Soup's On!

Tonight as I sat waiting for Middle Son to finish basketball practice, I considered my dinner options. There weren't may as I haven't really been to the store in a few weeks. Sure I've run over and spent $50 here and a $100 there, but frankly that just keeps us in fresh fruit, veggies, milk and cereal, and the bargains of the week at the store. (Four boys tween to teen = $$$$ @ grocery store!)

So having served some version of spaghetti multiple times in the past few weeks, including last night, I knew I needed to branch out. They aren't that picky, but everyone even ravenous boys, have limits on how much pasta and tomato sauce they can stand to eat.

Remembering a container of frozen beef broth, collected who knows when, seen in the freezer this afternoon as I put the latest winnings from the bread store away, I determined to make Hamburger Soup.

I was introduced to Hamburger Soup in college by my roommate Carrie. She was a great cook. Usually the meal was cheap and simple. Sometimes it was strange. (Hot dogs in Ketchup Gravy over Mashed Potatoes anyone?) But it was filling, generally nutritious and almost always easy to whip up out of the dregs of the pantry and freezer.

Hamburger Soup consisted of hamburger, beef broth, dry onion soup, cubed potatoes, and frozen mixed vegetables. Add the wheat rolls I found at the bread store yesterday and a lettuce, dried cranberry and feta cheese salad, and we have a healthy like meal. (Unless you have heart disease. We don't.)

She usually made homemade bread sticks to go with it. They were amazing. Her baking skills were amazing. She could whip up and bake nearly any cake, cookie, or bread and have it popping out of the over before I could ever even get over thinking about how much work baking it would be. I miss her. I should offer to let her move in. I don't suppose her children and husband would let her go...

"Hamburger Soup it is for dinner tonight." I thought, but then in a brilliant flash of remembered lost pieces of my mind, I recalled the leftover Stroganoff sauce in the fridge, AND more amazing I plumbed the deepest depths of memory and brought back my parents' culinary delight Garbage Soup.

Who wouldn't love to eat Garbage Soup? No kid could complain right? It has a great name anyway.

Actually it usually tasted pretty good too. My father always cleared the table. (He often cooked too.) He would take those dribs and drabs of food leftover and put them into a container in the freezer. Layer upon layer it would build. Spaghetti and meat sauce one night. Mixed vegetables another. All growing into a multi-layered iceberg. Then when two or three containers were full, he would melt them down in a pot (pre-microwave era) and add a few things to jazz it up, including salt, and serve it.

Amazingly it was actually pretty good. Never the same twice, but tasty.

Granted he was a bit careful about what he threw in. He was and still is a great cook, creating recipes from out of his head. Still the whole process was a bit like heading for Vegas and placing all your hungry stomachs on the craps table. You never knew what was going to fill your bowl. The only thing for sure was that if you liked it, you'd never get any more, ever again.

So downstairs now simmering away is our own version of Garbage Soup. It is pretty tasty too. But I probably won't tell my family that it is actually basically stuff moments away from the garbage. Some of them are picky.