soup and bread

The other night for supper, I made a pot of veggie soup — my attempt to replicate the soup we had at our small group gathering last weekend. Our group’s name is Stone Soup, and that’s often what we have for dinner when we get together: the host will set a pot of water to boiling and then we all bring stuff to toss in. That weekend, there’d been both white and sweet potatoes, broth, spinach, kale, tomatoes, beans, ground pork and onions, butternut squash, rice, and probably some other stuff I’m not remembering. 

It was delicious, so I had to make some for us, as well as garlic butter bread with smoked cheese, which was something else we ate at small group. The host had a baguette and, on the spur of the moment, someone grabbed a mortar and pestle and mashed a couple cloves of garlic and some salt into butter. “Eat the garlic bread and smoked cheese together,” someone suggested, so I did and it was so good my head about fell off.

So anyway, that’s what I made for supper the other night. It was just my husband and me, which is getting more and more common these days: the kids are still here, but they bounce in and out, and keeping up with their schedules is tricky so when the food is ready, we eat, never mind them. My younger son was getting a shower — he had choir rehearsal and wasn’t sure he’d have time to eat first (“Just put my soup in a to-go container,” he’d shouted as he pounded up the stairs to the bathroom) — and my girls had a dinner date with a girlfriend in town. 

We’d just sat down when my husband squinted at the stove. “Ugh,” he said. “I can’t stand looking at that dirt.” He jumped up, dug the vacuum out of the closet and, using the long, skinny attachment, vacuumed out under the stove. As soon as he sat back down, it was my turn to pop up, grab my camera, switch off the table light, and stand on my chair to photograph my soup. 

“Mmm, good,” I purred, shoveling more buttery garlic bread into into my mouth, at which point my husband had the audacity to tell me it had too much garlic and that maybe he’d like it better if the garlic wasn’t raw. And then I snorted and called him The Queen Elizabeth since she’d banned garlic from Buckingham Palace.

We were nearly done with our meal when my younger son plopped down beside me and began slurping soup. He took one bite of the bread before announcing he’d eat the bread when he got home. “I don’t want to breathe garlic on everyone.”

“Too late,” I said. “You already took a bite. Just eat it.”

“Later,” he repeated, wrapping his plate with plastic wrap.

And then he slammed out the door and my husband and I cleaned up the kitchen. The end.

This same time, years previous: spiced gouda divino, the milking parlor, the quotidian (3.16.20), pastry, expanded, fresh ginger cookies, good writing, wear a helmet!, the quotidian (3.16.15), smiling for dimples, warmth, cornmeal blueberry scones.