Soup, bread and salad for dinner sounded good to 24 grownups and 5 kids under seven, on a frigid night in late January, last Thursday’s dinner. But did I take a single picture? Nope.
I tried to plan things so that people could be as acetic or extravagant in their food choices as they wished – well, in the confines of a simple soup dinner, anyways. So there was a vegan soup, greens & garlic soup from Anna Thomas newer Vegetarian Epicure – it was definitely the unexpected hit of the night. A whole head of garlic, onions, and greens – I used spinach and curly & lacinto kales – broth (although one of the funny things about Thomas book is a lot of the recipes say “chicken or vegetarian broth), cubed potatoes, white wine, and a dash of rice vinegar to bring the flavor up. I think it was so good because I used several kinds of veggie broth I had frozen, one made with greens, one with lots of herbs, one a kind of standard carrot, celery, onion, garlic broth. Paired with the greens soup was 101 Cookbooks seeded flatbread, also vegan, no eggs or dairy.
The other two soups were from the Ovens of Brittany, a long-ago restaurant chain in Madison WI, where I worked for about 4 years: Cream of vegetable, and Spanish country soup. The cream of vegetable was the rich one, although I used whole milk & half & half, rather than the heavy cream called for. I did use all the butter specified; almost 2 sticks, 14 TBLS, but dispersed through a little over a gallon of soup – at least 15 servings, so not really all that much butter when divided by servings.
The bread to go with the cream soup was buttermilk pull-aparts, from this Saveur recipe. The bread for the Spanish country soup – that I made with bratwurst & bacon instead of ham & chorizio – was long-rise no-knead, a brown loaf and a white sourdough, that I think was the best sourdough I’ve ever made.
And then there were 3 kinds of bar cookies for dessert – Dorie Greenspan’s blondies; brownies – I used a cakier King Arthur recipe, rather than my standard very fudgy ones; and raison bars, filling from an old better Homes & Gardens cookie book, crust from Betty Crocker.
Chicken liver pate with seedy flatbread wedges
But we’ve been eating the leftovers all weekend, such as there was. I took some of the flatbread and a little pate – also a leftover, frozen since the cookie party – over to Steve & Heike’s, where we ate them with smoked oysters and a beer and akmak for a little snack before going to see David Bromberg and Jorma Kaukonen. Watching these two old pickers was great fun – I’d forgotten how funny Bromberg is – someone called out a request and he said:
Look at me. I’m a shlubby overweight Jewish guy, and being up here is the most power I get. You people might know what you want to hear, but you have no idea how to compose a set”.
I think he’s the Daniel Pinkwater of folk. I’d also forgotten his funny lyrics – “Don’t let the glasses fool you” – that should be my motto.
I took the last half of the sourdough loaf, and the last brownies and raison bars to John yesterday. We passed through Milwaukee on the way to a West HS hockey game, and had lunch at Honeypie.
That leaves only the bucket of cream o’ veg left – can’t decide if we should eat it for dinner tonight, or it’s work lunches for me the rest of the week.
Yogurt bucket of cream o' vegetable soup
