What’s cooking this week?
Potato leek soup (1 qt.)
Corn chowder (1 qt.)
Parker House rolls (6)
Sourdough sandwich bread
Country bread
Tart cherry granola
We’re serving up soup by the quart in the Cookout kitchen this week. Two kinds, both of which pair perfectly with warm, fluffy Parker House rolls. We’re also baking a few of our weekly standards.
As we did last week, we’re sticking with delivery only this week. Message us with your order any time throughout the week, give us 24 hours (or 2 days for sourdough), and we’ll bring it to your door. Everything is $8.
Cozy chair, from Maria’s sketchbook
Kitchen Report
I made pea soup this week from a recipe told to me by my dad, whose pea soup I grew up eating in the days and weeks following Thanksgiving. He’d buy a whole ham for us to make ham sandwiches prior to the main event, and the bone from that ham became the occasion to make pea soup. The recipe is simple: get out your stock pot when you’re making your coffee. Throw in peas, an onion, a head of garlic, a handful of peppercorns, a ham bone, and fill the pot up with water. Let that bubble away on the back burner for as long as you can handle. For the first few hours that’s an easy task, but after a while the individual ingredients can no longer hold their own and stubbornly begin to commingle, giving up an aroma greater than the sum of its parts. The real challenge of this recipe is practicing restraint as temptation digs in. The skilled cook perseveres when the aroma becomes a warm blanket. The methodical bloop bloop bubbles and rustling leaves out the window make a meditative rhythm to pass the time. Finally, finally, when the cook can no longer muster the strength to go on, the soup is ready.
Recipes such as this are not measured in cups and ounces, but in time and emotion. They are recipes as stories--part of an oral tradition of storytelling that helps define a family, and as such get passed down and altered over generations. When I asked my dad for his pea soup recipe he told me his grandmother would add cut up hot dogs to it. Hot dogs or ham bones, it is all “Pea Soup” in my family.
Happy cooking,
Bryan