There are a lot of things to love about April. The weather is getting warmer, the days longer, and we stay on the playground after school for ages. Little blue flowers carpet the lawns in my neighborhood, and daffodils’ yellow cheeriness is everywhere.
On the other hand, finding tasty and interesting things to eat is something of a challenge. Spring has not yet brought with it anything edible, and while our Public Market still has plenty of fall foods left, the apples are growing wrinkly, the carrots are flaccid, and the onions are trying to reproduce. And how many beets can one person eat, really?
There’s plenty of food left in the freezer, but all of the normal and obvious combinations—along with most of my creativity—have been pretty much used up.
I came home this afternoon after a long, sunny play on the playground with one dusty child and one muddy child—go figure—and absolutely no idea as to what I might make for dinner.
I had chicken stock and fresh bread, which made soup seem like a good choice. I had sweet potatoes and the ever-present onions. A trip downstairs to the freezer, and I came up with my very last bag of corn [ insert frown face here ], some roasted red and green peppers, and a bag of kale… because it fell on me when I was pulling out the corn.
Cool.
And we’ll call it Spring Soup with Fall Vegetables.
First things first. Chop the onions and sauté them in butter. I start almost every soup or stew I ever make this way. In fact, sometimes I chop up a few onions and start sautéing them and THEN try and figure out exactly what else is going in the pot. Oddly enough, this works more often than it doesn’t… and cooking onions smell good, anyway.
Then I decided that I wanted my sweet potatoes to cook fast and be squishy and mushy when my soup became soup. So I peeled them and cut them up tiny. And tossed them in with the sautéing onions, and cooked them for a bit.
Then I added the chicken stock, brought it to a boil and cooked it long enough to empty the dishwasher and fill it back up again.
(You weren’t expecting a detailed recipe, were you? Spring is no time to be following directions!)
I added the corn, then the peppers, then the kale. And let it simmer a bit until it was time for dinner.
Delicious!
