Marion cooks up a delicious, hearty Potato, Parsnip and Carrot Soup with sausage and dill, based on childhood memories, and I revisit a simple, satisfying soup with white beans, sausage and leafy greens. Recipes below.

Unseasonably cool weather [and mind you, we’re not complaining—we love it] put Blue Kitchen in full soup mode this past weekend. We both made hearty, warming soups. I’ll let Marion tell you about hers first. And if summer is still being summery where you are, you’ll find links to a couple of chilled soups at the end of this post.

My mother didn’t care for cooking. She loved to bake, and my childhood is crowded with memories of amazing pastries—braided challahs; tiered cakes iced and decorated with tiny! marzipan! fruits and vegetables!; sheets of napoleons so good that I don’t even bother to taste napoleons any more because they will be a disappointment; cinnamon rolls at once austere and intense. But the cooking? Oh, well.

There were exceptions, of course. For special occasions, roasted geese and ducks. Anything she ever made with a potato–latkes, kugels, salads. One of her attempts at Americana, chuck roast sprinkled with—yes!—dried onion soup and baked in aluminum foil, which I recall thinking was amazingly wonderful. And her soups. Elegant clear very gold chicken soup. Mushroom barley soup. Borscht, starting with the single most gristly ugly piece of beef at the store plus some dirty beets from the yard and transforming it all into this tart, clear purity. And potato soup with lots of fresh dill.

This dish is a modest homage to those wonderful bowls. Continue reading “Two hearty soups for one chilly weekend” →