dagens tankeställare

"When someone I love is sad, I make soup. Nothing thaws melancholia like broth and love. I pay no attention to intricate soup rules requiring hours of preparation and scads of forethought. I've little time for making Fancy spice balls or stock from roasted chickens. But I have time enough for love, given in the form of a simple soup.

So it was that when my friend was in pain, I made soup. I combined the last remaining ingredients in my near-empty, winter cupboard and ended up with alchemy. Days later my friend called, raving endlessly about my soup and begging for the recipe. I, being a distracted mother of three, had forgotten I'd even made the soup. And I spent the next few days trying to re-create the beloved broth to her satisfaction.

"No, that's not it!" She'd shake her head with every combination of ingredients I suggested. I verbally cooked and re-cooked the soup until I was sick of the whole event. Then I finally figured it out. It was the LOVE that made the difference. I kept forgetting to tell her about the love.

The following recipe (though I believe it to be greatly enhanced over the original version) met with her final, grudging approval.

• 1 lb. Spicy vegetarian chorizio
• 4 cans unsalted chicken broth
• 1 diced onion
• 2 cans any bean on your shelf
• 1 28 ounce can peeled tomatoes, chopped
• 1 big dash of love

Combine all ingredients. Heat thoroughly. If you plopped the sausage in frozen (as I did) this will take 30 minutes. That's it. Really! If your friend whines, as mine did, insisting the recipe be more complicated, write out the following directions:

Early in the morning before you've had your coffee or fed your family, begin your homemade chicken stock by slow roasting a free-range, organically-fed, young hen. Crush four hundred dollars' worth of imported spices with a marble mortar and pestle. Add the ingredients in the order you placed them in your grocery cart. Stop after each spice addition to stir fifty times. Cook all day over a flame tamer. Do not leave the stove for even a nanosecond. Taste-test the broth every sixty seconds.

This whole process prior to consumption should take 23 ½ hours. Or you could add love and save 23 hours."