Get a New Pan, Jan, Just Get Yourself Free

I set out to make chicken vegetable soup for my friend. I made beef barley for her last week which was exceptional. Beef barley is really the king of soups, if you ask me.

Soup making is like art, I say to myself. What kind of insecure, self-doubting knob needs a recipe for soup? Now, I’ve made some beautiful chicken soup, usually to later house a matzo ball. That soup is thin and spare, a bit of chicken with a few very done diagonally sliced carrots and some parsley. If that soup was a painting, it would be in the minimalist section of the gallery.

Since my friend is peaked (a favorite term from childhood that I’ve not used for a while, but which applies to her as she works her way through a chemo – surgery – chemo calendar), I decided a chicken soup was in order, but one with heft, lots of meat and vegetables. I started out, my Smarty Pants self, by browning the chicken thighs first. This was something I had never done before and also a grievous error.

The thighs combined with sauteed onions, garlic, carrots, and celery created a deep brown, hideous broth. “It just needs salt,” my husband said. I salted. Tasted again. It tasted like water gotten from a rusty pump next to a falling down pit toilet in a deer hunters’ campground last used in 1956. I let it sit overnight.

This morning, I lifted the lid. It looked brown and objectionable. I wonder if the soup can be saved. And then I think you are going to take saved soup to your friend with cancer? I tormented over this since I am loathe to throw out food. But you know what? Some things (and soup) shouldn’t continue on this earth.

I gave it all the heave-ho (another term from childhood that I like an awful lot) except for the chicken which I shredded and saved. I sang to myself, “Get a new pan, Jan. Just get yourself free.”

I started over. With a recipe. Oh Lordy. The humility this took.

Anyway, a creamy chicken and wild rice soup with carrots, celery, red sweet pepper. Oh, and baby spinach (I hate adult spinach). It’s beautiful. Wanna see?