Life is Like a Bowl of Soup

One of the consequences of packing up and moving to an unknown frontier is living with the fruit of educated guesses on how best to prepare. Not knowing what kind of place I would be landing—how large or small, how public or private—made for some trade-offs on what to bring and what to leave behind.

Some of my guesses were right on target, like picking up a used pub table and stools for dining. The set I found was exactly the right fit in my new basement apartment.

The same cannot be said for either of my ‘small’ couches. Both are in storage, being too wide to make it through the narrow doorways to my dwelling.

Some choices can only be filed under, “What was I thinking??” A ten-quart soup pot? There is no way that the small nation I could feed with that thing would ever fit in my comfy walk-out basement abode.

A few nights ago, I decided to make a pot of soup as the vehicle for using up the many odds and ends I had in my refrigerator.

I was conceiving in my head something creamy, that would encompass all the vegetables I intended upon throwing in the pot. I opened one of my cookbooks and found a recipe for a creamy cauliflower soup that I thought I could use as the basis for my creation.

Let me first say, making two quarts of soup in a ten-quart pot is just weird. The entire time I felt like I was missing something BIG in the process. And yet, lots of stuff went in the pot: chicken stock, a couple red potatoes, cauliflower, radishes, cucumber, a little broccoli, onion, carrots, celery, a few spinach leaves.

Then, I realized that some of the more exotic spices, I did not have. So I improvised. Cardamom became arugala. Beyond a stretch. Lemon juice became baked garlic. What? Yeah, I know. But as I always say, garlic is the culinary equivalent of duct tape. That stuff will fix whatever’s wrong in the pot! Kind of reminds me of a certain someone I know.

As I began simmering all the ingredients, another key problem hit me. I left all the food processor-y type appliances behind with the other community property holder. Kinda hard to make a creamy soup when you can't cream all the stuff up, no? So, fork in hand, I began mashing the soup along the side of the pan. It took close to half an hour, but I got stuff sort of smashed up. And when it was all said and done, the texture was actually really great—better than pureed.
As I sat eating what turned out to be a rather delicious concoction, I realized that the evening’s meal was something of an allegory for many of the changes going on for me lately.

Sometimes, we don’t have what we think we need in life to get by, but when we’re open to working with what we have around us, sometimes it all turns out for the better.