By Patricia Lee Sharpe
I love to eat soup. I even like to make soup. And I adore shopping for fresh vegetables, so Saturday mornings at the Farmers Market in Santa Fe are pure pleasure. Pleasure for the eye. Pleasure chatting with farmers and with friends I happen to bump into. Pleasure just sauntering around. And pleasure anticipating that first spoonful from the soup bowl.
Before I get down to business, let me linger on a few of the sights and sounds of the Farmers Market. I didn’t buy any flowers today, but I could have---dahlias, zinnias, gladiolas, lavender---plus all sorts of edible or decorative plants for my garden, were I in a dig-and-sweat mood. I gave a wave to the guy who recycles iris tubers. For practically nothing you can have elegant prize-winning varieties in your own garden. I stopped to tap my foot in time with the fiddler and grinned at the jolly fellow singing old Hispanic songs. Violin case and hat were filling nicely with green stuff, I noted. Then my mouth was watering full flow as I lingered over fresh pastries and pies, which I usually don’t buy for two reasons. One, calories. Two, I do my own baking, except for croissants or the occasional cheese Danish at my favorite breakfast spots. Bread is another matter. I can’t improve on the breads I find at Sage Bakery, which also supplies many restaurants in town.
The farmers market is a great place for carnivores as well as herbi-vores. Free range beef. Pork from pigs who don’t live in crates. Poultry from chickens who get to run around all day outside. Plus goat and yak and bison/American buffalo. And if you love cheese, this is the place. I’ve served Sweetwoods goat cheese to a Brit married to a French woman and resident in France. His reaction: nothing better of that particular variety of fromage in France.
But today I am mostly buying vegetables, because I am making soup. I bought a pound of each of the following: baby squash, fingerling potatoes, vidalia onions, carrots, skinny green beans. Except for the beans, the cost was $2.00 a pound, so that’s $8.00 for the vegetables, plus 50¢ for the celery I had to buy at the super-market and $3.00 more for a half pound of the beans. Total veggie cost for the soup: $11.50.
The chicken will come from necks and backs thanks to three large very flavorful birds whose breasts and legs will be sold separately at the Pollo Real booth where gloriously fresh eggs can also be found. The three carcasses I’ll use cost $6.20. And here's a tip: Pollo Real's heritage turkeys make Thanksgiving dinner worth preparing.
Naturally, I’ll throw into my soup some herbs and spices from my supply at home, so the total outlay for this batch of soup will be $16.70, pluss pennies. (A little less if you substitute leftover rice or noodles for the potatoes.) I should end up with about 6 quarts of soup: delicious broth, enormous chunks of chicken, plenty of vegetables. Is that a bargain or what? And think of all those lunches all ready to heat and eat: faster than take out; cheaper than franken-frozen.
As for those who are stressed by the current economic situation: these days the Farmer's Market is equipped to accept food stamps.
When I’m making chicken vegetable soup, I want the chicken to be succulent, not cooked to death, and I want the broth flavored with veggies that aren
’t so overcooked they need to be thrown out and replaced by another batch of veggies. Here’s how I do it:
1. Immerse the necks and backs in water—cold or hot, it doesn’t matter--in a mammoth soup pot. Obviously if the chicken is frozen, it will take longer for the water to reach the boiling point. Boil the bones in the water for half an hour or less—just long enough to cook the chicken that clings to the bones and also long enough to make it fairly easy to pull flesh off bone with your fingers.
2. Remove the carcasses from the broth and let them cool enough to be handled. Discard the fatty skin. Use your fingers to strip off the larger bits of chicken, which you can set aside in a bowl. Finally, return the bones, which will have lots of chicken still clinging to them, to the hot broth. This is a good time to throw in a couple of bay leaves.
3. At this point you can add the diced onion, carrots and celery to the broth. Simmer the veggies and bones until the carrots are about half cooked. Time to add the diced unpeeled squash and skin-on potatoes (chopped into pieces about 3/4" long).
Continue to simmer for about ten minutes. Now add the beans (also cut into pieces about 3/4" long), and simmer the works for about ten more minutes. By now the carrots should be firm but easy to chew, the potatoes soft but not disintegrating, the onions silky, the beans a little crunchy. The broth will be very flavorful.
4. Turn off the heat and fish out all the bones, returning otherwise lost veggie bits to the broth, which usually benefits from a little spicing up. Here’s my usual constellation: freshly ground black pepper, about a quarter teaspoon of powdered cloves, marjoram and a couple of shakes of salt, depending on the size of your salt shaker. Sometimes I use dried coriander instead of the marjoram. Re salt: I use very little. The tiniest amount has a miraculous ability to make a soup broth taste finished.
5. Taste the broth. Do nothing more. Or add whatever appeals to you. And if you think the flavor needs to be a little more intense, just boil a little of the broth away, remembering to spare the veggies, if too much boiling down needs to be done.
6. Finally, there’s the floating fat problem. You can skim it now, or put the soup in the fridge and remove the fat when it has solidified. This is not such a bad idea. Reheated soup tastes even better.
7. Oh, yes, don’t forget to dump all that chicken back into the soup. Heat and enjoy.
8. Freeze what you don’t use in a day or two. I’m going to save most of this particular batch to serve to my grandson next week.
How much time does it take to make this soup? Less than an hour to chop veggies and remove chicken from bones. All in all, not much more than two hours from start to finish.
Once the soup is ready, I’ll serve it with pecan nut bread from Sage bakers and goat cheese from Sweetwoods Dairy. My salad will the fabulous salad mix from Mr. G’s farm. I’ll drink ordinary tap water, then have a mug of Sumatra made from freshly ground coffee beans. And I’ll eat outside, where the sun is hot but the breeze coming off the mountains is always cool. Life could be a lot worse.