soup

The inspiration for our meals comes from a thousand different places. Sometimes it’s from stopping by the farmstand and seeing fat green leeks sticking up from black buckets like an awkward floral display. Sometimes it’s from our friends’ cookbooks and blogs — ooh, that looks good. Often food arrives on the table because we needed something for the kid fast. That’s why we’re working on stocking our pantry well these days, so we always have interesting ingredients to throw together.

Sometimes, however, our best dishes come from the food we cannot eat.

We have a recipe in our cookbook for a blue cheese cheesecake with a fig crust. (It’s really good, that one.) The only reason it exists is because Danny and I were in Vancouver, doing a weekend event for my first book, and we ate at a great little restaurant called Salt Tasting Room. There were curlicues of good prosciutto and choices of local cheese that made it difficult to decide what to eat, chutneys and pickles and interesting twists. We ate well. All the dessert options, however, had gluten in them. Mostly, I wanted the blue cheese cheesecake.

So we went home and made it, used the fig cookies from my first book as the crust, and took a bite. “Book. That’s going in the book,” we both said.

A little deprivation helps sometimes.

In December, we were at Palace Kitchen, one of our favorite restaurants in Seattle. We don’t go out for dinner often these days. In fact, almost not at all. We live on an island where the best restaurant is the one where Danny cooks. Evenings in Seattle are spent at friends’ houses, but mostly we’re on the road for the ferry with Lu’s eyes growing droopy as we drive. A night out is a rare celebration.

(My goodness, life has changed in the last three years!)

We were eating dinner after a big cookbook event, along with friends Amy Pennington and Lara Ferroni, whose books had been selling fast.. We were happy to be together, laughing and relaxing after being on all evening. Danny and I enjoyed our applewood-smoked chicken and pork chop. Lu ate everything when she wasn’t giggling with Amy. However, I noticed Lara’s silence most. She dipped her spoon into her potato-sunchoke soup slowly, savoring each taste. When she did talk, she pointed to the chile oil quivering on top of the soup. I’ve never seen anyone enjoy soup so much.

Danny and I looked at each other. We didn’t have to talk. We knew what the other was thinking.

We’re making that soup at home.

Here it is.

You know, sometimes we hear from folks: “Your recipes look good but they look too fancy for our house.” We all have different cooking styles, so we’re not out to please everyone. We’re just trying to share what’s in our kitchen.

However, before I met Danny I also divided dishes into a) simple enough for me to do and b) the stuff that restaurant chefs make. Having this restaurant chef around the house is wonderful for so many reasons, but mostly because he has shown me to not be intimidated by food. If I go into a recipe ready to learn, and take my time on a slow Saturday afternoon, I’m usually amazed by how easy it is. The next dish after that success takes half the time because I get out of my own way and just cook.

Also, fancy-sounding recipes start with a cutting board full of humble ingredients, mostly.

We don’t do a lot of posts where we show you every step in photos here. With a two-year-old running around, there isn’t time! But this weekend, while my parents danced with Lu to the soundtrack of Glee, Danny and I cooked. Actually, he cooked and I sat up on the kitchen counter to take photos for you.

We want you to have this soup.

So you start with a hot pan and some pancetta. Pancetta is an Italian favorite, a little like bacon but not smoked. It’s usually cured with salt, sugar, fennel seeds, and pepper. Use a touch of pancetta in this soup and all those flavors will slip into your spoon as well.

If you don’t have pancetta, you can use a little bacon or ham here too.

And if you’re vegetarian, you can skip the pancetta entirely. Use the onion instead.

You chop an onion. I can’t really think of a soup that doesn’t start with 1 large onion, peeled and chopped. Onions are humble but wonderfully useful. If you’re using the pancetta, you can cook the onion in the rendered fat until it’s soft and translucent. However, if you don’t want the meat, caramelize the onion pieces instead. Cook them on low heat, slowly, until they are limp and dark brown and clinging to each other. That caramelized taste will add a depth of flavor to this soup you’ll love.

These are sunchokes.

You might know them as Jerusalem artichokes instead. They’re not flashy vegetables — look at those knotty tubers! They look a little like fresh ginger root, but they are nothing like ginger. They have the name artichoke in them, but they taste nothing like an artichoke. They’re actually from the sunflower family. In Italian, the name for sunflower is girasole. Someone heard that in English and thought it sounded like Jerusalem. They’re not from Jerusalem. These are confusing little vegetables, right?

Actually, they’re lovely. They have a slight nutty taste, a faint sweetness, and a wonderful crunch. They’re also full of iron, apparently. There’s a hint of water chestnut in the bite of a sunchoke. I love them. And I had never heard of them before I met Danny.

One of my favorite moments of being pregnant with Lu was when I returned home to find a big jar of pickled sunchokes on our front porch, thanks to our friend Brandon. (Pregnant women love pickled things, you see.)

(Some people complain that eating sunchokes gives them intestinal upset. Sunchokes are high in fiber and contain inulin, instead of traditional starch, so that can cause upset in some folks. If you’re not eating a diet high in fiber right now, these might come as a shock to the system. Danny and I have never had a problem, however.

Mixing the sunchokes with the potatoes might cut down on the effects, if you suffer from them.)

Seriously, you want to try these.

And I love that making soup means you can rough chop them. No need for meticulous precision when these are going to be pureed anyway.

Potatoes.

I really don’t think that any soup (or dish, for that matter) that involves potatoes could be called that fancy. They grow in dirt. They have such knobbly skin.

I think potatoes are beautiful.

This is the size of the diced potatoes you want for this soup. We describe it in the recipe, but we wanted you to see it here.

You let everything cook, with some chicken stock or water, until the potatoes yield to the knife.

It only takes 30 minutes to make, if that.

We love our Vita Mix blender. (Thank you, Cari!) LOVE. IT. This blender makes the smoothest soups I have ever sipped. (And the grain attachment makes it easy to grind your own flours.)

However, until a couple of years ago, we didn’t have a Vita Mix. A regular blender works here too.

You can use an immersion blender, of course. We love that thing too. Just expect it to take a bit longer than with a powerful blender.

Also, when you use the blender, you have to blend in batches. This allows you to pour the soup through a strainer and watch the steam rise.

Oh, the smell. This soup smells rich and warm, the antidote to a cold winter day, like putting on a blanket.

There are no expensive ingredients in it, and it’s all vegetables and stock and spices. However, it smells as though it should cost much more than it does.

And there it is, topped with pancetta and drizzled with chile oil you made yourself.

See? You can do this. You want this soup.