Ge's Vegetable Soup

That's Momma (Ge) with Janelle on the left, Norah on the right and me, of course, on her lap.

When you wake up one morning in November and it's suddenly 20 degrees outside, when it had been 65 degrees the day before, it is time to make a pot of vegetable soup like Momma used to make. Momma was a country cook and she made real comfort food that even her grandchildren liked to eat. They called her "Ge," which is really hard to spell so that you can understand how to say it. "Ge" has a hard G, like that in golf, so it really should have been spelled, "Ghee," but Momma didn't want it that way and Momma pretty much always got things the way she wanted them. If you are as old as I am and grew up during the time when it was still okay to read The Story of Little Black Sambo, you might remember that Sambo tricked the tigers into running around the tree so fast that they turned into ghee. So at least my generation would know how to pronounce it if it were written that way. Anyway, my son Taylor loved Ge's vegetable soup and I can imagine him asking me how to make it one day, so here's the recipe.

PREPARATION 

Buy a huge package of stew beef, preferably discounted as it approaches its "sell by" date, because this is a thrifty soup. I got about 3 pounds in a package from Sam's Club and had to pay full price in spite of my attempts to negotiate a better deal with the meat manager. Then, when you wake up at 3:00am and can't go back to sleep, go to the kitchen and cut the stew beef into bite-size pieces so that it will be all ready to go in the morning. Get a big-ass soup pot (see Tips for the Inexperienced, inset). If you live in New York City like Lawler, my daughter/blog coach, do not attempt to make this soup because you will never have room for a big-ass pot and, even if you did have the big-ass pot you wouldn't have a sink big enough to wash it in. This recipe serves at least 20 and cannot be reduced.

BEEF AND ONIONS

Heat some oil in the big-ass pot, add the stew beef pieces, season with salt and pepper and stir it all around to brown the meat. Meanwhile, peel and cut up a shit ton (see tips) of onions and add them to the beef. Add a dollop of beef-flavored Better Than Bouillon to a few cups of hot water, along with about four squirt-shakes of Worcestershire (WUH-stuh-SHEE-uh) Sauce. Worcestershire Sauce was one of Momma's secret ingredients - she would even put a couple of shakes in potato salad. And if you haven't discovered Better Than Bouillon, prepare to be grateful, yet again, for another hot tip from Youngest Sister. You know those recipes that call for 1/2 cup of chicken broth, so you open a container of chicken broth and measure out that 1/2 cup and then put the rest in the fridge where it will stay for 6 weeks until it has little dots of mold floating on top and then you throw it out? If you are shaking your head in agreement, Better Than Bouillon will set you free. It comes in lots of flavors and you can get it at Kroger, but at Costco they have huge 8-oz. jars that I can no longer live without. I just wish they would make jars of tomato paste like that. Can I hear an Amen?

Anyway, bring that to a boil then reduce it to a simmer and put the top on the pot a little cock-eyed (see below) so that the steam can escape. Take a picture of it for your blog or social media, then leave it to cook for at least an hour. Then take a picture of your crazy-ass husband sitting in the hot tub playing Angry Birds in spite of the fact that it is 20 degrees outside.

THE VEGETABLES

While the beef and onions are cooking you can start accumulating the other ingredients. This is where you can be creative, which would have driven me nuts when I was in my twenties. I remember trying to cook something using a recipe from the Joy of Cooking that included the instructions, "Add a couple of tablespoons of mayonnaise, sour cream or vegetable oil, enough to moisten." Seriously? As a beginner cook, I needed more boundaries than that, especially since oil isn't even the same texture as mayonnaise and sour cream. How can they possibly be interchangeable? It freaked me out so much that, to this day, I cannot use the Joy of Cooking, so I hope my lack of specificity doesn't similarly taint your experience here. But suffice it to say that you can use whatever vegetables you like. If you don't like it, don't put it in there. My friend Karen would probably put okra in it because she is a Louisiana-educated Texan and that sort of person puts okra in everything. Momma was very suspicious of okra and its tendency to go slimy on you, so add okra at your own risk. 

Momma always had a container in the freezer into which she would put leftover vegetables - a spoonful of lima beans, a half-cup of french-style green beans - whatever was left in the pan when the meal was over. When it was full, she would start another one. When it was time to make soup, she would just throw the whole mess into the pot, so there could be some interesting stuff in there, like mushrooms and broccoli. I always buy a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, and I like to add a bag of baby limas because they aren't in the mixed vegetable blend. Momma did not like Fordhook limas because, as my friend Steve would say, they are like little bags of sawdust. But she loved baby limas, aka buttuh beans, so we always had little baby limas in our soup. While I do not save vegetables all year long like Momma did, I do use vegetable soup as an opportunity to clean out the freezer. This morning I found some partial bags of frozen peas and corn, which are just perfect for this soup. But peel and cut your own potatoes - real potatoes - because they are never good frozen. For the liquid, go to your pantry and see what you have on hand that has anything to do with tomatoes, but always be sure to include a can of Campbell's tomato soup. Today I put in a can of whole tomatoes (cut up), the Campbell's tomato soup and a can of Progresso Tomato basil soup. It's the first time I have ever included that and I am very excited about this exotic addition because I think it is a tasty soup, on account of the basil.

Cut the potatoes into bite-size pieces and add them to the pot along with the rest of that stuff and cook it for a few hours more. If it gets too thick, add some water. Give it a stir and add salt about every half hour. It always needs salt. 

THE PASTA DECISION

After you have cooked the soup for a couple of hours, you make the pasta decision - whether to put pasta in it or not. Sure it already has potatoes, but is there really such a thing as too much starch? Actually, pasta is a sort of fancy word for something that goes in this soup because, when I was growing up, there was only macaroni and spaghetti, and macaroni is what went into this soup. We didn't start calling it pasta until the '80s and, when we finally did, I remember it sounded kind of highfalutin. Back then there was no agnolotti, no fusilli, no rotini; it was elbow macaroni or nothing. Of course, nowadays we can buy pastas of every shape and size right down there at Kroger, so I got a wild hair and bought rigatoni, because I thought it would be interesting, but mostly because it was the cheapest pasta they had (and remember, this is thrifty soup). Well, this rigatoni cooked up really BIG, so I'm not sure it was the best choice I could have made but, as Tony would say, it's all going to the same place. It doesn't really matter what it looks like. 

If you're going to put pasta in the soup, add it at the end, and stir it a little more often, to keep it from sticking to the bottom. You will probably need to add some more water and, naturally, some more salt.

SERVE IT UP

Momma would serve this soup for dinner, accompanied by big hot crusty kaiser rolls and butter. After that, we would reheat it daily for lunches, adding water and salt each time, until it was gone. But if you are like me, once the soup is ready to eat, you will have been cooking it for so long that you will have absolutely zero interest in eating it. What started as a big-ass potful of love suddenly looks more like a massive slop bucket that you have to search to find suitable containers for, so that you can fill those free spaces in the freezer again. Your crazy-ass hot-tubbing husband gloats over the fact that it really was a good idea to save all those chocolate chip cookie dough containers that you bitched about because it's stupid to use them for storage containers when you can't see what's inside them and they get lost in the fridge until the content goes the way of the aforementioned chicken broth. So you just scowl at him and fill the chocolate chip cookie dough containers with Momma's vegetable soup and get it ready to take to Sara, who is just finishing another round of chemo and could use a little bit of comfort, and Karen, who can put her own damned okra in it if she wants to. And then you hear Momma's voice saying, "Nastiness I do despise," and it reminds you of why you thought it was such a good idea to make soup in the first place, because it really is comfort in a pot. And it will be even better on the second day.