Farewell to Winter Stone Soup

Since its inception last November, the Stone Soup potluck has become a second-Friday-of-the-month tradition. (I do love to uphold a good tradition.) I originally envisioned it as a winter event, and after we topped 80 degrees at the beginning of April, soup season seemed definitively over. But I wasn't quite ready to give up the potluck. And I still had an assortment of random rooty things in the fridge which, at this point in their long life, would be best served in soup.

Wouldn't you know? Just in time, the temperature plunged. On Thursday, I spotted snowflakes. The freshly-laundered mittens were recommissioned. Friday I awoke to white ground. (April 9, for the record.) Soup weather indeed!

A large part of the satisfaction of the stone soup theme is making something from "nothing." I carried that theme a little further this time by forgoing a trip to the grocery store entirely and simply rounding out the menu with whatever I had on hand. I enlisted help from my garage-sale bread machine to get a loaf of bread underway. I turned the remaining rhubarb and strawberries in the freezer into a crisp. I put some onions and a leek in the soup pot. Then I waited to see who might arrive and what ingredients would arrive with them.
It unfolded something like this. I made a fire in the fireplace and somehow managed to fill up the house with smoke, which caused me a bit of anxiety when I remembered the scrabbling sound I'd heard in the chimney earlier in the week and started imagining charred squirrel. Fortunately the smoke dissipated with no further incident before the first guests, Michael and Powell, appeared at the door. While the dogs raced around the backyard, we chopped squash and turnips and parsnips and celeriac. Lee called to say she was on her way and she'd run into her neighbor while she was picking up ingredients at Tom's - could he come too? Of course. Shortly after she and D.C. arrived with potatoes and peppers, Michelle and Ben showed up. And then things got lively.We went out to the garden to pick sorrel and cress. We came back in and wiped off eight muddy dog paws. Lee chopped potatoes and put them on to boil. D.C. cut up peppers. Michelle got inspired by the cress and Michael's tomatoes and concocted a topping for the baguette she'd brought. Into the broiler it went. Ben put the squirrel nutcracker to work on a walnut and the wobbly table conspired to spill a glass of wine all over the floor. While we mopped up, the potatoes boiled over, the bread burned up, and both smoke alarms started to shriek. "Fire! Fire!" one of them intoned. (Who knew?) We opened windows and consigned the blackened bread to the compost pile. With calm reinstated, Michelle made a more successful batch of appetizers and I turned my attention back to the soup. In went the potatoes and the peppers and some quinoa. Also some parsley and the garden sorrel. Salt. Pepper. Some cider vinegar. Probably some other things, although I couldn't tell you what now. In any case, we squeezed six chairs around the table, sat down, and ate soup and bread while the wind blew outside and the fire drove the chill away.

Let's call this particular recipe "Farewell to Winter Stone Soup." And instead of suspending the potlucks until this sort of soup weather rolls around again, how about summertime Stone Salad? Stone Pizza? Stone burritos? Stay tuned!