{"id":285,"date":"2010-01-31T18:24:39","date_gmt":"2010-01-31T23:24:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/?p=285"},"modified":"2014-04-03T23:23:15","modified_gmt":"2014-04-04T04:23:15","slug":"twenty-four-people-for-soup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/twenty-four-people-for-soup\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty-four people for soup"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> – 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<\/a>, also vegan, no eggs or dairy.<\/p>\n

The other two soups were from the Ovens of Brittany<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

The bread to go with the cream soup was buttermilk pull-aparts, from this Saveur recipe<\/a>. 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And then there were 3 kinds of bar cookies for dessert – Dorie Greenspan’s<\/a> blondies; brownies – I used a cakier King Arthur recipe<\/a>, rather than my standard very fudgy<\/a> ones; and raison bars, filling from an old better Homes & Gardens cookie book, crust from Betty Crocker.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Chicken liver pate with seedy flatbread wedges<\/p><\/div>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Yogurt bucket of cream o' vegetable soup<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[44,45,24,43,19],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bar-cookies","tag-bread","tag-dinner","tag-leftovers","tag-winter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8599,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions\/8599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}