Sick Day Soup

Here's what I love about soup.  You can throw anything you want into a pot with some water and people will eat it.  The weirder the ingredients, the more people praise it.  Easiest target?

Wicker Park Hipsters

I live in Bucktown, which is a neighborhood  considered to be conjoined twins with the Wicker Park hipster mecca of Chicago.  This is a damn lie.  Wicker Park is where people go to spend a lot of money to look poor.  Bucktown is just where you go to spend a lot of money.

I swear this leads up a soup recipe.

Anyway, my point is this.  You can get a hipster into anything if you tell him (or her... it's hard to tell.  Sometimes they are wearing the exact same outfit) that he (or she) has never heard of it.  I figure I could make a killing in Wicker park just by extracting things from my refrigerator, throwing them in water, and naming it after some obscure subculture.

I imagine the sales-pitch would go something like this.  (again, I am enlisting the help of owls)

Hipster:  What's in this soup?

Me:  Some pretty obscure ingredients.  You've probably never heard of them.

Hipster:  Oh really.  What's it called?

Me:  I call it Steampunk Delorean Soup!

Hipster:  I need to eat all of it before it goes mainstream!

  

ME

And how did I come up with this clever business venture?  A fever dream of course!

For the last ten days or so I have been pretty sick with some kind of crud, so all I wanted in the world was soup.  However the last thing in the world I wanted to do was leave the house in any way.  Where some would see a sad spiral into eating the crumbs out of the Christamas cookie tin, I saw opportunity for the mandated weekly blog entry.

It starts with one very important ingredient.

ALWAYS HAVE THIS IN YOUR PANTRY.  For my tradition of Sick Day Soup (throwing all the food I have into broth and eating it no matter what it tastes like)  Vegetable broth can be used in all kinds of cooking and tastes WAY better than chicken or beef broth.  I found a can of this in my kitchen my problems vanished.  No zombie-esque walks to the 7-11 for a can of condensed Cambell's for me!  No sir.  I cracked that puppy open and began to raid the fridge.

What I found:

  

Red cabbage, crimini mushrooms, an onion, and some leftover ham from the six pounds of pig my parents dragged to Chicago.

So, without any particular goal in mind I set to work.

1)  slice up 1/2 the cabbage until it looks like this:

Also slice up the onion and some garlic (this isn't cheating.  You should always have a crap ton of garlic in your house NO EXCUSES).  Throw those into a pan with some olive oil and saute away on a low temp stirring occasionally.  

2)  While cabbage and garlic are sauteing, chop up the mushrooms (I assume any kind will work, I just happened to have crimini in the fridge) and set aside.

3)  Slice up whatever leftover ham your parents have left in your fridge into cubes.  Throw cubes and mushrooms into the saute pan as well and stir frequently for about three minutes.  Basically just make sure you don't overcook the mushrooms.

4)  Empty the contents of the saute pan into a soup pot.

5)  Pour in can of vegetable broth fill with water until contents are just covered.  Throw in a dash of salt and pepper, stir, and cover with a pot lid.

6) Put it on high heat, wait until it gets to a boil then IMMEDIATELY lower to the lowest setting of heat you have.  (If you are like me and have a gas stove, this is a delicate balancing act between perfectly cooked food and a gas leak).

7)  When you are done, it should resemble this:

Looks disgusting, right?  

IT WAS DELICIOUS.  I dub this recipe a success and it goes in the recipe book.  Mazzocca out.