"Yum" only begins to describe it #1

This blog is kind of the opposite of Steve, don't eat it! So, I made this soup the other day, and it occurred to me that I should start a post series called "Yum" only begins to describe it.

The first installment will be about my Vegetable Beef Soup. First, you have to understand soups in our house - there is no recipe. We throw together what we have on hand, so recreating the soup would be quite a feat. No problem - every soup turns out beyond delicious.

Let's start with stock. The thought of buying stock from a store is so abhorrent, well, OK - we do make a concession for vegetable stock. We get these amazing chickens and turkeys from Steve and Jackie Good of Cloverlawn Farms, and the ultimate best beef (in the form of 1/2 a cow) in the world that is solely pastured or hay-fed from Les Roggenbuck of East River Organic Farm. Now, when you are getting whole birds and half cows, you have lots of extra stuff left over. So, we save all our vegetable trimmings and make stock from scratch.

Next, spices. We can't get them at the grocery store - oh no! Lisa discovered several years ago from some online forums about Penzey's Spices. So, she ordered cinnamon. I said, "Cinnamon? Come on, how great can cinnamon be that you have to order it on line and have them ship it?" OK, I admit it - I ate my words. There is no comparison. The more we ordered from Penzey's, the more we were hooked. Bill Penzey travels around the world finding sources for herbs and spices that grow their crops in a responsible manner, handle only the best quality, and can be personally verified. We were Penzey's Tourists for a while (visiting them wherever we travelled), until they finally opened one near us.





Long story short, I had some beef stock I had made in the freezer, as well as lots of ground beef. So, I sauteed some onions and garlic, carrots, and celery, threw in a pound of ground beef, stock, barley, a can of soup beans, seasoned it all with salt, cumin, aleppo pepper, oregano, and basil. Well, by the time Lisa came back from picking up Rachel's new glasses, the house was smelling so good that everyone was lined up at the table clamoring for me to serve up the piping hot piece of heaven. Lisa says, "Is that all we have for dinner? I want something else to fill me up." Well, she couldn't eat anything else after a bowl of that. Saturday and today, that's all they want for lunch.

Now that is my idea of soup - so good you can't resist, and it warms the tip of your hair down to the tip of your toes, and is a meal unto itself.