingredient-lasagna you’ve slapped together.

Don’t get persnickety — I just know when you can gently tease the best out of something delicate — you can pretty much cook anything.

So where do all good soups start their lives? Most people would say it is the broth. Sure — that’s important but I know where the true home of delicious soup lies: butter.

The premise of any good soup in my book is sauteing the vegetables in butter first. It adds a deep note of maturity to the soup vs just throwing in chopped raw vegetables into hot water or broth.

And if you sautee the vegetables while listening to music or NPR or your favorite podcast — I swear the essence of it goes into your soup too.

The base for any soup I make is easy: a goodly glob of unsalted butter in the bottom of the soup pot (mine is a dented one from a garage sale 20 years ago), chopped yellow or white onions, celery, and a few finely diced garlic cloves.

Sautee until they are soft and translucent and not browned — you save that for other kinds of soup like unctuous French onion — but here, today — you want the fragrant coaxed paleness of onion, celery, and garlic to waft up from the pot.

If the soup is going to be pureed (which I do with any soup with cream in it) you can rough chop the vegetables. If it is going to be a soup with meat and chunks of vegetable goodness — well then — make sure you chop things to the size that fits nicely and safely on a soup spoon.

No one loves you when they have a chunk of broccoli the size of a small tree staring at them from their spoon.

I have a Golden Rule. If you make any kind of soup that has vegetables in it — you should always sautee them first before you move deeper into the soup-making process. My only exception? Potatoes. Don’t sautee them, ever.

Today I added about 4 cups of mashed potatoes from last night’s dinner. Then a 1/2 teaspoon of Dijon mustard and a tiny splash of white wine. I crumbled up the ragged remainders of the blue cheese and tossed it in.

And don’t forget about those three strips of lonely cooked bacon. I chopped them finely and added them to the pot so they weren’t lonely any longer.

And then I added a liter and a half of chicken broth bought from a store as I can sometimes be lazy like that. See? You’re not alone.

OK. I digress. Make sure the pot is on medium-low heat, which by the way, should be your friend for almost everything in life. Low and slow applies to so much, don’t you think?

Boiling soup is a crime and it turns everything to mush, overcooks the works and the color turns 50 sad shades of grey. So don’t be tempted to rush the process. You’ve been warned.

A good soup needs to have a marriage of flavor so the minimum time needed is an hour — depending on the soup. When you eat it tomorrow and the next day after that — it will be even more deliciously committed.

Once everything has simmered slowly for an hour — take it off the heat and get your blender out. You’ll also need another pot or a very large bowl to temporarily hold the pureed soup while you’re emptying out the main soup pot.

If you have an immersion blender, well then lucky you.

Use a ladle and wear oven mitts, please. Transfer about 2–3 cups of the soup to the blender, put the lid on and puree the hell out of it for a few seconds. Empty it into the other pot. Do this until the main soup pot is empty.

Then I usually pour the works back into my beat-up soup pot. Why? Well — it has magic in it and already has a relationship with the ingredients.

You are so so close to eating this. But wait. Just a few things left. Add about 1/2- 1 cup of half and half cream or go full-on whipping cream if you don’t worry about cholesterol and the waist size of your pants.

Stir until well-blended and make sure to gently reheat for about 5 minutes. And now you taste it and see what it needs. A little salt and pepper? A bit more cream or another splash of wine? Your tastebuds will guide the way.

Now get some bowls out for you and whoever else needs some soup therapy. You can crumble a tiny bit more blue cheese on top of the soup (but not too much) and then I recommend a thick piece of hearty bread on the side. With butter of course.

And because it is almost impossible to eat soup quickly — and why would you — you get to savor the soup you made and maybe someone else will get to savor it as well.

Somehow your problems will feel a little lighter. The rough edges of your situation won’t feel quite so jagged. The soup will linger in your thoughts.

Calmness seems to enter the room and your body. The person perhaps who is eating across from you will probably sigh.

You’ve just experienced Soup Therapy.

Thanks for reading! I have loads of food essays (delicious recipes too) and thoughtful and quirky simpler living essays waiting for you. (Well over 100 of them!) And this story caught the attention of NBC News in New York!