the early bird special

Soups I've made over the last several weeks, where I got the recipe, how much I have left and how good they were:

Minestrone - The Joy of Cooking (75th Anniversary Edition)

Super complex and delicious, especially considering how low-fat this recipe is. I love to make this recipe when I have a refridgerator full of random vegetables getting elderly, because everything tastes good simmered in chicken broth with beans and pasta and bacon. This soup is all eaten and gone.

Corn Chowder - The New Basics

Ross and Erin left this cookbook behind when they got married and moved to Hotlanta. I am physically incapable of not rescuing abandoned books, and cabbaging onto this one has yielded many more tangible benefits than that copy of stories about Buddhist women languishing on my bookshelf. This recipe was pretty good; it included bacon, red peppers and lots of onion with the corn and milk, but didn't really thicken properly. I have three small containers of this soup in the freezer.

Bean and Pasta Soup - The New Basics

Tomato based soup full of beans and orzo, I added chicken breast to this soup. This got very thick and on the second day I put almost a quart of broth in it to thin it out and make it more "soupy." I had a tupperware full of this soup from the freezer for lunch today, and it was even more delcious than I remembered. There are still two frozen containers of this waiting for future lunches.

Curried Sweet Potato Chowder - Better Homes and Gardens

Here's the thing, I love the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook; it contains the best sugar cookie recipe I have ever tried, excellent recipes for dips, a whole section on slow cooker recipes, undsoweiter. It is my second favorite cookbook after The Joy of Cooking because of its broad sweep
(TJOC is broader; it has instructions on how to skin and cook a squirrel!) and reliability; I've never made a bad recipe from this cookbook. But now the caveat, it took a couple interesting recipes for me to realize how "midwest" this cookbook is. For example, last spring when we had a Kentucky Derby party I prepared a rootbeer pulled pork selection for our guests, and for the rootbeer sauce, the recipe told me to use a cup of "chile sauce." Now, to me, the urban international food conusmer that I am, "chile sauce" means something like Siracha or Choloula, so I tried to prepare a serving sauce with an entire cup of that, and, not surprisingly, it was mouth scaldingly inedible. I had never before heard of this "chile sauce" that lives in a bottle next to the A-1 and isn't spicy at all. I had a similar experience when making this curried sweet potato chowder. I was expecting a soupy savory pot of something that tasted not exatly like the panang I can get from Thai Tom, but at least vaguely reminiscent. No. Not at all. This soup was tasty, but milky and sweet, not savory and substantial. Nevertheless, I ate it all, knowing that the tuppers frozen would probably never be defrosted for lack of enthusiasm.