Kitchen Zink - Stone Soup

Remember these Kitchen Zink updates I used to write about my cooking before I got sidetracked by trying to improve myself and all?  Well, they're back, at least at the moment.  For whatever reason, the meals we've cooked lately have felt a little uninspired.  Ironically, that was the original motivation behind making the 52 changes, but thus far few of them have been culinary in nature.  That may have to change.  In any case, I didn't feel much like writing about the duck I horrendously overcooked (shoe leather, anyone?) or the decision to try Mixed Bean Cassoulet (yes, it really is just a pile of beans).  But this past weekend, we had all of my siblings over, so we had to make something decent.

I wanted to make something moderately healthy, since they were all off on road trips of some sort (younger ones heading out to California, and older driving home from Tulsa, OK) and were likely to be living off fast food for the foreseeable future.  Looking around the house, there was so much produce from the farmer's market and our own garden that it was pretty easy to make a soup.  In fact, we were able to make the most local soup I've ever had, created in the famous stone soup style.

I have to guess that everyone has heard the old folk tale about stone soup, but just in case, here's the condensed version (condensed version!  In a blog about soup!  I love it!).  Some hungry travelers show up in a village somewhere, seeking some food.  The villagers are tea-partiers and don't want to spread the wealth, ;) so the travelers come up with a clever plan.  They tell the townsfolk that they can make soup out of a stone, and proceed to boil some water with a big rock in the pot.  As it "cooks," they say things like, this looks great, but it would be even better with carrots.  So one of the villagers brings carrots and throws them in.  So on and so forth with all sorts of soup ingredients, until they all share the results, and are amazed at how great stone soup tastes.

Well, we did pretty much the same thing, except I guess you would call ours dirt soup.  Sounds even better, doesn't it?  What I mean by that, though, is that all of the ingredients we just threw in our soup came from our own local dirt, either in the downtown community garden, or in an area farm.  I didn't think much of it at first, since we try to eat local as much as possible, but when you tabulate it all, it's pretty neat.  Here's the rundown of the soup, complete with source:

The broth is by far my favorite story of the ingredients, especially since it didn't start its life as a broth.  It all begins with a humongous crop of Swiss Chard (a tasty green, quite a bit like spinach) at our garden.  The leaves were so immense that brontosauruses were eyeing them as tasty treats, so we had to pick a lot all at once.  Fortunately there is a great website (http://www.pickyourown.org/) with tons of information on how to preserve a harvest.  One of the great ideas they have is a step-by-step description of how to freeze greens, including chard.  It's a simple blanch-shock-freeze procedure, but we had so much chard, it took several iterations.  By the time we had put all the wilted chard into the freezer, we were left with a stockpot full of gorgeous, ruby-red blanching liquid.  It turns out that as the chard was blanching, it was also giving off nutrients and flavor into the water, until it was a veritable chard stock.

Stacia deserves all the credit for noticing the change in the water and bringing to light what a waste it would be to just dump it down the drain.  So why not make it a stock for real?  Boil it down some more, add some salt and pepper, and presto!  Free vegetable stock, and from our own garden, too!  But a stock is just a starting point; we needed more to make it a really good soup.  Stacia (again!) found a good recipe to start from, but essentially, we stone-souped it, throwing in whatever we had on hand.  And that was:

Diced tomatoes, from our garden, sliced carrots from the garden, sliced celery from Hy-Vee, diced turnips from the DM Farmer's Market, wilted kale from the garden, chopped onion from the garden, farfalle from Hy-Vee, and homemade meatballs made from Eden Farms pork, a DM Farmer's Market vendor.  Even the storebought items are from a local grocery store, and aside from making my own pasta, which I will yet do one day but haven't so far, we really had no choice on the farfalle.  The only area for improvement is the celery, which was an old Dole stalk we had in the fridge.  It certainly was grown in California or maybe Mexico, but literally all of the other ingredients were raised right here in Iowa, most within the city limits of Des Moines.  I'm not sure I want to label myself a "locavore" yet, but it sure is exciting when you can make the concept work.

The soup seemed to go over pretty well, and with the large batch we made, we're still eating it for lunches this week.  It's really nice, especially when you've had some less thrilling cooking moments lately, to actually come through with a fresh, healthy, locally produced dish.  On top of that, being able to share it with my family was very gratifying.  And to think that we were able to make it all starting with nothing but a stone, or in this case some leftover blanching water, well, that just rocks!  :)