Category Archives: family

When winter is coming on: Comfort Soup

family, food and cooking,

Last week I made Comfort Soup with lamb instead of beef. I couldn’t find the written recipe fast enough, so I gave up and made a version from memory. And I see, now that I found the recipe, that I had forgotten one of the few ingredients. But the lamb made it superb nonetheless.

This morning I looked here to see if I had ever posted the recipe for this soup that was a mainstay of our menus from the beginning of our family. Though I had mentioned twice the eating of it, it appears I never shared the recipe itself, which I had clipped from Mademoiselle magazine when in high school, and saved in the three-ring binder that I used for all those ideas I hoped to use “someday.”

More than any other product of our kitchen, this recipe was requested by friends to whom we served it, and many of them mention it years later, telling how they continue to make it in their own homes. I wish I had the original magazine clipping, but I think it was becoming unreadable, at which point — I don’t want to say how long ago, because it’s mind-boggling — my oldest, Pearl, wrote out our family’s most recent adaptation, which you can see in the picture. But this is the original:

COMFORT SOUP

1 quart chicken stock
2 boxes frozen chopped spinach
1 # lean ground beef
2/3 c. grated Parmesan cheese
1 egg
ground black pepper

In a soup pot heat chicken stock and add spinach, frozen or thawed. Heat to a simmer (this will take longer if you are defrosting the spinach at the same time) while you make tiny meatballs (about ¾” in diameter) from the ground beef, cheese, and a dash of ground black pepper (which you have first mixed together). When the broth is simmering and the spinach is defrosted, add the meatballs and simmer for 10-15 minutes.  Lightly beat the egg and swirl it around in the soup. Serve.

Serves 2-4. Good with French bread.

I don’t see spinach frozen in boxes anymore. The other day I made my lamb version with a pound of frozen chopped spinach and about a pound and a half of ground lamb. I forgot the egg altogether, and didn’t measure the Parmesan cheese. In the past I have made it with (a lot of!) fresh spinach. It’s very adaptable.

Just now I searched online for Comfort Soup to see if anyone else in the world had used that recipe from the 60’s, but if they did, they haven’t featured it on their website. In the era of food porn, something this “plain” does not have the right features to endear it to cooking site hosts, and there is not even a photo of anything resembling it. You’ll have to make it yourself if you are to experience in better ways than the visual, how Comfort Soup is a winter-warming pot of coziness.

Albert Anker – Girl Eating Soup

What the deer and I notice.

family, nature, other gardens, , , , , , , , ,

When Ivy shook the crabapple tree, dozens of fruits thumped down on the grass, alerting the deer across the street. Right away one mama hurried over with her two fawns to  accept the offering.

I’m at daughter Pippin’s for a few days, having many literary, outdoorsy and even poetic adventures. Five hours farther north in California than I live, and at higher elevations, I’m enjoying the more dramatically aromatic and visual signs of fall.

In their back yard, dozens of mushrooms have sprouted: these are Western Black Elfin Saddle, and Spectacular Rustgill — plus one I didn’t identify.

Higher up where we played at the edges of a lake, various plants drew our attention to them because of their beautiful colors, and even Pippin learned a new species: Dwarf Bilberry. In our sightings it was often set off by azaleas turning color in a wide range of tones.

At the lake we discovered schools of baby trout, minnow sized, in a sunlit pool making for a natural fish nursery.

The most surprising thing close to home was a Monarch butterfly in Pippin’s garden, seemingly having wandered way off course; they are never seen in this part of the country, and this is the wrong time of year, as well. It was fluttering among the extravagant dahlia flowers, and we encouraged it to light on a white one, or any color more complementary. But it preferred the red one.

Just below is a picture of this year’s most startling bloom, maybe 9-10 inches across, “Belle of Barmera.” I never get bored looking at these beauties, which are planted inside a high-fenced garden to keep them from the deer. This was one of the years that the deer poked their heads through and ate some anyway.


It’s been quite a rich visit as far as natural wonders go.
I hope to tell about other sorts of fun I’ve had, very soon.

A visit from Maggie and Pearl.

family, food and cooking, summer, , ,

I’m still enjoying the afterglow of having Pearl and her daughter Maggie here for a couple of days last week. Just we three, three generations, happy to be together, however briefly. I don’t think I mentioned at the time that Maggie came by herself for two nights last May; on her way home from college she stopped here.

This time they were headed back in the other direction. We shopped a little bit for things she’ll need in her dorm suite, and Maggie took her car for an oil change. We cooked a lot, and it is so fun to cook with helpers who go on to appreciate everything on the table. Other times, Pearl very wisely suggested sitting outdoors with our tea or whatever, and there is nothing like being in the garden with people I love.

One afternoon Maggie told us mysteriously that she was going to run a quick errand, and when she came back she was bringing three It’s It ice cream sandwiches. It seems these treats aren’t available except in California.

The weather was fairly warm, but Maggie and Pearl had come from a hotter and more humid Wisconsin, so no one was bothered much. We ate the goodies on the patio, at dusk. It typically cools off here even before the sun sets, so to be gifted a rare balmy evening, coordinated perfectly with our desire to sit out in the most leisurely way — that was the icing on the cake, or the ice cream between the oatmeal cookies.

There had been cake, too, which I’d baked beforehand in honor of both their birthdays, belatedly. I used a Lemon Buttermilk Sheet Cake recipe from America’s Test Kitchen, which I found on someone else’s site, and changed just a little bit. It used the zest and juice of three whole lemons, and was the best lemon cake I’ve ever eaten. I forgot to take a picture, and I sent the leftovers along with Maggie.

Maggie got the idea to make lavender lemonade: She used several lemons from my tree, and dried lavender flowers I had sitting on the kitchen counter. It was just the right amount of sugar, and the nicest accent of lavender — yum! I sent her back to school with a few more lemons, and a lavender plant in a pot, for her balcony. So it was a pretty lemony visit all around, with plenty of sweetness to bring out the flavor.

Joaquin Sorolla, My Wife and Daughters in the Garden

Thinking about babies and Barbie.

culture, family, movies, women, , , , , ,

As I may have said here before, I have probably watched fewer movies than anyone you know. So I don’t often mention them. The two I saw most recently were “My Octopus Teacher” and “Babies,” both of which I’ve enjoyed more than once. I watched “Babies,” a 2010 French documentary, with my four-year-old grandson just last month. Its subjects are four babies in their first year of life, in Namibia, Mongolia, Tokyo, and San Francisco.

I very much love that movie, for the meditative and close-up way it shows vastly different styles of mothering across cultures and around the world. I admit, my own style doesn’t exactly fit with any of those shown, but if I had to choose among the four, I feel most akin to the Mongolian way. In any case, all the families in the movie are pretty traditional for the local culture in which they are raising their children.

The contrast between that movie and the current one everyone is talking about, “Barbie,” didn’t cross my mind until I read this article in Salvo Magazine: “Existential Barbie: A World Without Love is Never Kenough,” by Annie Brownell Crawford. The author starts with a brief introduction:

“The plot begins when Barbie suddenly starts thinking about death, her feet fall flat, and she discovers cellulite on her thighs. To solve her existential crisis, Barbie travels to the real world with her unwanted Ken tagging along. When she arrives in California, Barbie is shocked to discover a world of exaggerated patriarchy where men think of her as an object and girls hate her for her beauty. Here, as the teen character Sasha explains, ‘Men hate women, and women hate women.’”

Crawford notes that “the film moves chaotically between satire and sincerity,” and she wouldn’t be quick to draw conclusions from the above statement alone, but there are reasons to think it was meant seriously. So she responds,

“Modern feminists seem to hate women as much as they believe men do, for the female body confronts all of us with our intrinsic dependence on one another and ultimately upon God. As the apostle Paul reminds us, ‘woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God.’ (I Corinthians 11)  We only know ourselves as women and as men through our relationship with each other, and we only know ourselves as humans in relationship to the God we image. The female body reminds us of this interdependence and the givenness of our existence, for our mothers literally gave us life.”

Of course the biggest difference between these two movies is that one is all about babies, and the other one lacks babies entirely, except for the unfortunate baby dolls:

“The film opens with an origin story wherein the newly created Barbie rescues little girls from being forced to play with baby dolls. After independent, infertile Barbie arrives, the young girls of the world celebrate their liberation from motherhood by smashing their babies to bits.”

I’m not enough of a movie buff that I am likely ever to see “Barbie,” but if I did, I might afterward go on to read some of the critics who are saying that if you dig deep through those layers of irony and satire, it’s actually anti-feminist and conservative in its message. Maybe how you feel about that depends partly on what you think The Patriarchy is. Is Ken in or out of it?

I wonder if Kimberly Ells has seen “Barbie”…. She attended the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations this spring and heard much about the desire to “smash” and “eradicate” the patriarchy; so she started asking around at the event, What is The Patriarchy, exactly? She wrote succinctly about the answers she got in this article: “In Praise of Men.”

I’d be interested to hear if any of my readers has thoughts about these movies or the questions raised by “Barbie.” And if you haven’t seen “My Octopus Teacher” or “Babies,” I definitely recommend those!

A Mongolian mother and child.