magic soup

Last night, my boyfriend wasn’t feeling well; I found him in bed and inchoate when I got home from work. I brought him hot honeyed tea and ice water and let him rest while I worked on a web project, and then I started feeling hungry.

He said he wasn’t hungry, but I didn’t care. I knew how to rouse him. I went to the Harvest Coop down the street and came back with a pack of bone-in chicken thighs, a finger of fresh ginger, citrus juices, a brick of frozen spinach, and no-salt chicken stock.

I started hacking up the chicken, too impatient to wait for the meat fall apart in the pot. I dropped the chunks, the skin, and the bones in an inch of water in a huge stockpot with olive oil and salt. I poured in all the storebought stock. I chopped an onion. I chopped a potato. I chopped celery we’d never made bloody marys with last weekend that was starting to sag, and half a bag of baby carrots that were almost about to turn slimy. All in. Then I peeled the ginger and four cloves of garlic, and buzzed those up in our new mini-prep food processor (thanks, S!). I added sea salt, fresh-ground pepper from our hand-mill, cumin, Frank’s Red Hot, other spices; some butter to amp the fat content. White wine. V-8. A modest roue. When the contents began to boil, I dropped in the entire block of frozen spinach. It had been on the stove nearly forty minutes at this point. The meat was cooked through.

I cut two incredibly thin slices from the giant loaf of sourbread in our frig, and toasted them. When they were done, I put them on a foil-covered tray in the toaster-oven, buttered and garlicked and oreganoed. Didn’t even toast it, just let sit in the warm oven and head toward crostini, toward crouton; I’d hit the “toast” switch when my boy came out for dinner. It was at about this point that he stumbled out of the bedroom, lured by the yummy smells. I tested the potatoes and carrots for softness; good to go. He ate TWO bowls of chicken soup to the one I managed, with enormous islands of of veg and meat rising up over the lip of the large bowl. And a whole other fat slice of sourdough, and more juice. The ginger was good for him. The eating was good for him.

And since he’s usually the one making me amazing meals, it was even more satisfying; I very rarely cook, or can cook anything better than he could. I’m the baker: I make breads, pizza dough, cookies, cupcakes, cheesecakes. He can’t bake. Even my dinner contributions tend to be things that come from the oven: lasagne, meatloaf. He makes things more along the line of baked prosciutto-wrapped scallops stuffed with porcini-garlic remoulade and served with lemon-garlic sauteed scallops and a side of garlic-white wine-spinach and a tomato ragout. Like so.

He usually does breakfasts, too; an amazing omeletter. But last Saturday I took over, with the help of mini-prep food processor, Pioneer Woman’s hollandaise, and Smitten Kitchen’s poached egg tutorial. Rather than strict Benedict, I built a base of wilted spinach, fried tomato (Irish-style), and prosciutto, though. And learned that a little cayenne goes quite a ways. And that poaching perfectly wiggly eggs is totally easy if you can handle stepping away and ignoring them for a few minutes. It rocked our socks.

Then, immediately after making him this amazing super-benedict-breakfast-thing, I headed off to a feminist media activism conference.