Michael Collins
On Tuesday evenings, I ask my Granddaughter to set the table for our Family Dinner Night. She always asks, “Do we need Spoons, Forks, and Knives”?
Most of my family doesn’t consider soup a meal. In fact, my oldest son claims he doesn’t even like soup, so no spoons on Family Dinner night. I know it can be and people can live on it if necessary but to my family, it is something you slurp when you're cold, especially on an overnight Boy Scout adventure, but it is frequently used by me to stop my stomach from making embarrassing noises before the real food arrives, or when those canned beans are still trying to escape from the Ranch. Soup can be quite delicious (I actually make what I consider to be the most delicious soups in the universe. But to many, that still doesn't make it a meal. A slice of Whitebread, a few saltine crackers, but that is not as good as salt and pepper added to the soup before you eat it, along with a few dashes of Tabasco.
Now Chocolate, so I have heard, is also delicious but it, too, is also not officially recognized as a meal (though I personally can be satisfied with a big bowl of chocolate ice cream, or even a bowl of vanilla ice cream smothered in Chocolate Syrup), as so could my Grandchildren, especially after they get out of the cool water of the Hot Desert Pool or the Southern California Ocean. They just seem to go together like white on rice. Yes, there are some soups which are, in fact, really Chili or Stews and they can pass as a meal. I seem to eat many of them on a daily basis. I always make sure I have a stock of pre-canned (HOT) Chili and Del-Monte Beef Stew when my wife is not home teasing me with healthy colored things that are born in a skillet of the Virgins. Like Oils? (What is up with that anyway?) They have less water and more rice or barley or other chewable lumps
of things. I'm from the old school where if your spoon stands up in it, then it starts to enter meal territory. If there's just a lot of water, no matter how flavorful, it's merely a precursor to a meal. And if it's a consommé (pronounced "con-sue-may" - a see-through broth containing nothing edible except for the liquid--it's really more of a hot salty drink in a bowl), well, forget it. Where does Ramon fit in? I suppose it depends on how much water and flavor you poor out before you eat it. Just yesterday afternoon, my Grandson poured out his entire flavor, by mistake, and then had to use hot tap water so he could add his flavoring back in.
A consommé aside: the only time I've been served something actually called "consommé" was at a wedding dinner party for Tim and Joy, in a fancy condo overlooking the LA. It was a Chinese wedding party when a bubbling–boiling, fishy-smelling, consommé arrived, looking kind of like, tasting like, and smelling remarkably like something out of the ocean that had sat on a fishing boat without ice for a couple of weeks. Which would probably have been fine if I had not been there but could have doubled as the kind of laxative, they give you before a colonoscopy but in reverse.
I could have eaten it, but there were no potted plants to inflict it on. So, we took turns, distracting the hostess, while we'd sneak into the bathroom carrying our consommé cups and flush away the boiling evidence with floating eyeballs.
Back to Soup--I have had entire meals consisting only of soup and bread or crackers, but I chalk that up to the fact that I could have entire meals consisting of just bread, which might be why I am gaining weight. If the bread is good enough, like fresh warm sourdough, it doesn't need anything, though a little butter never hurts, and certainly never hurt James Beard who ate his bread fresh from the oven and, in his own words, "slathered" with butter. And he lived to a ripe old age.
So man can live by bread alone if the bread is good enough, and if by "alone" you mean it includes butter or mayo with Tabasco and a slice of something eatable or a piece of cheese. (This is what I call a Fold-Over)
But I digress; this man cannot live by soup alone. My wife is currently trying to prove me wrong. She found a particular brand of soup she is apparently obsessed with. It goes by the name Jenny Craig. She doesn't call it obsessed, she just buys it, never eats it, but leaves it in the cabinet for me to eat when she is gone.; Thank you Tabasco.
I have to admit that soup is one of the joys in my life. Watery soup, thick soup, stews, chili’s an the things you can come up with by watching famous chefs with an Austrian accent on the Food Channel, as long as they don’t throw ol’ dead fish in the middle of it.
My wife's favorite is something with zero calories and no flavor. Her soup might be accompanied by a piece of mozzarella (which, of course, is food). Still, this is not a meal in my book, and I refuse to accept it as such. And yet--it is dinner. Take it or eat cottage cheese. (NOT, in my world.)
She gets this way, from time to time, depending on what her doctor scales tell her. I like to mess with them to see if she notices. She has been gone for several weeks, and after all these days, I have moved on and made my own meals, which, when I'm desperate and hungry may be something like either a fold-over or a fold-in sandwich. They always include White Bread, Mayo, Tabasco, and some kind of thinly sliced meat. Videos have been posted on YouTube and Facebook.
A Fold-In is just the opposite. It is like a Green Bean or whatever kind of soupy leftover in your fridge that you can put in a bowl on top of the white bread and then fold it all in together.
Wow, a new kind of soup that you can eat without a fork.
But now I am out of food and out of ideas. I will ask her tonight what she recommends. She will probably remind me of the Clam Chowder she asked me to buy her 2 years ago but has never been eaten. Also, so much chicken and turkey broth". Maybe there is some chicken enchilada soup she might say that I always loved but have never eaten it." I do like soup, as long as its flavor is killed with something hot and spicy, with no white creamy stuff in it...But I traditionally eat it with something--a quesadilla, tortilla chips, saltines, some kind of meat or something. Last night it was just a small bowl of leftover Del-Monte Beef Stew, some saltine crackers, and lettuce on the side with creamy Ranch dressing. I was still hungry, so I made 2-Fold-overs of White bread, mayo, and Buffalo Flavored Tabasco. It took about a half-hour to write this and now I am hungry, another hour until lunch. It's not my imagination, my stomach is making noises, and they're not happy, contented noises, they're "what was with that soup last night?" noises.
So later I'll have whatever I can find in the cupboard, mixed with a lot of leftover ground London broil, and call it Soup. Then I will look forward to Saturday when we might go out and eat at a restaurant with my wife, where you can bet your bottom dollar, I won't be ordering soup. Well, not as a main course, at least.
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