Simplicty on a Soggy Night
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
Blustery, chilly, rainy nights are made for soup, and when the ingredients of that soup happen all to be local, organic, and picked up within two blocks of one’s front stoop, well, even better.
Monday was Southside CSA pick up day, and this week it was all a seemingly drab selection of things like collard greens, kale, potatoes, garlic, onion, beets, radishes, etc.—cold weather fare to be sure (please pass the kielbasa…).
Ever the good kitchen sport—and taught from an early age to make the most of what each season had to offer— Lily turned to her culinary goddess, her gastronomic Rock of Gibraltar: Alice Waters.
“She’s our generation’s Julia Child,” Lily said to me as she thumbed through Ms. Waters’ Art of Simple Food and found a recipe for Kale & Potato Soup (and then summarily sent me out for two quarts of chicken stock and some local smoked bacon at Marlowe & Daughters butcher around the corner).
“But instead of being all about technique, [Alice Waters is] all about the ingredients.”
Simplicity, seasonality. (And a dose of nostalgia: my mom used to make a killer kale soup when I was a kid).
The soup was extraordinary last night, eye closingly, loud volume-ingly more so tonight, brought to temperature on a low gas flame over 45 minutes, and then topped with grated Parmesano-Reggiano and just a few conservative drizzles of of serrano chili-infused olive oil I made from last week’s CSA cache.
Wine Pairing: Bodegas Biurko Gorri Arbanta Rioja (’Agricultura Ecológica’)* 2008
Music Pairing: Jolie Holland Catalpa (2003)**
* Means, roughly, ‘organic,’ though these things tend to be mind-numbingly difficult to understand by degrees.
**A random and happy coincidence: it’s what we happened to play as the evening unfolded, a music choice that seems perfect in retrospect, despite its arbitrary appearance on one’s hastily decided silence filling.
Note on recipe
Although your best best would be to buy the book (Lily found hers at Costco at a deep discount), there is a version of the recipe at dianacooks.com (whose observation, “its taste is complex — definitely more than a sum of its parts,” is spot-on).
Ms. Waters’ recipe calls for shaved Parmesano Reggiano and good olive and cracked black pepper at the end; although Lily frowned at me, I chose to use a spicy oil and no black pepper. The cheese gives the soup a salty kick, so make sure you don’t overdo your seasoning pre-cheese.
Ms. Waters also suggests variations with chorizo or other spicy sausage. Lily chose instead to use smoked, uncured bacon (with the rendered meat returned to the soup, slightly trimmed of fat and torn into bite-size rectangles).
