Everywhere across the world when dusk begins to cast shadows, the unprepared parents and caretakers all begin to ask: What’s for supper?” The joy resides in vegetable soup…straight from your garden.

I detest the word ‘supper’. It conjures an underwhelming meal. For some reason, it also brings to mind smacking lips and hungry families, hunched over a groaning board.

Still: WHAT is for dinner???

But there it is, the question always asked and only answered once at a time Just to be asked eternally again until the food is all grown, eaten, and gone.

What else is joy but homegrown items straight from the garden in a soup bowl?

I love nothing better to answer that question with a pot of soup. Particularly if it’s cooked on the stove on a chilly Fall evening. If it is Autumn, we have remainders of the summer garden that I need to deal with anyway. I do not can or dehydrate very much, so the sooner, the better.

Tomatoes, small potatoes, peppers, dried rosemary, fresh chives, lemon thyme, half a zucchini, make a good starting base. Grown or locally-purchased items like carrots, onions and beautiful blocks of Twin Oaks tofu (locally made delicacy) all share amazing potential. This potential reached literal boiling point when married together in a pressure cooker full of salted boiling water.

Now what? Coming in straught from the garden

Vegetable soup itself epitomizes the saying “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,”.

I think of this as I recall that there are a few shiitakes from our own inoculated logs I can add, more for their woodsy character than their flavor.

These are a few of my favorite soups…

It takes all kinds: French Onion, tomato, potato, Lemon tofu…but vegetable soup sends a message of care and warmth and ultimate nourishment. Simply put, it is joy, distilled.

When prepared in a pressure cooker, the individual vegetables and herbs, and mushrooms retain their vibrant colors, texture, and vitamins (or so I am told). From processing to partaking is quite rapid.

If I was more proficient in chopping vegetables or refrigerator rummaging, it would almost be fast food. Fast, minus of course, ordering seeds from catalogs, sowing, watering, observing, weeding, mulching, and harvesting at least half of the ingredients!

Partake of simple perfection, Joy=soup

Vegetable soup is personal on this level: Within view of a garden where most of the components were grown, we sit down to a deceptively humble meal. Candles, fresh-baked hunks of bread, and the warmth of summer are contained in each spoonful. If you need some joy in your life, I suggest its synonym: soup.