I’m one of those folks who anticipate with glee the clear crisp autumn mornings. Give me gloomy gray clouds which has a slight rainy mist moving over the blooms of spring and two things will right away occur: the closet will resemble an end-of-summer department store clearance rack as the fall wardrobe takes over, plus the stove top will brim with consolation food. And of all of the politically incorrect comfort dishes bursting from my flour-dusted and grease-stained mid-1950′s edition Betty Crocker cookbook, my favourite drop cuisine would need to be soup.
Soup (the creamier, the greater!) transports me to my grade school days, wearing my minor red jumper dress, where upon twisting the plastic cap on my Partridge Family thermos I am rewarded which has a whiff of mom’s Slumgullion soup. To this day I’d lay bets that the smell of that soup wafting on a stiff fall afternoon breeze brought my test scores up no less than twenty percent.
Once a week mother would magically create a soup our massive pot she jokingly called “the cauldron.” and the resulting aroma that would seep into each corner and crevice of our residence wasn’t of this world.
Like the cartoons of the day, I could imagine my feet being lifted off the ground, nose sniffing the air, as I floated toward the simmering taste of heaven coming from the kitchen.
Mom had numerous names for her consomm? concoctions; Italian Delight, Every little thing but the Kitchen Sink, or my favourite: Slumgullion Soup. And I loved just about every slurp, despite the outrageous names. When I grew older, and asked mom for the recipes to her amazing soups, she let me in on The Massive Secret: just about every one of her soups was created from leftovers.
They weren’t precisely recipes, she stammered, a little embarrassed at the thought. How could she not have recipes for her outstanding connoisseur soups?
I couldn’t fathom that these bowls of bliss which I so closely connected with my wonder years weren’t going to become passed down for future generations. I was pretty much incensed until I realized that although they could possibly not have been pulled from the pages of a connoisseur magazine or from hand-scrawled notes long-stored in terrific grandma’s recipe trunk, these soups had been put together out of a combination of financial necessity and adore. I know that now. You will in all probability even have leftovers to pour into the school Thermos, as well.
You may also be interested in reading about thermos food jar and plastic food storage containers.