What I Had for Lunch Today: Tomato Soup with Farro

Soup is odds-and-ends food for me. This one is three or four shallots and a couple of cloves of garlic, chopped and sautéed, plus a few tablespoons of leftover marinara, vegetable bouillon, fresh parsley and dill, and a handful of farro, simmered till the farro was tender. I finished it with a splash of heavy cream, a pat of butter, homemade croutons and a grating of Parmigiano-Reggiano. For dessert, a couple of chocolate digestive biscuits and an espresso. I would've enjoyed my lunch more if a certain dog and cat had not been staring fixedly at it the entire time. Note to Taz: onions, chocolate and sugar are all bad for dogs.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Parmesan Soup



Remember when bones were free, or practically so? You asked the butcher for them when you wanted to make soup, or give a treat to your dog. Suet was the same: a waste product that bird lovers knew to ask about. The butcher went in the back and reappeared with a hunk, which you could wrap up in a piece of chicken wire and hang up in the back yard to attract chickadees and woodpeckers. Then the markets got wise, and now the fat and the bones cost as much as some of the meats.

Same thing with cheese rinds. Stores used to toss them; if you knew someone in the back, they might save them for you. Most people wouldn't even know what to do with them in any case. But then word got out about using them for gourmet soup, and now they're six to ten dollars a pound.

Here's some of that gourmet soup. What it lacks in beauty, it makes up for in taste. Half a pound of Parmigiano Reggiano rinds, an onion, a few cloves of garlic, a handful of Italian parsley, salt and pepper simmered for an hour with a quart and a half of water makes the broth. It's supposed to be strained, and the solids discarded. As if! I just chopped up the cheese into chewy nuggets and kept going. I added cooked cannellini and some ribbons of kale, cooked it a bit longer till the kale was tender, then drizzled olive oil over it to serve.

This is divine with a couple of slices of toasted sperlonga. Although spring is technically less than a week away, it's still ridiculously cold here, with views of snowbanks from all the windows. A pot of this will be long gone before anyone at the Emory House wants warm-weather fare.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Sundried Tomato Soup

This is a small red onion and a shallot sautéed in butter, then some thyme, parsley, tarragon, snipped sundried tomatoes in olive oil, vegetable bouillon and water added; the whole thing simmered briefly, then topped off with heavy cream.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Korean Noodle Soup

One of my favorite places to shop is Tran's World Food Market in Hadley, Mass. It's open seven days a week, from early morning till wicked late, and carries an unbelievable assortment of Asian foods. It's my source of Lan Chi Chili Sauce with Garlic, masaman curry paste, and other neccessaries of my pantry. Lemons and limes are about a dime, scallions have the tops left on, the ginger is always fresh. There's a little Oriental Grocery a few blocks from me, on Main Street in the South End, and I try to patronize it, too, but I can't always find what I'm looking for there.

In both places, I'm apt to carry off some product I've never tried, for just that reason. I think this packet of Korean noodle soup was something I ended up with from the Oriental Grocery when they didn't have what I'd gone in there for.

The packet came with enough two-foot-long noodles for two servings, two seasoning packets, and two tiny packets of something that looked and tasted like motor oil, had nothing but Korean writing on it, and wasn't mentioned in either the directions or the ingredient list.

To the packet ingredients I added water, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, some asparagus, and some bamboo shoots in hot chili oil. It was already quite spicy. It's supposed to be eaten cold, but who wants to eat cold soup when it's barely 50 degrees in the house?

What I Had for Lunch Today: Yellow Split Pea Soup with Garlic Bread

I made this soup by sautéeing onions, green and orange peppers, celery and cabbage in olive oil. Then I dumped in about a pound of yellow split peas, a couple of spoons of barley miso, salt, pepper, thyme, and three bay leaves. I cooked it all down and garnished it with organic pumpkin oil and Cholula hot sauce. Ali made the garlic bread.