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’Tis the Season … for Soup

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Japanese Udon Soup

Shown above is the Pork Udon soup made by the Men’s Club at the West L.A. Buddhist Temple Obon festival each July. Even though it is in the middle of summer, I always go to down a couple bowls of the stuff. I always add a little Shichimi Togarashi (Japanese chili powder with black sesame seeds) to bring out the flavor.

Soup and I go way back, to the beginning in fact. My mother was a great cook, especially when soups and pastries were involved. We always had a bowl of soup for every lunch and dinner we ate together as a family. Sometimes that bowl was all we needed, particularly if the soup was the hearty Gulyás Leves—or Hungarian Goulash, as it’s also called.

I wish I had the recipes for all her soups, such as the Hungarian egg-drop soup, the mushroom and vegetable soup, the green bean soup with sour cream, the Slovak dry bean soup, the beef broth with big chunks of beef in it (Husleves), the tomato soup, the rice and caraway seed soup—and the list just goes on forever. Mom’s homemade beef broth was the stuff of dreams, though I remember not appreciating it as much when I was younger because I thought my Dad asked for it too often.

Virtually all Hungarian soups begin with a roue (Hungarians call it rántás) consisting of minced onion and garlic, real Hungarian paprika (not the Spanish variety), minced parsley, and some flour. I’m still working at trying to get the right combinations to make it taste as if Mom made it.

Martine has not been feeling well for the last couple of weeks, so I will cook a home-made vegetarian minestrone tonight with a broad mix of veggies and crowned with some Swiss Chard that has been blended into the stock. I’ll try to remember to take a picture of a serving of it tonight and save it for later publication, perhaps with an approximation of the recipe I used. (I never follow recipes exactly: Usually I cherry-pick several recipes and add a few elements of my own.)

When we have soup, we rarely eat an entrée with it. Sometimes I’ll have some cheese and crackers.

If you want to get through the winter happy and healthy, I recommend you eat lots of soup. Real soup, not the canned stuff!

Crisp and Lightly Sweet

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Fuyu Persimmons

For someone like me who cannot get through the day without fresh fruit, November provides some interesting alternatives. Because I am in Southern California, some of what I describe may not be available to those of you who inhabit colder climes.

Specifically, I am talking about two fruits that come into their own around now: the Fuyu Persimmon and the Asian Pear. Today, at the Westwood Farmers’ Market, I bought a couple of pounds of each.

Unless you are familiar with them, Fuyus look squat, hard and unripe. If you’ve ever bit into a hard Hachiya Persimmon and got a mouthful of alum, you are unlikely to experiment with Fuyus lest you repeat the negative effects. Fortunately, Fuyus taste good hard. Plus, having no inedible seeds or pits, you can just slice off the stiff top leaves and bite into the whole fruit like an apple without seeds.

You will notice two things right off: First, the Fuyu is quite crisp. And second, it is only lightly sweet. In contrast, a ripe Hachiya is, to my mind, too sweet. I rather like fruits that are not too sweet; that’s why I prefer Deglet Noor dates to the grossly sweet Medjools. Fuyus will keep for a week or more in the crisper of your refrigerator.

Asian Pear

Asian pears are very similar: They are crisp (somewhat like a Honey Crisp Apple) and lightly sweet, though they do have seeds like normal apples and pears. The main difference is that they taste best when peeled.

Predictably, Martine does not like either fruit; though I can’t seem to get enough of them. Not everybody likes the variety of fruit that I eat.

Just to show you how much variety there is in the produce throughout the year, check out this month by month list of what’s in season put out by the Southland Farmers’ Market Association. In contrast, here is what I imagine the offerings are in the Midwest, from which I originally hailed:

January – French Fries
February – French Fries
March – French Fries
April – French Fries
May – French Fries
June – Cherries, French Fries
July – Lots to Choose From
August – Lots to Choose From
September – Melons, French Fries
October – French Fries
November – French Fries
December – French Fries

Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, considering that California and Florida are busy shipping fruits all around the country—especially citrus fruits during the winter months—but the picture tends to be pretty bleak in general.

The Paradise of Apples

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Loaded Branch at Green Mountain Orchard

One of the best things about travel is discovering (or, in our case, re-discovering) some great foods. Although we like the apples from Oak Glen, where we journeyed yesterday, nothing can compare with the tanginess of apples and apple cider from Vermont and New Hampshire. There is something about the granitic soil that does something rich and strange to the flavor. And when you make cider from them—without killing the flavor by pasteurizing—the result is one of the most refreshing drinks on the planet.

The first couple of days of our vacation in September were spent in Vermont. After a brief stop at the Vermont Country Store in Rockingham, we drove to nearby Putney, where Green Mountain Orchard is located. We had heard they sold unpasteurized apple cider, and it was true. Between the two of us, we guzzled a whole quart of the stuff and then spent an hour just driving around the property and seeing their trees (such as the one above) as well as their stands of raspberry and blueberry bushes.

When we crossed over the border into Canada, we hoped to be able to find equivalent quality. We bought a bag from a farm stand just west of Fredericton, New Brunswick, but it wasn’t the same thing. The terrain had changed to fertile flatlands, which are good for most crops, but which result in so-so fruit.

I remember buying apple cider by the gallon from Tanzi’s Grocery (now long gone) in Hanover, New Hampshire, when I was a student at Dartmouth. Because at the time we had no access to refrigerators, the students would hang the gallon jugs by the eyelet from their dorm room windows. Most did this to ferment it into hard cider. I just wanted to drink good, cold cider. (Naturally, it was unpasteurized.)

Northern New England will forever go down in my memory for its apples, its Maine lobster, and a delicious preparation of young cod, haddock, or whitefish called scrod that Martine and I ate in Boston back in 2005.