Soup Bowl Quotes

I skimmed the pond scum with a spoon like broth in a soup bowl. Why does everything have to remind me of her?

But, you know, do what you like! Have a million books! I was only, like, asking. It’s still a book if you’re reading it on an iPad. Soup is soup whatever bowl it’s in.

I ate a rainbow in a bowl, because it’s better than eating rain soup. Food and water aren’t supposed to be one and the same.


One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, "How beautiful the world could be...

But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed.

I remembered what Morrie said during our visit: “The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” "Morrie true to these words, had developed his own culture – long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted not time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities– conversations, interaction, affection–and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.

That bowl of soup—it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present, and future.

When I’m feeling down, I make myself a big bowl of Up Soup. The bowl only looks empty, but in reality it’s full of hope. Grab a spoon, there’s plenty for both of us.

Ms. McMartin had no close family. Her nearest relative was a distant cousin who had recently died in Shanghai, after a severe allergic reaction to a bowl of turtle and arsenic soup.

Sometimes a good bowl of soup or a buttered piece of fresh bread can make a terrible day feel better.

Do you always eat with so many of your Guard, Majesty?” “Usually.” “Are security concerns so great?” “Not at all. I prefer to eat with my Guard.” “Perhaps when you begin a family, that will change.” Kelsea narrowed her eyes as Milla began to ladle soup into her bowl. “My Guard are my family.

I'm sorry, 'herbal medicine', "Oh, herbal medicine's been around for thousands of years!" Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out.

I finished my soup and bread and helped myself to a handful of cookies from the cookie jar, glancing at Morelli, wondering at his lean body. He’d eaten two bowls of soup, half a loaf of bread slathered in butter, and seven cookies. I’d counted. He saw me staring and raised his eyebrows in silent question. “I suppose you work out,” I said, mores statement than question. “I run when I can. Do some weights.” He grinned. “Morelli men have good metabolisms.” Life was a bitch.

Not that I'm complaining. It was better than my old dream, where Harma Dogshead was feeding me to her pigs." "Harma's dead." Jon said. "But not the pigs. They look at me the way Slayer used to look at ham. Not to say that the wildlings mean us harm. Aye, we hacked their gods apart and made them burn the pieces, but we gave them onion soup. What's a god compared to a nice bowl of onion soup? I could do with mine myself.

Even the most gentle people have a dark side you know." I was trying to warn him. "I know," he said handing me the other bowl of soup. "It's how you control that darkness that defines you.

More than anything else, I love the sensation of the weight of the soup in my hand when I hold the soup bowl in my hand and the warm, fresh taste of the soup. It's like having the warmth of a newborn baby's squishy flesh in my hand.

Yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” And at the same time, his long bony body rose up out of the bed and his bowl of soup went flying into the face of Grandma Josephine, and in one fantastic leap, this old fellow of ninety-six and a half, who hadn’t been out of bed these last twenty years, jumped on to the floor and started doing a dance of victory in his pajamas.

Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico's children they stand pinched and patient in last year's too-small shoes.

I eat overcast skies for breakfast, because sunlight isn’t filling enough. As a lover, I’m a bring-my-own-umbrella kind of guy, because a soup bowl doesn’t offer enough space or protection.

Any particular animal?” “Jenny Green-Teeth. A water-dwelling monster with big teeth and claws and eyes like soup plates,” said Tiffany. “What size of soup plates? Do you mean big soup plates, a whole full-portion bowl with maybe some biscuits, possibly even a bread roll, or do you mean the little cup you might get if, for example, you just ordered soup and a salad?” “The size of soup plates that are eight inches across,” said Tiffany, who’d never ordered soup and a salad anywhere in her life. “I checked.

Evil is not one large entity, but a collection of countless, small depravities brought up from the muck by petty men. Many have traded the enrichment of vision for a gray fog of mediocrity--the fertile inspiration of striving and growth, for mindless stagnation and slow decay--the brave new ground of the attempt, for the timid quagmire of apathy. Many of you have traded freedom not even for a bowl of soup, but worse, for the spoken empty feelings of others who say that you deserve to have a full bowl of soup provided by someone else. Happiness, joy, accomplishment, achievement . . . are not finite commodities, to be divided up. Is a child’s laughter to be divided and allotted? No! Simply make more laughter! Every person’s life is theirs by right. An individual’s life can and must belong only to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave. No one can deny another person their right to their life, nor seize by force what is produced by someone else, because that is stealing their means to sustain their life. It is treason against mankind to hold a knife to a man’s throat and dictate how he must live his life. No society can be more important than the individuals who compose it, or else you ascribe supreme importance, not to man, but to any notion that strikes the fancy of the society, at a never-ending cost of lives. Reason and reality are the only means to just laws; mindless wishes, if given sovereignty, become deadly masters. Surrendering reason to faith in unreasonable men sanctions their use of force to enslave you--to murder you. You have the power to decide how you will live your life. Those mean, unreasonable little men are but cockroaches, if you say they are. They have no power to control you but that which you grant them!

My meal arrived. It was a bowl of tepid, green curried water with two spinach leaves floating in it. The waiter called it 'vegetable soup'. I called it inedible slop.

I don't need to eat the stuff now because now I'm here-right in the middle of it!The soup I ordered in Colorado had all these little slices of vegetables and things, which at the time just looked like kitchen scrapings to me. But now I'm in the miso soup myself,just like those bits of vegetable. I'm floating around in this giant bowl of it, and that's good enough for me.

There is no such thing as beauty, especially in the human face… what we call the physiognomy. It’s all a mathematical and imagined alignment of features. Like, if the nose doesn’t stick out too much, the sides are in fashion, if the earlobes aren’t too large, if the hair is long… It’s kind of a mirage of generalization. People think of certain faces as beautiful, but, truly, in the final measure, they are not. It’s a mathematical equation of zero. “True beauty” comes, of course, of character. Not through how the eyebrows are shaped. So many women that I’m told are beautiful… hell, it’s like looking into a soup bowl.

A new poll found that 84% of American people were disgusted by Congress, and my only thought is, Are 16% of Americans insane? If they’re not disgusted, they should eat a bowl of vomit soup. It’s fresh, as I just made it after reading the latest political news.

I open the toilet door and step out, my internal fire re-stoked, ready to face my demons, fight if need be and win. I’m raging, focused like a jungle warrior after his second bowl of tiger-cock soup.

But the kitchen will not come into its own again until it ceases to be a status symbol and becomes again a workshop. It may be pastel. It may be ginghamed as to curtains and shining with copper like a picture in a woman's magazine. But you and I will know it chiefly by its fragrances and its clutter. At the back of the stove will sit a soup kettle, gently bubbling, one into which every day are popped leftover bones and vegetables to make stock for sauces or soup for the family. Carrots and leeks will sprawl on counters, greens in a basket. There will be something sweet-smelling twirling in a bowl and something savory baking in the oven. Cabinet doors will gape ajar and colored surfaces are likely to be littered with salt and pepper and flour and herbs and cheesecloth and pot holders and long-handled forks. It won't be neat. It won't even look efficient. but when you enter it you will feel the pulse of life throbbing from every corner. The heart of the home will have begun once again to beat.

She a nice lady ol auntie … but ol moms was somethin else, she really somethin else. Harrys eyes were closed and he was leanin back remembering how his mother always protected him from the cold wind in the winter when he was a kid, and how warm she felt when he got in the house and she hugged the cold out of his ears and cheeks and always had a bowl of hot soup waiting. … Yeah, I guess the old lady was pretty groovy too. I guess its a bitch being alone like that. Harry Goldfarb and Tyrone C. Love sat loosely in their chairs, their eyes half closed, feeling the warmth of fond memories and heroin flowing through them as they got ready for another nights work.

Why would Danika tell them to lie low in the Meat Market?” “Why tell them to lie low in the Bone Quarter?” She sniffed and sighed with a longing toward a bowl of noodle soup. Hunt said, “Even if Danika or Sofie told Emile it was safe to hide out, if I were a kid, I wouldn’t have come here.” “You were a kid, like, a thousand years ago. Forgive me if my childhood is a little more relevant.” “Two hundred years ago,” he muttered. “Still old as fuck.

Everything has turned sour, I’ll never be carried away with joy again. There’s a terrible clarity dominating everything. As though the world were made of crystal so that you only have to flick part of it with your fingernail for a tiny shudder to run through it all.… And then the loneliness—it’s something that burns. Like hot thick soup you can’t bear inside your mouth unless you blow on it again and again. And there it is, always in front of me. In its heavy white bowl of thick china, dirty and dull as an old pillow. Who is it that keeps forcing it on me? “I’ve been left all alone. I’m burning with desire. I hate what’s happened to me. I’m lost and I don’t know where I’m going. What my heart wants it can’t have … my little private joys, rationalizations, self-deceptions—all gone! All I have left is a flame of longing for times gone by, for what I’ve lost. Growing old for nothing. I’m left with a terrible emptiness. What can life offer me but bitterness? Alone in my room … alone all through the nights … cut off from the world and from everyone in it by my own despair. And if I cry out, who is there to hear me?

Lady Middleton piqued herself upon the elegance and extravagance of her table, and all her domestic arrangements; she loved to surprise English visitors with displays of hospitality native to her homeland, such as flavouring her soups with monkey urine and not telling anyone she had done so until the bowl had been drained.

Hard work is never quite finished.”  Strong old hands ladled out two bowls of soup.  “But life doesn’t need to be perfect to be celebrated.

Rain soup is best served cold, an upside-down umbrella makes a good bowl, and I wash dishes by hand—the same way I make love to myself.

I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and crap out a better insult than that.

A brick could be used like yellow sneezes hello every time love walks like a slinky down the stairs. Who used my shoe as a soup bowl?


Though my skull is the size of a soup bowl, everything in the universe—and more—can fit inside my imagination. And guess what? My imagination tastes like chicken noodle soup.

He had created a cocoon of human activities—conversation, interaction, affection—and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.

It’s the little cruelties that get you,” she told him. “Never the big hurts, the pains you can point to, and say, ‘Oh, I see this bruise,’ but the wounds that you can’t even tell are there until one day you are eating a bowl of fennel soup or sunbathing on the deck of the pool and you can’t move, you can’t do anything, because you think, Well, something is dead in me, what has been done to me, and why did I allow this to happen? And now, and now, and now…

Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops. His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it. Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

So . . . ,” she says, following him to the chalkboard. “You got a Visiting. An actual Visiting—Natasha Grimm-Pitch was here.” Baz glances back over his shoulder. “You sound impressed, Bunce.” “I am,” Penelope says. “Your mother was a hero. She developed a spell for gnomeatic fever. And she was the youngest headmaster in Watford history.” Baz is looking at Penny like they’ve never met. “And,” Penny goes on, “she defended your father in three duels before he accepted her proposal.” “That sounds barbaric,” I say. “It was traditional,” Baz says. “It was brilliant,” Penny says. “I’ve read the minutes.” “Where?” Baz asks her. “We have them in our library at home,” she says. “My dad loves marriage rites. Any sort of family magic, actually. He and my mother are bound together in five dimensions.” “That’s lovely,” Baz says, and I’m terrified because I think he means it. “I’m going to make time stop when I propose to Micah,” she says. “The little American? With the thick glasses?” “Not so little anymore.” “Interesting.” Baz rubs his chin. “My mother hung the moon.” “She was a legend,” Penelope beams. “I thought your parents hated the Pitches,” I say. They both look at me like I’ve just stuck my hand in the soup bowl. “That’s politics,” Penelope says. “We’re talking about magic.” “Obviously,” I say. “What was I thinking.” “Obviously,” Baz says. “You weren’t.” “What’s happening right now?” I say. “What are we even doing?” Penelope folds her arms and squints at the chalkboard. “We,” she declares, “are finding out who killed Natasha Grimm-Pitch.” “The legend,” Baz says. Penelope gives him a soft look, the kind she usually saves for me. “So she can rest in peace.

Half-empty paper coffee cups. Half-eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. —This is how I live, I am thinking.

Colin was still working on his food, having somehow managed to charm the servants into bringing him a bowl of soup. He’d set down his spoon, though, and was presently examining his other hand, idly flexing each finger in turn, murmuring a word as each pointed out toward Phillip. “Miss. My. Wife.” “Bloody hell,” Phillip finally burst out. “If you’re going to break my legs, would you just go ahead and do it now?

I know few greater pleasures than holding a lacquer soup bowl in my hands, feeling upon my palms the weight of the liquid and its mild warmth. The sensation is something like that of holding a plump newborn baby.

Molly! I’ve got to ask you your question first!” “Arthur, really, this is just silly. . . .” “What do you like me to call you when we’re alone together?” Even by the dim light of the lantern Harry could tell that Mrs. Weasley had turned bright red; he himself felt suddenly warm around the ears and neck, and hastily gulped soup, clattering his spoon as loudly as he could against the bowl. “Mollywobbles,” whispered a mortified Mrs. Weasley into the crack at the edge of the door. “Correct,” said Mr. Weasley. “Now you can let me in.

Mrs Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first finger-bowl. The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutant I knew at college about dinner, that I learned what I had done.

All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse’s pudgy face.

I'm a circle incomplete. I'm a heart that barely beats. All the memories stay forever like tattoos. I'm a star without a sky. I'm hello with no goodbye. I'm the dreams we had that never will come true. That's me with no you.

Early on, Zinkoff's mother impressed upon her son the etiquette of throwing up: That is, do not throw up at random, but throw up into something, preferably a toilet or bucket. Since toilets or buckets are not always handy, Zinkoff has learned to reach for the nearest container. Thus, at one time or another he has thrown up into soup bowls, flowerpots, wastebaskets, trash bins, shopping bags, winter boots, kitchen sinks and, once, a clown's hat. But never his father's mailbag.

It doesn’t eat only birds—it mostly eats rats and insects—but they still call it the “Bird-Eating Spider” because the fact that it can eat a bird is the most important thing you need to know about it. If you run across one of these things, like in your closet or crawling out of your bowl of soup, the first thing somebody will say is, “Watch it, man, that thing can eat a goddamned bird.” I don’t know how they catch the birds. I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can’t fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it “sir” because it would be the dominant species on the planet. None of us would leave the house unless a Goliath Fucking Flying Bird-Eating Spider said it was okay.

Dear Patton: I've been feeling blue lately but I wasn't sure if it had anything to do with the amount of rain we've had over the last few weeks. What are your thoughts on that? Ms. Diller Cary, NC Dear Ms. Diller: Rain can have a profound effect on someone inclined toward melancholy. I live in Los Angeles, and, as of this writing, we've just experienced three weeks of unending late-winter storms. The sky has been a limitless bowl of sludgy, hopeless gray. The ground, soaked and muddy, emits burbly, hissing spurts with every step, which sound like a scornful parent who sees no worth, hope, or value in their offspring. The morning light through my bedroom window promises nothing but a damp, unwelcoming day of thankless busywork and futile, doomed chores. My breakfast cereal tastes like being ostracized. My morning coffee fills my stomach with dread. What's the point of even answering this question? The rain--it will not stop. Even if I say something that will help you--which I won't, because I'm such a useless piece of shit--you'll eventually die and I'll die and everyone we know will die and this book will turn to dust and the universe will run down and stop, and dead dead dead dead dead. Dead. Read Chicken Soup for the Soul, I guess. Dead. Dead dead. Patton

Johnny, did you ever hear of the Club of Rome?" Johnny had, but the audience would need reminding. "They were the people who did computer simulations to find out how long we could get along on our natural resources. Even with zero population growth—" "They tell us we're finished," Sharps broke in. "And that's stupid. We're only finished because they won't let us really use technology. They say we're running out of metals. There's more metal in one little asteroid than was mined all over the world in the last five years! And there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids. All we have to do is go get 'em." "Can we?" "You bet! Even with the technology we already have, we could do it. Johnny, out there in space it's raining soup, and we don't even know about soup bowls.

fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress that find themselves in the soup bowls and on the cheeseboards of the county’s diners. From teapot or soup dish, it passes into mouths, irrigates complex internal biological networks that are worlds in themselves, before returning eventually to the earth via a chamber pot. Elsewhere the river water clings to the leaves of the willows that droop to touch its surface and then, when the sun comes up, a droplet appears to vanish into the air, where it travels invisibly and might join a cloud, a vast floating lake, until it falls again as rain. This is the unmappable journey of the Thames.

To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt. Well, true enough, any word worth repeating is greater than the sum of its parts; and the particular word-part Z can, from a certain perspective, appear anally wired. On those of us neither prosaic nor jaded, however, those whom the Fates have chosen to monitor such things, Z has had an impact above and beyond its signifying function. A presence in its own right, it’s the most distant and elusive of our twenty-six linguistic atoms; a mysterious, dark figure in an otherwise fairly innocuous lineup, and the sleekest little swimmer ever to take laps in a bowl of alphabet soup. Scarcely a day of my life has gone by when I’ve not stirred the alphabetical ant nest, yet every time I type or pen the letter Z, I still feel a secret tingle, a tiny thrill… Z is a whip crack of a letter, a striking viper of a letter, an open jackknife ever ready to cut the cords of convention or peel the peach of lust. A Z is slick, quick, arcane, eccentric, and always faintly sinister - although its very elegance separates it from the brutish X, that character traditionally associated with all forms of extinction. If X wields a tire iron, Z packs a laser gun. Zap! If X is Mike Hammer, Z is James Bond. If X marks the spot, Z avoids the spot, being too fluid, too cosmopolitan, to remain in one place. In contrast to that prim, trim, self-absorbed supermodel, I, or to O, the voluptuous, orgasmic, bighearted slut, were Z a woman, she would be a femme fatale, the consonant we love to fear and fear to love.

the marquise had often said that there are means to get rid of people one dislikes, and they can easily be put an end to in a bowl of soup.

There’s a hair in my soup. That’s the problem of using my helmet as a bowl.

Taken slowly, or mindfully, even eating an orange or a bowl of soup, or a small piece of dark chocolate for that matter, can take on the flavor or prayer.

I’ll make a soup out of sound, and I’ll call it “Decibels.” You can get a cup or a bowl, a small or a large, and they’ll both have the same volume.

He was friendly as a warm bowl of soup. An affable guy, he always had a dimpled smile on his face and lived life unplagued by want.

We Hungarians can’t end a night of drinking without eating sauerkraut soup. Mariska brings steaming bowls of it.

The bowl is warmer than the soup.

The idea ... seemed about as likely as a shark strolling out of the sea on its fins to ask for a bowl of soup.

Frozen aquatic bird soup on a stick is a BearPaw Duck Farm popsicle. It's easy to make. Just pour the powdered mix into a bowl, add water, and freeze with a stick in the center.

Ah, my dear friend, cheer up... After all, we have peace! And because there is peace, the occupiers can't behave so abominably anymore. All right, we're not free. But we are used to that, Mr. Kujawski. After all we were both born into slavery, and we will die in it. Oh yes, at first they'll exploit us ruthlessly. Fourteen hours of slave labor a day. A bowl of watery soup. Whippings, beatings... But that will pass with time. Because there is peace, they won't have a chance to get any new slaves. They'll have to take good care of those have already. Cheer up, dear Mr. Kujawski... [...] Arbeit macht frei, work makes man free, and it makes him especially so in the sunshine of European peace. We will lack only one thing. Only one! The right of dissent. The right to say out loud that we want a free and independent Poland, that we want to brush our teeth and go on holiday in our own way, conceive children and work our own way, think in our own way, live and die. This is the one thing you will find missing in the sunshine of European peace, which you, my friend, hold to be the highest good.

Not to say that the wildlings mean us harm. Aye, we hacked their gods apart and made them burn the pieces, but we gave them onion soup. What’s a god compared to a nice bowl of onion soup?

If this is hard to understand from a map, the rest is harder. For one thing, the river that flows ever onwards is also seeping sideways, irrigating the fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress that find themselves in the soup bowls and on the cheeseboards of the county’s diners. From teapot or soup dish, it passes into mouths, irrigates complex internal biological networks that are worlds in themselves, before returning eventually to the earth via a chamber pot. Elsewhere the river water clings to the leaves of the willows that droop to touch its surface and then, when the sun comes up, a droplet appears to vanish into the air, where it travels invisibly and might join a cloud, a vast floating lake, until it falls again as rain. This is the unmappable journey of the Thames. And there is more: what we see on a map is only the half of it. A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page.

Morrie.. had developed his own culture - long before he got sick. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature.. He had created a cocoon of human activities - conversation, interaction, affection - and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.

Today at lunch the waiter told me that the soup of the day was "Beef and Human." And I was like, "What the shit?" He said he'd had some and it was "good but really heavy on the human." Victor was like, "That sounds great. I'll have a bowl of that," and I felt like I'd fallen into a Twilight Zone movie. But it turns out the waiter was saying "Beef and Cumin," which honestly sounds almost as gross.

Dearest Reece, I know you think it improper, or at the very least imprudent, for us to write to one another, but I don't care.There are too many rules as it is and they would choke me if I let them. Between corsets and lessons and curtsies and etiquette, I am hardly myself, and that is how they want it. They would prefer we all dress and talk and think (or not think) alike, like paper dolls. I do not wish to be a paper doll. Surely you can see that I am stronger than that.I don't give a fig for the scandalbroth or the gossipmongers. Let us remove to Paris, where no one knows us to care and where they dine on scandal with eclairs every morning. You will say again that it is impossible but I refuse to believe it. I know with every touch of your hand on mine, with every stolen kiss, that nothing is impossible. Perhaps love isn't meant to be simple. Perhaps this is merely a test, such as Psyche went through to prove herself to Cupid. Would you have me count lentils, beloved? And as you claim I have the most to lose, I pray you will let me decide for myself what it is I want and need. Which is you. Not silks or lobster soup in crystal bowls or diamonds around my neck. Just you. You say again and again that you love me. Prove it.

The technology of food matters even when we barely notice it is there. From fire onward, there is a technology behind everything we eat, whether we recognize it or not. Behind every loaf of bread, there is an oven. Behind a bowl of soup, there is a pan and a wooden spoon (unless it comes from a can, another technology altogether). Behind every restaurant-kitchen foam, there will be a whipping canister, charged with N2O.

There exists in this world a spider the size of a dinner plate, a foot wide if you include the legs. It's called the Goliath Bird-Eating spider, or the "Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider" by those who have actually seen one. It dosen't eat only birds--it mostly eats rats and insects--but they still call it the "Bird-Eating Spider" because the fact that it can eat a bird is probably the most important thing to know about it. If you run across one of these things, like in your closet or crawling out of your bowl of soup, the first thing somebody will say is, "Watch it, man, that thing can eat a fucking bird." I don't know how they catch the birds. I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can't fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it "Sir" because it would be the dominant species on the planet.

We got cocktails to start and decided on a bottle of Bordeaux to share with dinner. We ordered voraciously. The pumpkin soup, the beef in banana leaf, fried spring rolls, crispy squid, a bowl of bún bò hué, and a seafood mango salad recommended by the waitress. Ordering food so as to maximize the quantity of shared dishes and an exuberance for alcohol are the two things my father and I have always counted on for common ground.

Walking the two buildings between Daisy Belle’s Diner and the apartment above her photography studio, she was glad she chose a small bowl of vegetable beef soup for dinner. It would help keep her warm until she got home.

What kinds of creatures are we? Just because we want a piece of meat, we take a life. Just because we want a bowl of soup, we kill the child of another being. In exchange for a good taste in our mouth that will last seconds, we take endless years from another animal, causing them to suffer fear, pain, and sadness. These questions are not odd to ask. Centuries ago, the famous poet Su Shi asked them too—as have others. We all must eat of course. But we should find a way to do this compassionately. And our efforts should be more thoughtful than a short fast here and there. Such half measures foster evil while making people feel like they’re accomplishing great good.

Oscar, we’re alive and in Melbourne and that’s all that matters.” The door clicked shut behind him. He placed the bowl on the dresser and dropped the spoon into the soup. “We’re alive, in Melbourne, and living in a whorehouse.

So, it wasn’t until I was living in Mexico that I first started enjoying chocolate mousse. See, there was this restaurant called La Lorraine that became a favorite of ours when John and I were living in Mexico City in 1964–65. The restaurant was in a beautiful old colonial period house with a large courtyard, red tile floors, and a big black and white portrait of Charles de Gaulle on the wall. The proprietor was a hefty French woman with grey hair swept up in a bun. She always welcomed us warmly and called us mes enfants, “my children.” Her restaurant was very popular with the folks from the German and French embassies located nearby. She wasn’t too keen on the locals. I think she took to us because I practiced my French on her and you know how the French are about their language! At the end of each evening (yeah, we often closed the joint) madame was usually seated at the table next to the kitchen counting up the evening’s receipts. Across from her at the table sat a large French poodle, wearing a napkin bib and enjoying a bowl of onion soup. Ah, those were the days… Oh, and her mousse au chocolate was to DIE for!

A pond is just a giant bowl of Rain Soup. BearPaw Duck Farm has one that's one quarter full, or three quarters empty, depending on if you are a realist or a realist. I myself am a realist, which is like a pessimist's pessimist.

Kids in aprons appeared, putting tureens of vegetable soup on the tables and plates of boiled eggs, potatoes and lentils, bowls of endive-and-radish salad, small rounds of cheese and loaves of brown bread, all looking quite delicious, in Zoe's opinion.

I now sell Duck Soup in three bowl sizes: Medium, Large, and Extra Large. Sure, the Medium has been made the Small, in theory, because it has the least quantity per serving, a simple labeling issue, but my nametag says Bob, which is the ideal name for dyslexics to read.

Tsunami spotted Snail and Herring among the guards. Their eyes darted anxiously from side to side, as if they were wondering how they were still alive. Because Mother wants to make a spectacle of them, Tsunami guessed. Coral was probably waiting for the right moment to punish them in public, the way she’d punished Tortoise. Well, two can play the spectacle game, Your Majesty. “MOTHER!” Tsunami declared dramatically as the waitstaff set bowls of soup in front of each dragon. Beside her, Whirlpool jumped and nearly tipped his bowl onto himself. Even Queen Coral looked startled. “I have something DREADFULLY SHOCKING to tell you!” Tsunami announced. She wanted this to be loud, so every dragon could witness it. “Oh?” said Coral. “Could we discuss it after breakfast? In a civilized fashion?” “NO,” Tsunami said, louder than before. “This is TOO SHOCKING.” Even SeaWings not invited to the feast were starting to peer out of their caves and poke their heads out of the lake to hear what was going on. “Well, perhaps —” Coral started. “WOULD YOU BELIEVE,” Tsunami said, “that my friends — the DRAGONETS OF DESTINY, remember — were CHAINED UP? And STARVED? In YOUR CAVES? By YOUR DRAGONS?” “What?” Coral said, flapping her wings. She looked thoroughly alarmed, but Tsunami couldn’t tell whether that was because the news actually surprised her or because she was being confronted openly with what she’d done. “I KNOW!” Tsunami practically bellowed. “It’s UNBELIEVABLE. I’m sure you didn’t know anything about it, of course.” “Of course,” Coral said in a hurry. “I would never treat any dragonets that way! Especially my dearest daughter’s dearest friends. Who are part of the prophecy and everything.” “And I’m sure you’ll want to punish the dragons who disobeyed you by treating my friends so terribly,” Tsunami said. “Right? Like, for instance, the one who lied to you about keeping them well fed?” She shot a glare at Lagoon, who froze with a sea snail halfway to her mouth, suddenly realizing what was going on. “Absolutely,” said the queen. “Guards! Throw Lagoon in one of the underwater dungeons!” “But —” Lagoon said. “But I was only —” “Next time you’ll obey my orders,” said the queen. A stripe quickly flashed under her wings, but Tsunami spotted it, and it was one Riptide had taught her. Silence. Oh, Mother, Tsunami thought sadly. “Can’t I even —” Lagoon said, reaching wistfully for her cauldron of soup as the guards pulled her away. “No breakfast for you,” the queen ordered. “Think about how that feels as you sit in my dungeon.” Tsunami was fairly sure Lagoon wouldn’t actually suffer very much. Queen Coral would have her back at Council meetings before long. But Tsunami wasn’t done. “And

The pizza at Brick Oven tastes like that classic line from that famous murder mystery movie “Rambo,” where Nicholas Cage rips off his tuxedo and says, “I may be a lot of things, but I ain’t no bowl of duck soup, sloshing around in a hurricane." Rambo II is even more romantic.

One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be!

There must be some kind of internal time distortion effect in here, because when I look at myself in the little mirror above my sink, what I see is my father's face, my face turning into his. I am beginning to feel how the man looked, especially how he looked on those nights he came home so tired he couldn't even make it through dinner without nodding off, sitting there with his bowl of soup cooling in front of him, a rich pork-and-winter-melon-saturated broth that, moment by moment, was losing - or giving up - its tiny quantum of heat into the vast average temperature of the universe.

His hands have begun to tremble, and he stuffs them into his pockets. They have put him in a thick gray coat, but he wears no scarf, and the skin of his neck and chest are exposed at the open collar. The healer in Arsinoe resists the urge to wrap him in a cloak. He is still weak and should be in front of a cozy fire with a hot bowl of soup. "How is it that I have come to be here?" he asks. "I gather that I was stolen from the capital." Emilia shoves him again. "You are here to give information, not get it." "Emilia." Jules shakes her head, then returns her attention to Pietyr. "You were stolen from you sickbed in Greavesdrake Manor. From what we have heard, you had been there for a long time." "You don't remember anything?" asks Arsinoe. "Have you ever been unconscious, Queen Arsinoe?" "Yes." "Then you should know that is a stupid question." She frowns. In her mind, she takes away his bowl of soup.

Because giving increases your sense of self-worth and receiving diminishes it—ladling soup at the Salvation Army evokes a very different feeling from having it ladled into your bowl—there is good reason to expect people will overestimate the amount of support they give and underestimate the amount they receive

With all the arrangements made, Marcus carried Lillian to the largest guest room in the building, where a bath and food were sent up as quickly as possible. It was sparely furnished but very clean, with an ample bed covered in pressed linen and soft, faded quilts. An old copperplate slipper tub was set before the hearth and filled by two chambermaids carrying steaming kettles. As Lillian waited for the bathwater to cool sufficiently, Marcus bullied her into eating a bowl of soup, which was quite tolerable, though its ingredients were impossible to identify. “What are those little brown chunks?” Lillian asked suspiciously, opening her mouth reluctantly as he spooned more in. “It doesn’t matter. Swallow.” “Is it mutton? Beef? Did it originally have horns? Hooves? Feathers? Scales? I don’t like to eat something when I don’t know what—” “More,” he said inexorably, pushing the spoon into her mouth again. “You’re a tyrant.” “I know. Drink some water.

Turning my gaze back to Hades, I said, “I’m not very hungry. Can I just have a bowl of soup?” As I said those words, a growl reverberated from deep within my traitorous stomach. Hades raised his brows, giving my belly a pointed look. “That’s just trapped wind,” I muttered. “All this to-ing and fro-ing makes a girl fart.

He took another “downer” and looked into monitor 2. This was the one he liked least of all. He didn’t like the man with his face in the soup. Suppose someone walked up to you and said: You will spend eternity with your phiz in a bowl of soup. It’s like the old pie-in-the-face routine: it stops being funny when it starts being you.

North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as 'duck.' One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy—they wouldn't tell me the breed—but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn't seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there.

Margherita was not allowed to play in the 'portego,' for one never knew when a customer would come, and the room must always be clean and tidy and respectable. It was only ever used by the family on special occasions, and so Margherita's eyes widened when she saw that her mother had spread the table with a spotless white cloth and the best pewter bowls and mugs. A small bunch of 'margherita' daisies was in a fat blue jug, and three sweet oranges sat in an earthenware bowl. Coarse brown bread stood ready on a wooden board, next to a bowl of soft white cheese floating in golden oil and thyme sprigs. Soup made with fish and clams and fennel and scattered with sprigs of fresh parsley steamed in a big clay pot.

This may have looked like a cookbook, but what it really is is an annotated list of things worth living for: a manifesto of moments worth living for. Dinner parties, and Saturday afternoons in the kitchen, and lazy breakfasts, and picnics on the heath; evenings alone with a bowl of soup, a or a heavy pot of clams for one. The bright clean song of lime and salt, and the smoky hum of caramel-edged onions. Soft goat's cheese and crisp pastry. A six-hour ragù simmering on the stove, a glass of wine in your hand. Moments, hours, mornings, afternoons, days. And days worth living for add up to weeks, and weeks worth living for add up to months, and so on and so on, until you've unexpectedly built yourself a life worth having: a life worth living.

Here they brought him more “duffers and dope,” with the addition of a bowl of soup. Many of the prisoners had their meals brought in from a restaurant, but Jurgis had no money for that. Some had books to read and cards to play, with candles to burn by night, but Jurgis was all alone in darkness and silence. He could not sleep again; there was the same maddening procession of thoughts that lashed him like whips upon his naked back. When night fell he was pacing up and down his cell like a wild beast that breaks its teeth upon the bars of its cage. Now and then in his frenzy he would fling himself against the walls of the place, beating his hands upon them. They cut him and bruised him—they were cold and merciless as the men who had built them.

...but tonight he remembered only the warm rooms and the faces of men and women bent over their bowls of steaming soup, and the children already asleep in their beds. He felt for them all a profound love, and he glowed. The moment of his loving was in the world of time merely sixty seconds ticked out by his watch, but in another dimension it was an arc of light encircling the city and leaving not one heart within it untouched by blessedness. Then the clocks began to strike, and the light of the ugly little man's moment of self-forgetfulness was drawn back again into the deep warmth within him. And he understood nothing of what had happened to him, only that now, for a little while, for a few moments or a few days, he would be happy and feel safe.

In a medium mixing bowl, combine all the ingredients except the meatballs and pour into a labeled 1-gallon freezer bag. Tape this bag to the meatball package and freeze.   To serve, thaw the ingredients of both bags. Pour the soup ingredients into a large saucepan. Bring to boil, reduce the heat, and simmer 30 minutes. Add the meatballs and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

He threw up his arms and yelled “Yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” And at the same time, his long bony body rose up out of the bed and his bowl of soup went flying into the face of Grandma Josephine, and in one fantastic leap, this old fellow of ninety-six and a half, who hadn’t been out of bed these last twenty years, jumped on to the floor and started doing a dance of victory in his pajamas.

the pho was curiously sugary, the lime juice was soapy, and at least one of them got sick after every meal—but they kept coming, both out of habit and necessity. You could get a bowl of soup or a sandwich at Pho Viet Huong for five dollars, or you could get an entrée, which were eight to ten dollars but much larger, so you could save half of it for the next day or for a snack later that night.

FOR THE CAKE: Beat together eight soup spoons butter with one cup sugar until fluffy. Mix in two eggs and three soup spoons juice from an orange. In a small bowl, blend one and two-thirds cups flour, a teaspoon baking powder, and half a teaspoon salt. Add dry to wet mixture along with one cup buttermilk. Blend well. Stir in one cup raisins, half a cup chopped walnuts, and one soup spoon finely grated orange peel. Pour the mixture into a buttered pan and bake forty-five to fifty minutes. Cool before icing.   FOR THE ICING: Stir two soup spoons juice of orange and two cups powdered sugar together until the sugar dissolves completely and the icing is smooth. The icing should be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. If it is too thick, add more liquid; if too thin, add a little sugar.

There is no place for you here, either! Are you a woman without shame, that you would be a burden upon my house?” The Governor was obviously the kind of person who received as much spiritual contentment from berating others as a cold man does from a bowl of soup. “No, I think not. To Khanbaliq or elsewhere, it matters little to me; I have no responsibility for my predecessor’s debts and belongings.

The month before I had found a cockroach in a bowl of onion soup and, when I complained, the waiter dutifully removed it and returned with another bowl from the same pot. Sheepishly, I explained that I no longer had an appetite for onion soup. A few days later, when I told the hotel manager how disappointed I was to find that onion soup was no longer on the menu, he said, ‘Oh, we ran out of cockroaches.

The history of Vietnam lies in this bowl, for it is in Hanoi, the Vietnamese heart, that phở was born, a combination of the rice noodles that predominated after a thousand years of Chinese occupation and the taste for beef the Vietnamese acquired under the French, who turned their cows away from ploughs and into bifteck and pot-au-feu. The name of their national soup is pronounced like this French word for fire...

My coffee was steaming, and I hunched over it while I watched the demon. His long fingers were interlaced about the white soup-bowl mug as if relishing its warmth, and though I couldn’t tell for sure because of the sunglasses, I think his eyes closed as he took the first sip. A look of bliss so deep it couldn’t have been faked slipped over him, easing his features and turning him into a vision of relaxed pleasure.

To meet my natural companions among the mighty dead. To walk with them in conversation. To know myself in them, through them. Because they are what we’ve become. Every blessing from soup bowls to salvation they discovered for us. Individuals just as real as you and me, they fought over each new idea and died to give life to the dreams we live in. Some of them—a lot of them—wasted their days following error down nowhere roads. Some hacked their way through jungles of suffering to collapse in view of some far-off golden city of the imagination. But all the thoughts we think—all the high towers of the mind’s citadel—were sculpted out of shapeless nothing through the watches of their uncertain nights. Every good thing we know would be lost to darkness, all unremembered, if each had not been preserved for us by some sinner with a pen.

But I would be damned if I’d let Curran intimidate me into caving in. “I see. I retrieve the surveys the Pack let slip through its fingers, and in return you bring me here against my will, interrogate me, and threaten me with bodily harm. I’m sure the Order will be amused to learn the Pack kidnapped its representative.” Curran nodded thoughtfully. “Aha. Who’s going to tell them?” Um . . . Good question. He could kill me and nobody would ever find my body. The Order wouldn’t even investigate that hard; they might just chalk it up to the flare-related craziness. “I guess I’ll just have to kick your ass and break out of here.” I bravely drank the rest of the soup from the bowl, abandoning all propriety. Probably shouldn’t have said that. “In your dreams.” “We’ve never had our rematch. I might win.” Probably shouldn’t have said that, either.

You might want to sit in public squares and people watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you're peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world.

In camp, too, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods (as in the famous water color by Dürer), the same woods in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant. One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be!

When deception cuts this deep someone has to pay. My father's chance to bring justice to the truly guilty was stolen from him. His only option was to forgive. I have others. They say vengence is a dish best served cold but, sometimes it's as warm as a bowl of soup. My father died an innocent man, betrayed by the woman he loved. When everything you love has been stolen from you. Sometimes all you have left is revenge. Like I said this is not a story about forgiveness.

While you can sell ramen relatively expensively in Japan, you can’t do it in America. People will unblinkingly pay $ 20 a plate for spaghetti pomodoro—which is just canned tomatoes and boxed pasta—but they will bitch to the high heavens about forking over $ 20 for a bowl of soup that requires three or four or five different cooked and composed components to put together. Plus, you will rake yourself over the coals looking for ingredients that even approximate what you can buy down the alley from your shop in Tokyo.

I was coming to understand what an education was. To escape from the little island of the living. To know what thinking men and women have felt and seen and imagined through all the ages of the world. To meet my natural companions among the mighty dead. To walk with them in conversation. To know myself in them, through them. Because they are what we’ve become. Every blessing from soup bowls to salvation they discovered for us. Individuals just as real as you and me, they fought over each new idea and died to give life to the dreams we live in. Some of them—a lot of them—wasted their days following error down nowhere roads. Some hacked their way through jungles of suffering to collapse in view of some far-off golden city of the imagination. But all the thoughts we think—all the high towers of the mind’s citadel—were sculpted out of shapeless nothing through the watches of their uncertain nights. Every good thing we know would be lost to darkness, all unremembered, if each had not been preserved for us by some sinner with a pen. I

Dear You, You’re so beautiful. Your smile, your eyes, your lips, your hands, everything. Did you know that you play in my mind like one of my favourite song lyrics, you sting my heart like after eating a bowl of hot soup. You know me but I don’t think you see me, I see you for one, I see you like no other, I see you so often your image never leaves the remains of my brain. I wish you see me, I wish you remembered me. I wish that you could see me the way I see you. I see you for you and that is the you that I love, but please can you see me too.

Needless to say, cooking for a man with such a delicate palate can be challenging and every once in a while I like to make something that isn't served with a glass of milk and a side of applesauce. This can be difficult with a husband with such discriminating taste buds. Difficult, but not impossible, if you're willing to lie. Which I am.   During the winter months I love to make soups and one of my favorites is taco soup. It has all of the basic food groups in one bowl; meat, veggies, beans, and Fritos. It's perfection. I've been warming bodies and cleaning colons with this recipe for years. However, when I met my husband he advised he didn't like beans, so he couldn't eat taco soup. This was not the response I hoped for.   I decided to make it for him anyway. The first time I did I debated whether to add beans. I knew he wouldn't eat it if I did, but I also knew the beans were what gave it the strong flavor. I decided the only way to maintain the integrity of the soup was to sacrifice mine. I lied to him about the ingredients. Because my husband is not only picky but also observant, I knew I couldn't just dump the beans into the soup undetected. Rather, I had to go incognito. For that, I implored the use of the food processor, who was happy to accommodate after sitting in the cabinet untouched for years.   I dumped the cans of beans in the processor and pureed them into a paste. I then dumped the paste into the taco soup mixture, returning the food processor to the cabinet where it would sit untouched for another six months.   When it came time to eat, I dished out a heaping bowl of soup and handed it to my husband. We sat down to eat and I anxiously awaited his verdict, knowing he was eating a heaping bowl of deceit.   “This is delicious. What's in it?” he asked, in between mouthfuls of soup.   “It's just a mixture of taco ingredients,” I innocently replied, focusing on the layer of Fritos covering my bowl.   “Whatever it is, it's amazing,” he responded, quickly devouring each bite.   At that moment I wanted nothing more than to slap the spoon out of his hand and yell “That's beans, bitch!” However, I refrained because I'm classy (and because I didn't want to clean up the mess).

The conversation lightened during the midday banquet the king hosted for our delegation. It was a lavish affair, like something out of a fairy tale, the fifty-foot table laden with whole roasted lambs and heaps of saffron rice and all manner of traditional and Western delicacies. Of the sixty or so people eating, my scheduling director, Alyssa Mastromonaco, and senior advisor Valerie Jarrett were two of the three women present. Alyssa seemed cheery enough as she chatted with Saudi officials across the table, although she appeared to have some trouble keeping the headscarf she was wearing from falling into the soup bowl. The king asked about my family, and I described how Michelle and the girls were adjusting to life in the White House. He explained that he had twelve wives himself—news reports put the number closer to thirty—along with forty children and dozens more grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, Your Majesty,” I said, “but how do you keep up with twelve wives?” “Very badly,” he said, shaking his head wearily. “One of them is always jealous of the others. It’s more complicated than Middle East politics.

The world can accommodate your situation, as it accommodates all situations. And your body will keep explaining to you how it all works, this original experiment, this lifelong gift. Your body will keep describing how, for the first time being at least, there is no escape from this particular vessel. These are your atoms. This is your consciousness. These are your experiences--your successes and mistakes. This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography. This is the existential container, the bowl of your life's soup, wherein something can be made sense of, wherein there is a cure, wherein you are.

That was my life until Stregobor and that whore Aridea ordered a huntsman to butcher me in the forest and bring back my heart and liver. Lovely, don't you think?” “No. I’m pleased you evaded the huntsman, Renfri.” “Like shit I did. He took pity on me and let me go. After the son of a bitch raped me and robbed me.” Geralt, fiddling with his medallion, looked her straight in the eyes. She didn't lower hers. “That was the end of the princess,” she continued. “The dress grew torn, the cambric grew grubby. And then there was dirt, hunger, stench, stink and abuse. Selling myself to any old bum for a bowl of soup or a roof over my head. Do you know what my hair was like? Silk. And it reached a good foot below my hips. I had it cut right to the scalp with sheep-shears when I caught lice. It's never grown back properly.” She was silent for a moment, idly brushing the uneven strands of hair from her forehead. “I stole rather than starve to death. I killed to avoid being killed myself. I was locked in prisons which stank of urine, never knowing if they would hang me in the morning, or just flog me and release me. And through it all, my stepmother and your sorcerer were hard on my heels, with their poisons and assassins and spells. And

The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” Morrie, true to these words, had developed his own culture—long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted no time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities—conversation, interaction, affection—and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.I had also developed my own culture. Work. I did four or five media jobs in England, juggling them like a clown. I spent eight hours a day on a computer, feeding my stories back to the States. Then I did TV pieces, traveling with a crew throughout parts of London. I also phoned in radio reports every morning and afternoon. This was not an abnormal load. Over the years, I had taken labor as my companion and had moved everything else to the side.

Has he invited you to dinner, dear? Gifts, flowers, the usual?” I had to put my cup down, because my hand was shaking too much. When I stopped laughing, I said, “Curran? He isn’t exactly Mr. Smooth. He handed me a bowl of soup, that’s as far as we got.” “He fed you?” Raphael stopped rubbing Andrea. “How did this happen?” Aunt B stared at me. “Be very specific, this is important.” “He didn’t actually feed me. I was injured and he handed me a bowl of chicken soup. Actually I think he handed me two or three. And he called me an idiot.” “Did you accept?” Aunt B asked. “Yes, I was starving. Why are the three of you looking at me like that?” “For crying out loud.” Andrea set her cup down, spilling some tea. “The Beast Lord’s feeding you soup. Think about that for a second.” Raphael coughed. Aunt B leaned forward. “Was there anybody else in the room?” “No. He chased everyone out.” Raphael nodded. “At least he hasn’t gone public yet.” “He might never,” Andrea said. “It would jeopardize her position with the Order.” Aunt B’s face was grave. “It doesn’t go past this room. You hear me, Raphael? No gossip, no pillow talk, not a word. We don’t want any trouble with Curran.” “If you don’t explain it all to me, I will strangle somebody.” Of course, Raphael might like that . . . “Food has a special significance,” Aunt D said. I nodded. “Food indicates hierarchy. Nobody eats before the alpha, unless permission is given, and no alpha eats in Curran’s presence until Curran takes a bite.” “There is more,” Aunt B said. “Animals express love through food. When a cat loves you, he’ll leave dead mice on your porch, because you’re a lousy hunter and he wants to take care of you. When a shapeshifter boy likes a girl, he’ll bring her food and if she likes him back, she might make him lunch. When Curran wants to show interest in a woman, he buys her dinner.” “In public,” Raphael added, “the shapeshifter fathers always put the first bite on the plates of their wives and children. It signals that if someone wants to challenge the wife or the child, they would have to challenge the male first.” “If you put all of Curran’s girls together, you could have a parade,” Aunt B said. “But I’ve never seen him physically put food into a woman’s hands. He’s a very private man, so he might have done it in an intimate moment, but I would’ve found out eventually. Something like that doesn’t stay hidden in the Keep. Do you understand now? That’s a sign of a very serious interest, dear.” “But I didn’t know what it meant!” Aunt B frowned. “Doesn’t matter. You need to be very careful right now. When Curran wants something, he doesn’t become distracted. He goes after it and he doesn’t stop until he obtains his goal no matter what it takes. That tenacity is what makes him an alpha.” “You’re scaring me.” “Scared might be too strong a word, but in your place, I would definitely be concerned.” I wished I were back home, where I could get to my bottle of sangria. This clearly counted as a dire emergency. As if reading my thoughts, Aunt B rose, took a small bottle from a cabinet, and poured me a shot. I took it, and drained it in one gulp, letting tequila slide down my throat like liquid fire. “Feel better?” “It helped.” Curran had driven me to drinking. At least I wasn’t contemplating suicide.

Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander, humbly at your whim, my dear lady.” He leaned forward. “What’s wrong with your leg?” “Nothing. It be perfectly fine.” “No, no,” he said with a frown, pointing. “Not that one, the other.” Adie looked down at the missing foot, then back up to Zedd. “It does not go all the way to the ground. What be the matter with your eyes?” “Well, I hope you learned your lesson; you only have one foot left, you know.” Zedd’s frown melted back to a grin. “And the problem with my eyes,” he said in his thin voice, “is that they have been famished, but now they are feasting.” Adie smiled a little smile. “Would you like a bowl of soup, wizard?” “I thought you would never ask, sorceress.

Madarjoon was reminding Oliver how to set a table, while Benyamin and Alice carried steaming dishes into the dining room in preparation for their dinner. The air was thick with the aroma of saffron and fresh turmeric, cinnamon and salted olive oil; fresh bread was cooling on the kitchen counter beside large plates of fluffy rice, sautéed raisins, heaps of barberries, and sliced almonds. Feta cheese was stacked beside a small mountain of fresh walnuts—still soft and damp—and handfuls of basil, mint, scallions, and radishes. There were spiced green beans, ears of grilled corn, dense soups, bowls of olives, and tricolored salads. There was so much food, in fact, I simply cannot describe it all. But

O great and mighty Master Li, pray impart to me the Secret of Wisdom!’ he bawled. A silly smile was sliding down the side of his face like a dripping watercolor, and his eyeballs resembled a pair of pink pigeon eggs that were gently bouncing in saucers of yellow won-ton soup. To my great credit I never batted an eyelash. ‘Take a large bowl,’ I said. ‘Fill it with equal measures of fact, fantasy, history, mythology, science, superstition, logic, and lunacy. Darken the mixture with bitter tears, brighten it with howls of laughter, toss in three thousand years of civilization, bellow kan pei—which means “dry cup”—and drink to the dregs.’ Procopius stared at me. ‘And I will be wise?’ he asked. ‘Better,’ I said. ‘You will be Chinese.’” Li

Picking up my spoon, I dip it into the broth, making sure to get pieces of the small, fatty meat. I close my eyes and eat my spoonful, marveling at the rich, savory flavors. It's like beef broth, only heartier, and the meat has this really interesting texture. Before I know it, I've devoured half the bowl. "You like Soup Number Five?" I look up to see Lola Simeona, the old woman from earlier, standing by my table, watching me. "Oh, yes," I say, patting my mouth with a napkin. "It's delicious! What is this meat? It's like nothing I've ever tasted. And I feel more... energetic already, sort of like I can take on anything." Like Prem. She smiles knowingly. "Yes, yes, Soup Number Five is magical." After a pause, during which her smile morphs into what I can only be described as a mischievous grin, she says, "The meat is bull testes." I stare at her for a long moment as her words filter into my brain. I set my spoon down carefully and take a sip of water. "Bull... testes?" I ask in the most neutral way I can. "Yes! It's an aphrodisiac!" She pats my shoulder and walks off to another table. I think I can hear her cackling. I look down into my bowl. I just ate a bunch of chopped-up bull balls. For a moment I wonder, in a very detached way (is this what being in medical shock feels like?), if I'm going to throw up. But then the moment passes, and I realize they're really delicious. And Soup No. 5 works. I can feel the potent mixture wending its way through my system, infusing my blood with confidence and desire. I eat another big spoonful.

Because this tea kaiseki would be served so soon after breakfast, it would be considerably smaller than a traditional one. As a result, Stephen had decided to serve each mini tea kaiseki in a round stacking bento box, which looked like two miso soup bowls whose rims had been glued together. After lifting off the top dome-shaped cover the women would behold a little round tray sporting a tangle of raw squid strips and blanched scallions bound in a tahini-miso sauce pepped up with mustard. Underneath this seafood "salad" they would find a slightly deeper "tray" packed with pearly white rice garnished with a pink salted cherry blossom. Finally, under the rice would be their soup bowl containing the wanmori, the apex of the tea kaiseki. Inside the dashi base we had placed a large ball of fu (wheat gluten) shaped and colored to resemble a peach. Spongy and soft, it had a savory center of ground duck and sweet lily bulb. A cluster of fresh spinach leaves, to symbolize the budding of spring, accented the "peach," along with a shiitake mushroom cap simmered in mirin, sake, and soy. When the women had finished their meals, we served them tiny pink azuki bean paste sweets. David whipped them a bowl of thick green tea. For the dry sweets eaten before his thin tea, we served them flower-shaped refined sugar candies tinted pink. After all the women had left, Stephen, his helper, Mark, and I sat down to enjoy our own "Girl's Day" meal. And even though I was sitting in the corner of Stephen's dish-strewn kitchen in my T-shirt and rumpled khakis, that soft peach dumpling really did taste feminine and delicate.

Then I stared at Arnold's bánh mì. The oil had yellowed the bread. Cartoonishly red hot sauce crisscrossed juicy chunks of chicken. It was topped with shredded coriander, chopped chilies, and translucent slivers of onion. I lifted my spoon, and then I heard myself speak. "Can I have that?" I put down my spoon and pointed at Arnold's sandwich. "What?" Arnold replied. "Your sandwich? Can we switch, please? I don't want this soup. I don't know why I asked for it." I lifted up my bowl and handed it over. Arnold received it because he had no choice and watched as I lifted up his bánh mì and deposited it in front of myself. I wrapped both hands around it and took a large bite before he could protest. I felt the tiny slices of chili deliciously tingle my lips. I made a full-bodied sound to demonstrate my pleasure.

One of Palau’s biggest draws for tourist divers is its shark population. When I asked for Remengesau’s reaction to the hundreds of shark fins found in the hold of the Shin Jyi, he immediately launched into an explanation of the economic impact of killing sharks. Alive, an individual shark is worth over $170,000 annually in tourism dollars, or nearly $2 million over its lifetime, he said. Dead, each sells for $100, and usually that money goes to a foreign poacher. Even if his numbers seemed a bit overstated, there was no doubting the financial consequences of killing the sharks. More than a dozen countries, including Palau and Taiwan, had banned shark finning. But demand for the fins, especially in Asia, remained high. Served at Chinese weddings and other official banquets, shark-fin soup, which can sell for over $100 per bowl, has for centuries signified wealth.

The pressure is on. They've teased me all week, because I've avoided anything that requires ordering. I've made excuses (I'm allergic to beef," "Nothing tastes better than bread," Ravioli is overrated"), but I can't avoid it forever.Monsieur Boutin is working the counter again. I grab a tray and take a deep breath. "Bonjour, uh...soup? Sopa? S'il vous plait?" "Hello" and "please." I've learned the polite words first, in hopes that the French will forgive me for butchering the remainder of their beautiful language. I point to the vat of orangey-red soup. Butternut squash, I think. The smell is extraordinary, like sage and autumn. It's early September, and the weather is still warm. When does fall come to Paris? "Ah! soupe.I mean,oui. Oui!" My cheeks burn. "And,um, the uh-chicken-salad-green-bean thingy?" Monsieur Boutin laughs. It's a jolly, bowl-full-of-jelly, Santa Claus laugh. "Chicken and haricots verts, oui. You know,you may speek Ingleesh to me. I understand eet vairy well." My blush deepends. Of course he'd speak English in an American school. And I've been living on stupid pears and baquettes for five days. He hands me a bowl of soup and a small plate of chicken salad, and my stomach rumbles at the sight of hot food. "Merci," I say. "De rien.You're welcome. And I 'ope you don't skeep meals to avoid me anymore!" He places his hand on his chest, as if brokenhearted. I smile and shake my head no. I can do this. I can do this. I can- "NOW THAT WASN'T SO TERRIBLE, WAS IT, ANNA?" St. Clair hollers from the other side of the cafeteria. I spin around and give him the finger down low, hoping Monsieur Boutin can't see. St. Clair responds by grinning and giving me the British version, the V-sign with his first two fingers. Monsieur Boutin tuts behind me with good nature. I pay for my meal and take the seat next to St. Clair. "Thanks. I forgot how to flip off the English. I'll use the correct hand gesture next time." "My pleasure. Always happy to educate." He's wearing the same clothing as yesterday, jeans and a ratty T-shirt with Napolean's silhouette on it.When I asked him about it,he said Napolean was his hero. "Not because he was a decent bloke, mind you.He was an arse. But he was a short arse,like meself." I wonder if he slept at Ellie's. That's probably why he hasn't changed his clothes. He rides the metro to her college every night, and they hang out there. Rashmi and Mer have been worked up, like maybe Ellie thinks she's too good for them now. "You know,Anna," Rashmi says, "most Parisians understand English. You don't have to be so shy." Yeah.Thanks for pointing that out now.

Rockton is no more Oliver than Churchgrove is Lord Kirkwood,” Lady Minerva said stoutly. “Then why did you steal my name for him?” Oliver asked. “It’s not quite your name, old chap,” Lord Gabriel said. “And you know perfectly well that Minerva likes to tweak your nose from time to time.” “Stop calling me ‘old,’ blast it,” Oliver grumbled. “I’m not some doddering fool.” “How old are you, anyway?” Maria asked him, amused by his vanity. “Thirty-five.” Mrs. Plumtree had said little until now, but apparently the conversation had piqued her interest. “That’s long past the age when a man should marry, don’t you think, Miss Butterfield?” Aware of Oliver’s gaze on her, Maria chose her words carefully. “I suppose it depends on the man. Papa didn’t marry until he was nearly that age. He was too busy fighting in the Revolutionary War to court anyone.” When the blood drained from Mrs. Plumtree’s face, Oliver’s eyes held a glint of triumph. “Ah, yes, the Revolutionary War. Did I forget to mention, Gran, that Mr. Butterfield was a soldier in the Continental Marines?” The table got very quiet. Lady Minerva focused on eating her soup. Lady Celia took several sips of wine, one after another, and Lord Jarret stared into his soup bowl as if it contained the secret to life. The only real sound punctuating the silence was Lord Gabriel’s muttered “bloody hell.” Clearly, there was some undercurrent here that Maria didn’t understand. Oliver was watching his grandmother again like a wolf about to pounce, and Mrs. Plumtree was clearly contemplating which weapon would best hold the wolf at bay. “Uncle Adam was a hero,” Freddy put in, oblivious as usual to undercurrents of any kind. “At the Battle of Princeton, he held off ten of the British until help could arrive. It was just him and his bayonet, slashing and stabbing-“ “Freddy,” Maria chided under her breath, “our hosts are British, remember?

Sauté, stirring regularly, the butter, onions, garlic, baby leaves, thyme, a pinch of salt and few grinds of pepper, until the onions are translucent. Meanwhile, remove the cord, membranes, and any clots from the placenta. Rinse it under cold water. Quarter it, set three quarters aside for another use, and add the remaining quarter to the sauté. Remove placenta when it is cooked through. Slice thin and set aside. Continue cooking the onions, stirring regularly, until they become brown.Add wine and simmer until the liquid evaporates and the onions lose their form. Add flour. Mix well. With a low flame, cook, stirring regularly, for 5 minutes. Add water, beef, placenta or chicken stock, and sliced placenta. Simmer for 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. To serve: preheat broiler. In oven-friendly serving bowls or pot, cover the hot soup with cubed sourdough bread and the bread with grated cheese. Broil until the cheese melts

I remember a personal experience. Almost in tears from pain (I had terrible sores on my feet from wearing torn shoes), I limped a few kilometers with our long column of men from the camp to our work site. Very cold, bitter winds struck us. I kept thinking of the endless little problems of our miserable life. What would there be to eat tonight? If a piece of sausage came as extra ration, should I exchange it for a piece of bread? Should I trade my last cigarette, which was left from a bonus I received a fortnight ago, for a bowl of soup? How could I get a piece of wire to replace the fragment which served as one of my shoelaces? Would I get to our work site in time to join my usual working party or would I have to join another, which might have a brutal foreman? What could I do to get on good terms with the Capo, who could help me to obtain work in camp instead of undertaking this horribly long daily march? I became disgusted with the state of affairs which compelled me, daily and hourly, to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? —“Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

Dougal lifted his spoon and slit it into his mouth. Immediately, a frozen look came over his face. Sophia tensed. He removed the spoon from his mouth. Sophia gripped her own spoon tighter. A slow red crept up his face, his eyes watering slightly. Ha! Mary's soup was working its magic. Pleased, Sophia pretended to eat some soup. Dougal slapped a hand on the table. The dishes and Sophia jumped. "What's wrong?" He pointed to his bowl with his spoon. "That." "The soup? Why, whatever's wrong with it?" "Nothing.That is the best soup I've ever had." Sophia blinked. Surely he hadn't just said- He dipped his spoon back into his bowl and took another large bite. Though his eyes watered and his face turned a deeper red, he continued to eat, murmuring, "Excellent!" every third bite or so. Sophia looked at her own soup, which reeked of garlic and pepper and onion. Mary had added a large amount of salt, as well. But watching MacLean eat with gusto made her question her perceptions. What if Mary's natural ability to cook had overcome her attempts to provide an inedible meal? Sophia dipped her spoon into herbowl and gingerly sniffed the contents, grimacing at the strong odor. Casting a puzzled look at MacLean, who was about finished with his soup, she put the spoon into her mouth. The burning sensation of pepper mingled with the rancid taste of uncooked garlic and what could only have been salted dishwater. She jerked the spoon from her mouth and grabbed her water goblet, pouring it into her mouth to wash down the horrid taste. Gasping, she glared with watery, accusing eyes at MacLean. He seemed not to have noticed anything, too busy scraping the bottom of his bowl, as if afraid some succulent tidbit might have escaped him. Finding nothing more, he placed his spoon on the table and sat back, wiping his mouth with his napkin. "That was the best soup I've ever been served. I believe I'll have more." "More? Are you...are you certain?" "I'm positive.

He was forever wallowing in the mire, dirtying his nose, scrabbling his face, treading down the backs of his shoes, gaping at flies and chasing the butterflies (over whom his father held sway); he would pee in his shoes, shit over his shirt-tails, [wipe his nose on his sleeves,] dribble snot into his soup and go galumphing about. [He would drink out of his slippers, regularly scratch his belly on wicker-work baskets, cut his teeth on his clogs, get his broth all over his hands, drag his cup through his hair, hide under a wet sack, drink with his mouth full, eat girdle-cake but not bread, bite for a laugh and laugh while he bit, spew in his bowl, let off fat farts, piddle against the sun, leap into the river to avoid the rain, strike while the iron was cold, dream day-dreams, act the goody-goody, skin the renard, clack his teeth like a monkey saying its prayers, get back to his muttons, turn the sows into the meadow, beat the dog to teach the lion, put the cart before the horse, scratch himself where he ne’er did itch, worm secrets out from under your nose, let things slip, gobble the best bits first, shoe grasshoppers, tickle himself to make himself laugh, be a glutton in the kitchen, offer sheaves of straw to the gods, sing Magnificat at Mattins and think it right, eat cabbage and squitter puree, recognize flies in milk, pluck legs off flies, scrape paper clean but scruff up parchment, take to this heels, swig straight from the leathern bottle, reckon up his bill without Mine Host, beat about the bush but snare no birds, believe clouds to be saucepans and pigs’ bladders lanterns, get two grists from the same sack, act the goat to get fed some mash, mistake his fist for a mallet, catch cranes at the first go, link by link his armour make, always look a gift horse in the mouth, tell cock-and-bull stories, store a ripe apple between two green ones, shovel the spoil back into the ditch, save the moon from baying wolves, hope to pick up larks if the heavens fell in, make virtue out of necessity, cut his sops according to his loaf, make no difference twixt shaven and shorn, and skin the renard every day.]

There are people in this country who will argue that because of the demise of morals in general, and Sunday school in particular, kids today are losing their innocence before they should, that because of cartoons and Ken Starr and curricula about their classmates who have two mommies, youth learn too soon about sex and death. Well, like practically everyone else in the Western world who came of age since Gutenberg, I lost my innocence the old-time-religion way, by reading the nursery rhyme of fornication that is the Old Testament and the fairy tale bloodbath that is the New. Job taught me Hey! Life's not fair! Lot's wife taught me that I'm probably going to come across a few weird sleazy things I won't be able to resist looking into. And the book of Revelation taught me to live in the moment, if only because the future's so grim. Being a fundamentalist means going straight to the source. I was asked to not only read the Bible, but to memorize Bible verses. If it wasn't for the easy access to the sordid Word of God I might have had an innocent childhood. Instead, I was a worrywart before my time, shivering in constant fear of a god who, from what I could tell, huffed and puffed around the cosmos looking like my dad did when my sister refused to take her vitamins that one time. God wasn't exactly a children's rights advocate. The first thing a child reading the Bible notices is that you're supposed to honor your mother and father but they're not necessarily required to reciprocate. This was a god who told Abraham to knife his boy Isaac and then at the last minute, when the dagger's poised above Isaac's heart, God tells Abraham that He's just kidding. This was a god who let a child lose his birthright because of some screwball mix-up involving fake fur hands and a bowl of soup. This was a god who saw to it that his own son had his hands and feet nailed onto pieces of wood. God, for me, was not in the details. I still set store by the big Judeo-Christian messages. Who can argue with the Ten Commandments? Don't kill anybody: don't mess around with other people's spouses: be nice to your mom and dad. Fine advice. It was the minutiae that nagged me.

The sky is a dark bowl, the stars die and fall. The celestial bows quiver, the bones of the earthgods shake and planets come to a halt when they sight the king in all his power, the god who feeds on his father and eats his mother. The king is such a tower of wisdom even his mother can't discern his name. His glory is in the sky, his strength lies in the horizon like that of his father the sungod Atum who conceived him. Atum conceived the king, but the dead king has greater dominion. His vital spirits surround him, his qualities lie below his feet, he is cloaked in gods and cobras coil on his forehead. His guiding snakes decorate his brow and peer into souls, ready to spit fire against his enemies. The king's head is on his torso. He is the bull of the sky who charges and vanquishes all. He lives on the stuff of the gods, he feeds on their limbs and entrails, even when they have bloated their bodies with magic at Nesisi, the island of fire. He cooks the leftover gods into a bone soup. Their souls belong to him and their shadows as well. In his pyramid among those who live on the earth of Egypt, the dead king ascends and appears forever and forever.

Even though Jasmine was supposed to try Marcella's Stone Plum Soup tonight, she pulled at her baking cupboard. She wanted chocolate. She wanted oozing, rich, creamy, comforting chocolate. She would throw chops on the grill and toss a salad for dinner. Tonight, she was going to concentrate her efforts on dessert. She pulled out her big bowl and mixer. She took down blocks of chocolate, vanilla, sugar. Poked her head into the refrigerator to count the eggs. Ten. Just enough. Her mouth watered, her tongue repeatedly swallowing the swamp that had become her mouth. Cream? A pint poked from behind the mayonnaise. She smelled it. One day to spare. She padded to the liquor cabinet and examined her choices. Brandy, amaretto, Grand Marnier. Mmm, yes. Grand Marnier, a subtle orange swirl. The chocolate and butter wobbled over the heat of the double boiler. Unctuous and smooth. Jasmine beat the eggs and sugar until lemony light. She poured in the chocolate in a long professional sweep. A few deft turns of the spatula turned the mixture into what she really craved. She stood over the bowl tasting slabs of it from the spatula. A good dash of Grand Marnier. Another taste. And another. She had to discard a number of egg whites to fit with the reduced mixture. She finally tipped the glossy beaten whites into the chocolate.

English Gingerbread Cake Serves: 12 to 16 Baking Time: 50 to 60 minutes Kyle Cathie, editor for the British version of The Cake Bible (and now a publisher), informed me in no uncertain terms that a book could not be called a cake "bible" in England if it did not contain the beloved gingerbread cake. When I went to England to retest all the cakes using British flour and ingredients, I developed this gingerbread recipe. Now that I have tasted it, I quite agree with Kyle. It is a moist spicy cake with an intriguing blend of buttery, lemony, wheaty, and treacly flavors. Cut into squares and decorated with pumpkin faces, it makes a delightful "treat" for Halloween. Batter Volume Ounce Gram unsalted butter (65° to 75°F/19° to 23°C) 8 tablespoons (1 stick) 4 113 golden syrup or light corn syrup 1¼ cups (10 fluid ounces) 15 425 dark brown sugar, preferably Muscovado ¼ cup, firmly packed 2 60 orange marmalade 1 heaping tablespoon 1.5 40 2 large eggs, at room temperature ¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons (3 fluid ounces) 3.5 100 milk 2/3 cup (5.3 fluid ounces) 5.6 160 cake flour (or bleached all-purpose flour) 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (or 1 cup), sifted into the cup and leveled off 4 115 whole wheat flour 1 cup minus 1 tablespoon (lightly spooned into the cup) 4 115 baking powder 1½ teaspoons . . cinnamon 1 teaspoon . . ground ginger 1 teaspoon . . baking soda ½ teaspoon . . salt pinch . . Special Equipment One 8 by 2-inch square cake pan or 9 by 2-inch round pan (see Note), wrapped with a cake strip, bottom coated with shortening, topped with a parchment square (or round), then coated with baking spray with flour Preheat the Oven Twenty minutes or more before baking, set an oven rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 325°F/160°C. Mix the Liquid Ingredients In a small heavy saucepan, stir together the butter, golden syrup, sugar, and marmalade over medium-low heat until melted and uniform in color. Set aside uncovered until just barely warm, about 10 minutes. Whisk in the eggs and milk. Make the Batter In a large bowl, whisk together the cake flour, whole wheat flour, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, baking soda, and salt. Add the butter mixture, stirring with a large silicone spatula or spoon just until smooth and the consistency of thick soup. Using the silicone spatula, scrape the batter into the prepared pan. Bake the Cake Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, or until a wire cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean and the cake springs back when pressed lightly in the center. The cake should start to shrink from the sides of the pan only after removal from the oven. Cool the Cake Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes. While the cake is cooling, make the syrup.

crispy baked wontons Brianna Shade | BEAVERTON, OREGON These quick, versatile wontons are great for a crunchy afternoon snack or paired with a bowl of soothing soup on a cold day. I usually make a large batch, freeze half on a floured cookie sheet, then store them in an air-tight container for a fast bite. 1/2 pound ground pork 1/2 pound extra-lean ground turkey 1 small onion, chopped 1 can (8 ounces) sliced water chestnuts, drained and chopped 1/3 cup reduced-sodium soy sauce 1/4 cup egg substitute 1-1/2 teaspoons ground ginger 1 package (12 ounces) wonton wrappers Cooking spray Sweet-and-sour sauce, optional In a large skillet, cook the pork, turkey and onion over medium heat until meat is no longer pink; drain. Transfer to a large bowl. Stir in the water chestnuts, soy sauce, egg substitute and ginger. Position a wonton wrapper with one point toward you. (Keep remaining wrappers covered with a damp paper towel until ready to use.) Place 2 heaping teaspoons of filling in the center of wrapper. Fold bottom corner over filling; fold sides toward center over filling. Roll toward the remaining point. Moisten top corner with water; press to seal. Repeat with remaining wrappers and filling. Place on baking sheets coated with cooking spray; lightly coat wontons with additional cooking spray. Bake at 400° for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown, turning once. Serve warm with sweet-and-sour sauce if desired.

For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your team. Picture that person (or people). Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side. You’ve got to reach both. And you’ve also got to clear the way for them to succeed. In short, you must do three things: → DIRECT the Rider FOLLOW THE BRIGHT SPOTS. Investigate what’s working and clone it. [Jerry Sternin in Vietnam, solutions-focused therapy] SCRIPT THE CRITICAL MOVES. Don’t think big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors. [1% milk, four rules at the Brazilian railroad] POINT TO THE DESTINATION. Change is easier when you know where you’re going and why it’s worth it. [“You’ll be third graders soon,” “No dry holes” at BP] → MOTIVATE the Elephant FIND THE FEELING. Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change. Make people feel something. [Piling gloves on the table, the chemotherapy video game, Robyn Waters’s demos at Target] SHRINK THE CHANGE. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant. [The 5-Minute Room Rescue, procurement reform] GROW YOUR PEOPLE. Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset. [Brasilata’s “inventors,” junior-high math kids’ turnaround] → SHAPE the Path TWEAK THE ENVIRONMENT. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation. [Throwing out the phone system at Rackspace, 1-Click ordering, simplifying the online time sheet] BUILD HABITS. When behavior is habitual, it’s “free”—it doesn’t tax the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits. [Setting “action triggers,” eating two bowls of soup while dieting, using checklists] RALLY THE HERD.

Every few months or so at home, Pops had to have Taiwanese ’Mian. Not the Dan-Dan Mian you get at Szechuan restaurants or in Fuchsia Dunlop’s book, but Taiwanese Dan-Dan. The trademark of ours is the use of clear pork bone stock, sesame paste, and crushed peanuts on top. You can add chili oil if you want, but I take it clean because when done right, you taste the essence of pork and the bitterness of sesame paste; the texture is somewhere between soup and ragout. Creamy, smooth, and still soupy. A little za cai (pickled radish) on top, chopped scallions, and you’re done. I realized that day, it’s the simple things in life. It’s not about a twelve-course tasting of unfamiliar ingredients or mass-produced water-added rib-chicken genetically modified monstrosity of meat that makes me feel alive. It’s getting a bowl of food that doesn’t have an agenda. The ingredients are the ingredients because they work and nothing more. These noodles were transcendent not because he used the best produce or protein or because it was locally sourced, but because he worked his dish. You can’t buy a championship. Did this old man invent Dan-Dan Mian? No. But did he perfect it with techniques and standards never before seen? Absolutely. He took a dish people were making in homes, made it better than anyone else, put it on front street, and established a standard. That’s professional cooking. To take something that already speaks to us, do it at the highest level, and force everyone else to step up, too. Food at its best uplifts the whole community, makes everyone rise to its standard. That’s what that Dan-Dan Mian did. If I had the honor of cooking my father’s last meal, I wouldn’t think twice. Dan-Dan Mian with a bullet, no question.

Not only was the four-poster- a lofty structure that would have put princesses and peas to shame- a place of rest and relaxation but it was, and had been for quite some time now, a portal for her magic carpet escapades. It was there that Estelle first began to practice what Marjan had called "eating at the edge of a ready 'sofreh'." Estelle always followed the same routine when assembling her dinner 'sofreh' on her bed. First, she would spread the paisley blanket Marjan had given her, tucking the fringed ends in tight around the sides of her mattress. Then, having already wetted a pot of jasmine tea, she would dig a trivet into the blanket's left corner and place the piping pot on top of it. Following the Persian etiquette of placing the main dishes at the center of the 'sofreh', Estelle would position the plate of saffron 'chelow' (with crunchy 'tadig'), the bowl of stew or soup that was the day's special, and the 'lavash' or 'barbari' bread accordingly. She would frame the main dishes with a small plate of 'torshi', pickled carrots and cucumbers, as well as a yogurt dip and some feta cheese with her favorite herb: balmy lemon mint. Taking off her pink pom-pom house slippers, Estelle would then hoist herself onto her high bed and begin her ecstatic epicurean adventure. She savored every morsel of her nightly meal, breathing in the tingle of sumac powder and nutmeg while speaking to a framed photograph of Luigi she propped up on its own trivet next to the tea. Dinner was usually Persian, but her dessert was always Italian: a peppermint cannoli or marzipan cherry, after which she would turn on the radio, always set to the 'Mid-West Ceili Hour', and dream of the time when a young Luigi made her do things impossible, like when he convinced her to enter the Maharajah sideshow and stand on the tallest elephant's trunk during carnival season in her seaside Neapolitan town.

CRANBERRY SCONES Preheat oven to 425 degrees F., rack in the middle position. 3 cups all-purpose flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) 2 Tablespoons white (granulated) sugar 2 teaspoons cream of tartar (important) 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon salt ½ cup softened salted butter (1 stick, 4 ounces, ¼ pound) 2 large eggs, beaten (just whip them up in a glass with a fork) 1 cup unflavored yogurt (8 ounces) 1 cup sweetened dried cranberries (Craisins, or their equivalent) ½ cup whole milk Use a medium-size mixing bowl to combine the flour, sugar, cream of tartar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Stir them all up together. Cut in the salted butter just as you would for piecrust dough.   Hannah’s Note: If you have a food processor, you can use it for the first step. Cut ½ cup COLD salted butter into 8 chunks. Layer them with the dry ingredients in the bowl of the food processor. Process with the steel blade until the mixture has the texture of cornmeal. Transfer the mixture to a medium-sized mixing bowl and proceed to the second step.   Stir in the beaten eggs and the unflavored yogurt. Then add the sweetened dried cranberries and mix everything up together.   Add the milk and stir until everything is combined.   Drop the scones by soup spoonfuls onto a greased (or sprayed with Pam or another nonstick baking spray) baking sheet, 12 large scones to a sheet. You can also drop these scones on parchment paper if you prefer.   Once the scones are on the baking sheet, you can wet your fingers and shape them into more perfect rounds. (If you do this and there are any leftovers, you can slice them in half and toast them for breakfast the next morning.)   Bake the scones at 425 degrees F. for 12 to 14 minutes, or until they’re golden brown on top.   Cool the scones for at least five minutes on the cookie sheet, and then remove them with a spatula. Serve them in a towel-lined basket so they stay warm.   Yield: Makes 12 large and delicious scones.

It’s just a devilish odd coincidence. I shared a boat – and a carriage – with Balcourt’s sister and cousin." "I didn’t realise he had a sister." "Well, he does." Richard abruptly pushed away his empty bowl. "What a great stroke of luck! Could you use the acquaintance with the sister to discover more about Balcourt’s activities?" "That," Richard said grimly, "is not an option." Geoff eyed him quizzically. "I realise that any sister of Balcourt’s is most likely repugnant at best, but you don’t need to propose to the girl. Just flirt with her a bit. Take her for a drive, call on her at home, use her as an entrée into the house. You’ve done it before." "Miss Balcourt is not repugnant." Richard twisted in his chair, and stared at the door. "What the devil is keeping supper?" Geoff leant across the table. "Well, if she’s not repugnant, then-what’s the – ah." "Ah? Ah? What the deuce do you mean by ‘ah’? Of all the nonsensical…" "You" – Geoff pointed at him with fiendish glee – "are unsettled not because you find her repugnant, but because you find her not repugnant." Richard was about to deliver a baleful look in lieu of a response, when he was saved by the arrival of the footman bearing a large platter of something covered with sauce. Richard leant forward and speared what looked like it might once have been part of a chicken, as the footman whisked off with his soup dish. "Have some," Richard suggested to Geoff, ever so subtly diverting the conversation to culinary appreciation. "Thank you." Undiverted, Geoff continued, "Tell me about your Miss Balcourt." "Leaving aside the fact that she is by no means my Miss Balcourt" – Richard ignored the sardonic stare coming from across the table – "the girl is as complete an opposite to her brother as you can imagine. She was raised in England, somewhere out in the countryside. She’s read Homer in the original Greek—" "This is serious," murmured Geoff. "Is she comely?" "Comely?" "You know, nice hair, nice eyes, nice…" Geoff made a gesture that Richard would have expected more readily from Miles.

pine nuts and toss gently again. Green Bean, Tuna, and Mushroom “Casserole” One of my favorite things from my Midwestern upbringing is the green bean and mushroom casserole at Thanksgiving—probably the same one that was on your holiday table, thanks to the canned-mushroom-soup marketing campaign. This is my grown-up version of that casserole, which has all the comfort appeal of the childhood dish, but way better flavor and nutritional value. Make it with a one-to-one ratio of mushrooms to green beans, and have some fun with the beans, if you like—you can grill them, slice them thin and use raw, use pickled green beans, or use a mix of all of the above. » Serves 4 Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper Extra-virgin olive oil 2 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled 1 pound wild mushrooms, wiped off and cut into bite-size pieces (about 6 cups) One 5-ounce can oil-packed tuna, drained 1 pound green beans, trimmed 1 cup heavy cream 1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice ⅓ cup Dried Breadcrumbs Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add salt until it tastes like the sea. Meanwhile, add ¼ cup olive oil to a skillet that’s large enough to hold all the mushrooms and beans and still have some room to stir the ingredients. Add the garlic and cook slowly over medium heat to toast the garlic so it’s very soft, fragrant, and nicely golden brown—but not burnt—about 5 minutes. Scoop out the garlic and set it aside so it doesn’t burn. Increase the heat to medium-high and add the mushrooms. Season generously with pepper and salt and sauté, tossing frequently, until the mushrooms are nicely browned around the edges, 5 to 7 minutes. Add the tuna and toss to incorporate. Keep this warm until the green beans are ready. Add the beans to the boiling water and boil until they are just a bit beyond crisp-tender, 4 to 7 minutes. Drain them thoroughly in a colander and then add them to the mushrooms and tuna. Add the cream, toss all the ingredients to coat, and simmer until the cream has reduced to a nice cloaking consistency and all the flavors are nicely blended, 6 to 9 minutes. Add the lemon zest and lemon juice and toss. Taste and adjust with more salt, pepper, or lemon juice. When the flavors are delicious, pile into a serving bowl and top with the breadcrumbs.

...the letters begin to cross vast spaces in slow sailing ships and everything becomes still more protracted and verbose, and there seems no end to the space and the leisure of those early nineteenth century days, and faiths are lost and the life of Hedley Vicars revives them; aunts catch cold but recover; cousins marry; there is the Irish famine and the Indian Mutiny, and both sisters remain, to their great, but silent grief, for in those days there were things that women hid like pearls in their breasts, without children to come after them. Louisa, dumped down in Ireland with Lord Waterford at the hunt all day, was often very lonely; but she stuck to her post, visited the poor, spoke words of comfort (‘I am sorry indeed to hear of Anthony Thompson's loss of mind, or rather of memory; if, however, he can understand sufficiently to trust solely in our Saviour, he has enough’) and sketched and sketched. Thousands of notebooks were filled with pen and ink drawings of an evening, and then the carpenter stretched sheets for her and she designed frescoes for schoolrooms, had live sheep into her bedroom, draped gamekeepers in blankets, painted Holy Families in abundance, until the great Watts exclaimed that here was Titian's peer and Raphael's master! At that Lady Waterford laughed (she had a generous, benignant sense of humour); and said that she was nothing but a sketcher; had scarcely had a lesson in her life—witness her angel's wings, scandalously unfinished. Moreover, there was her father's house for ever falling into the sea; she must shore it up; must entertain her friends; must fill her days with all sorts of charities, till her Lord came home from hunting, and then, at midnight often, she would sketch him with his knightly face half hidden in a bowl of soup, sitting with her notebook under a lamp beside him. Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and she would wave to him and think, each time, what if this should be the last? And so it was one morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran down-stairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, Mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where she had grasped it in her agony.

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

Suddenly, he was ravenous. Ramona ladled the soup into two bowls and passed one to him. He drank it. Spiced just right. He took a second swallow. Even better. “Good,” he said. She rolled her eyes. “Of course it’s good. Everything here is good. They’re serving our family recipes.” “In that case, I should have said passable.” “Clearly, you don’t value your life.

YELLOW RICE Serves 6 to 8 This simple, spiced rice dish is a great accompaniment to Spice Trade Fish Stew (page 78) or any roast or grilled chicken, fish, or meat dish. 2 cups white basmati rice 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 cup chopped onion 1 tablespoon hawaij for soup or Instant Almost Hawaij (page 216) 3 cups water Place the rice in a bowl and rinse it in several changes of water until the water runs clear. Cover with warm tap water and let sit for 20 minutes. Drain the rice and set aside. In a large saucepan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion and sauté until golden, 5 to 7 minutes. Add the hawaij and rice and stir until evenly coated. Add the water, stir well, raise the heat to high, and bring to a boil. Cover, lower the heat to low, and simmer for 15 minutes. Remove from the heat and let rest, covered, for 10 minutes. Fluff the rice with a fork before serving warm.

Cauliflower, Coconut, and Turmeric Soup Serves: 4 ½ cup unsweetened shredded coconut 1 teaspoon chopped fresh ginger 1 cup water 1 medium onion, chopped 4 cloves garlic, chopped 3 cups sliced shiitake mushrooms 1 head cauliflower, cut into pieces 4½ cups low-sodium or no-salt-added vegetable broth ½ teaspoon turmeric ½ teaspoon ground coriander ¼ cup raw macadamia nuts ¼ cup raw walnuts 1 bunch kale, tough stems removed, chopped ½ cup shredded cooked chicken or ½ cup raw chopped shrimp, optional (see Note) Blend coconut, ginger, and water in a high-powered blender until smooth and creamy. In a soup pot, heat 2 to 3 tablespoons water and water-sauté onion and garlic for 2 minutes, then add mushrooms and sauté until onions and mushrooms are tender. Add blended coconut mixture, cauliflower, vegetable broth, turmeric, and coriander. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 15 minutes or until the cauliflower is tender. In a high-powered blender, blend two-thirds of the soup liquid and vegetables with the macadamia nuts and walnuts until smooth and creamy. Return to the pot and reheat. Steam the kale until wilted and just tender, about 6 to 8 minutes. Divide steamed kale into four soup bowls and serve the soup on top. For added crunch, top with Crispy Chickpeas (page 328). Note: If desired, add chicken or shrimp after soup is blended and returned to the soup pot. Add ½ cup cooked shredded chicken and reheat or add ½ cup chopped raw shrimp and simmer for 3 to 4 minutes or until shrimp turns pink. PER SERVING: CALORIES 305; PROTEIN 9.3g; CARBOHYDRATE 29g; TOTAL FAT 19.7g; SATURATED FAT 8.1g; SODIUM 246mg; FIBER 9.1g; BETA-CAROTENE 7728mcg; VITAMIN C 175mg; CALCIUM 205mg; IRON 3.8mg; FOLATE 123mcg; MAGNESIUM 94mg; ZINC 1.7mg; SELENIUM 6.6mcg

French Minted Pea Soup Serves: 3 10 ounces frozen green peas 1 small onion, chopped 1 clove garlic, chopped 3 tablespoons VegiZest*, or other no-salt seasoning, adjusted to taste 3 cups water 1 bunch fresh mint leaves (save a few leaves for garnish) 3 regular dates, pitted ½ cup raw cashews ½ tablespoon Spike no-salt seasoning, or other no-salt seasoning, to taste 4 teaspoons fresh lemon juice 4 cups shredded romaine lettuce or chopped baby spinach 2 tablespoons fresh snipped chives Simmer peas, onions, garlic, and seasonings in water for about 7 minutes. Pour pea mixture into a high-powered blender or food processor. Add remaining ingredients except for the lettuce and chives. Blend until smooth and creamy. Add lettuce or spinach and let it wilt in hot liquid. Pour into bowls and garnish with chives and mint leaves. PER SERVING: CALORIES 313; PROTEIN 14g; CARBOHYDRATE 45g; TOTAL FAT 11.4g; SATURATED FAT 1.9g; SODIUM 153mg; FIBER 11.6g; BETA-CAROTENE 4496mcg; VITAMIN C 39mg; CALCIUM 192mg; IRON 9mg; FOLATE 210mcg; MAGNESIUM 156mg; ZINC 3mg; SELENIUM 8.1mcg

Growing up it seemed like all Iranians naturally knew which foods fell into which category, and meals were subconsciously, or at times consciously, due to illness or the weather, designed around this hot and cold concept. Out of respect to the scientists and doctors in our family I will say that none of this is based on hard science, but even the doctors in the family agree that if it brings comfort (like a warm bowl of. . . soup), then that is all the more reason to embrace it.

I’ll have another bowl of your wonderful soup!

Because miso may contain probiotic bacteria,19 it’s probably best not to actually cook the miso, lest the good bugs be wiped out. When I prepare it, I boil dried mushrooms, a pinch of arame seaweed, a few sun-dried tomatoes, and greens in a pot and ladle off about a quarter cup of hot broth into a large bowl, add the miso, and mash it with a fork until only a thin paste remains. I then pour the rest of the soup into the bowl and stir to combine it with the miso. And, because I’m a bit of a hot-sauce freak, I add some Sriracha for a little kick. My new favorite addition is freshly toasted sesame seeds. I pour out a layer of raw, hulled sesame seeds, put them in the toaster oven until they just start to turn golden, and then throw them sizzling into the soup. Makes the whole kitchen smell heavenly.

When it comes to lunchtime... we gather to eat a bowl of fresh soup every day. At some point mid-morning, the question "what soup shall we make today?" will have arisen... The soup then gets made in our office kitchen by the volunteer of the day, and devoured around the meeting table amid much conversation and debate!... It feels wholesome and nourishing in more ways than one; we get health from our meal, and well-being from our sense of community.

We could eat, why not? We’re sober, so he’ll let us in, the bastard. I ate there the other night, had a bowl of soup because I was starvin’. But god it was sour. Them dried-out bums that live there, they sit down and eat like fuckin’ pigs, and everything that’s left they throw in the pot and give it to you. Slop.” “He puts out a good meal, though.

All that preamble out of way, here’s what Big Dom eats. Keep in mind that he weighs roughly 100 kg (220 lbs), so scale as needed: Breakfast 4 eggs (cooked in a combo of butter and coconut oil) 1 can of sardines packed in olive oil (such as Wild Planet brand) ½ can oysters (Crown Prince brand. Note: Carbs on the label are from non-glycemic phytoplankton) Some asparagus or other vegetable TF: Both Dom and I travel with boxes of sardines, oysters, and bulk macadamia nuts. “Lunch” Instead of lunch, Dom will consume a lot of MCT throughout the day via Quest Nutrition MCT Oil Powder. He will also make a Thermos of coffee with a half stick of butter and 1 to 2 scoops of MCT powder, which he sips throughout the day, totaling about 3 cups of coffee. Dinner “One trick I’ve learned is that before dinner, which is my main meal of the day, I’ll have a bowl of soup, usually broccoli cream soup or cream of mushroom soup. I use concentrated coconut milk in place of the dairy cream. I thin it out [with a bit of water] so it’s not super dense in calories. After eating that, the amount of food that I want to consume is cut in half.” Dom’s dinner is always some kind of large salad, typically made up of: Mixed greens and spinach together Extra-virgin olive oil Artichokes Avocado MCT oil A little bit of Parmesan or feta cheese A moderate amount—about 50 g—of chicken, beef, or fish. He uses the fattiest versions he can get and increases the protein in the salad to 70 to 80 g if he had a workout that day. In addition to the salad, Dom will make some other vegetable like Brussels sprouts, asparagus, collard greens, etc., cooked in butter and coconut oil. He views vegetables as “fat delivery systems.

Brothy: Stracciatella Roman Egg Drop Soup Makes 10 cups (serves 4 to 6) 9 cups Chicken Stock Salt 6 large eggs Freshly ground black pepper 3/4-ounce chunk of Parmesan, finely grated (about 3/4 cup), plus more for serving 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley Bring the stock to a simmer in a medium pot and season with salt. In a measuring cup with a spout (you can also use a medium bowl), whisk together the eggs, a generous pinch of salt, pepper, Parmesan, and parsley.

Pour the egg mixture into the simmering stock in a thin stream while gently stirring the soup with a fork. Avoid overmixing, which will cause the eggs to break up into tiny, unappetizing bits, instead of the stracci, or rags, for which the soup is named. Let the egg mixture cook for about 30 seconds, then ladle the soup into bowls. Garnish with more Parmesan, and serve immediately. Cover and refrigerate leftovers for up to 3 days. To reheat, gently return soup to a simmer.

Gloria's soup is the same creamy white as her mousse, and dotted with crispy haggis croutons arranged in a half-moon shape. The "tattie scone" isn't the classic tattie scone, which is a flat potato-and-flour pancake fried crisp in a pan, but more like the risen scone you have with afternoon tea. Susan picks up the spoon and dips into the soup. "Ohhhhhhh. The soup is perfect, smooth and luscious, with a slight tang from the turnips (the "neeps" of the title) that keeps it from being too heavy. The finishing flavor is smoky, peaty. A little whisky, perhaps? The haggis croutons crunch as she bites into them, and the burst of spice further tames and complements the velvety richness of the soup. She devours every bit, sopping up the last of it with the scone, which is surprisingly fluffy for something made with potato. Like that morning's amuse-bouche, she's sorry when the dish is finished. But then Gloria appears, whisks the bowl away, and replaces it with a plate of seared trout with a lime-green sauce. On the side is rainbow chard and a small potato, split open, insides fluffed, topped with tuna tartare- a cheeky nod to a favorite Scottish meal of tuna salad-topped baked potato. "Trout with a lemony samphire sauce

We slurp a clear soup with dumplings and eat savory custard with eel and mushroom, grilled baby ayu, and bowls of sticky white rice with red beans. Mariko told me clearing one's plate was polite. That I can do.

Thanks to the soy-sauce-based kaeshi sauce, the broth does have a clean aftertaste, yes... but you would never expect this strong and sweet an umami flavor just at a glance!" "How on earth could she- Oh! The vegetable toppings... I've seen this combination before... Kozuyu." "Kozuyu?" "Yes, sir! I made this dish based on Kozuyu but with a paitan stock and soy sauce for the kaeshi. It's Kozuyu Chicken Soy Sauce Ramen." KOZUYU It's a traditional delicacy local to the Aizu area in Northwestern Japan. A vegetable soup, its clear broth is made with scallop stock. Considered a ceremonial meal, it is often served in special bowls on auspicious days, such as festivals and holidays. "Oh, so that's what it is!" "She took a local delicacy and reimagined it as a ramen dish. How clever!" "The scallop and paitan stock forms a solid foundation for the overall flavor of the dish." "Who knew that ramen and Kozuyu would complement each other this well?" "It looks like she also used a blend of light soy sauce and white soy sauce for the kaeshi sauce." White soy sauce! While most Japanese soy sauces are made with a mix of soy and wheat... white soy sauce uses a much higher ratio of wheat to soy! This gives it a much sweeter taste and a far lighter color than regular soy sauce, which is why it's called white. Since Kozuyu broth is traditionally seasoned with soy sauce, using white soy sauce makes perfect sense! "But white soy sauce alone isn't enough to explain this umami flavor! Where on earth is it coming from?" "In this dish, the last, most important chunk of umami flavor... ... comes from the vegetables. The burdock root, shiitake mushrooms, string beans... every vegetable I used as a topping... were first dried and then simmered together with the broth!" Aha! That's right! Drying vegetables concentrates the umami flavors and increases their nutritional value! It also ameliorates their natural grassy pungency, giving them a flavor when cooked that is much different than what they had raw! Megumi has captured all of that umami goodness in her broth!

movie. I grab the two bowls of soup and

This must have been what the doctor had meant when he said the mind could do astonishing things: Petrona eating from the fruit of the Drunken Tree and believing she had misplaced a bowl of soup in her sheets, and Abuela taking the doctor’s drugs and thinking herself on a cruise. Maybe the astonishing thing was how much nicer the things they imagined were compared to the real suffering of their bodies.

This must have been what the doctor had meant when he said the mind could do astonishing things: Petrona eating from the fruit of the Drunken Tree and believing she had misplaced a bowl of soup in her sheets, and Abuela taking the doctor’s drugs and thinking herself on a cruise. Maybe the astonishing thing was how much nicer the things they imagined were compared

Mary was standing behind it, emptying minestrone out of tins into the vat.  An entire slab was resting on the stage behind her with half of the cans missing. They looked to be wholesale and cheap. But the folks outside wouldn’t complain. A stack of plastic bowls and spoons had been set on the table next to the heater. Once it was full and hot, she’d call them in. Jamie was surprised that they hadn’t flooded in already. The door was open, after all.  That said something to her about Mary, and about the respect these people had for her. ‘Detectives,’ Mary said, a little surprised. ‘Did I call you?’ She seemed to be asking herself as much as Jamie and Roper.  ‘No,’ Roper said. ‘But we wanted to be here when Grace arrived.’ Mary took it in, stirring the soup with a ladle. ‘Oh, well she’s not here yet — as far as I know. I won’t be serving lunch for another half an hour or so.’ ‘That’s fine, we’ll wait,’ Roper said, smiling. He thought he was charming at times. But he never was. Silence hung in the air while Mary popped and emptied in another tin with a dull slap.  Jamie looked at the slab and saw that the soup was best before August last year. It was out of date — probably salvaged from a food bank. Jamie thought about the phrase, beggars can't be choosers, and then immediately felt bad about it. ‘There was a guy outside this morning,’ Roper said, pushing his hands into his pockets. ‘Smartly dressed, short black hair, glasses.’ ‘Oh, um,’ Mary said, not sure where he was going with it. ‘He bumped into Jamie, said some pretty nasty things — about the good people who rely on this shelter. Didn’t seem too excited about them being there.’ Mary’s face lit up and then drooped as she realised who he meant. ‘Ah, yes — I don’t know

Jamie hated being asked that question, because there wasn’t a good answer that didn’t make it sound like they were. Roper looked at her, not wanting to tackle it either. ‘We, uh,’ Jamie started, looking around the room. ‘We don’t have a list of suspects, yet. We’re just gathering information.’ Mary looked relived, nodding. ‘Okay, good. Well, if there’s anything I can do.’ Roper smiled, rocking back and forth on his heels. ‘Just let us know when Grace arrives and we’ll do the rest. You’ve been a great help already.’ He turned away and headed towards the far side of the room. Jamie followed, knowing it meant he wanted to talk. They stood side on so they had a view of both Mary and the door, and then Roper said, ‘I’ll make the call, get the uniforms out here. You think it’s worth looking around this place again?’ Jamie shook her head. ‘We’d be swinging in the dark. Let’s speak to Grace first, then go from there. If she gives us any names — the third person in the love triangle — then we can grab another file. But for now…’ She inhaled, knowing they had twenty something minutes to kill and she had two phone calls to make.  They couldn’t be put off any longer.  ‘Let’s head outside,’ Roper said. ‘It smells like piss in here.’ She thought that was rich considering that there was about a fifty-fifty chance that smell was coming from Roper himself. But she didn’t say anything. Roper had a cigarette lit before his feet hit the pavement and he circled into the street to get a look at the thirty-strong line that had now formed. The people were beginning to jostle.  They couldn’t have all been local — which meant that they were making the trek over for a plastic bowl of soup. Jamie looked away, focused her mind on the calls, and dug her phone out of her pocket.

been long, greasy, and pulled back into a low ponytail.  The words Mary had used were ‘cute asymmetrical bob’, and Jamie thought that probably meant she’d cut it for her. Damn, she really did care. No one that looked even remotely like Grace showed up, though. And after all the soup was finished, the crowd began to dissipate. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Mary said. ‘She’s usually here for lunch.’ Roper smacked his lips. ‘Who knows. Word gets around sometimes. Maybe she heard about the vic—’ He cut himself off. ‘About Oliver.’ Mary nodded, like she concurred.  ‘Mrs Cartwright,’ Jamie said, ‘do you know where Grace sleeps? Does she have a usual spot, or do you know if anyone might know how we can get hold of her?’ Mary thought for a second. ‘There’s a bridge that runs across an old overground line — not far from here. I know that a lot of our patrons make themselves a space there. I don’t know if that’s where she sleeps, but…’ She looked around, and seeing a guy in his late twenties with a tattered beanie hat pulled down to his eyebrows sitting on one of the chairs, polishing off a bowl of soup, lifted her hand and called out to him. ‘Reggie?’ He looked up, the fur lining the hood of his jacket all clumped together and dirty. ‘Hmm?’ he said, looking scared all of a sudden.  Jamie smiled at him, but the fear of getting questioned by two police detectives couldn’t be dispelled that easily.  Mary beckoned him over and he approached cautiously. ‘Reggie — you’ve got a space down on the old overground line, right? Under the bridge?’ He looked at Roper and Jamie, as though admitting it was going to get him in trouble.

I know of few greater pleasures than holding a lacquer soup bowl in my hands, feeling upon my palms the weight of the liquid and its mild warmth. The sensation is something like that of holding a plump newborn baby.

TOMATO SALAD/SAUCE 1 pound ripe tomatoes (2 or 3 tomatoes) 1 teaspoon finely chopped garlic ¾ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper ⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil 1 cup shredded basil leaves PASTA Salt to taste 8 cups water 1 pound penne or bow-tie pasta ⅓ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (preferably Parmigiano-Reggiano) FOR THE TOMATO SALAD/SAUCE: Cut the tomatoes in half crosswise, parallel to the stems, and gently press the seeds out. Cut the flesh into ½-inch pieces, and put them in a bowl large enough to hold the finished dish. Add the remaining salad ingredients, and toss well. FOR THE PASTA: Salt the water and bring to a boil. Add the pasta, stir well, bring back to a boil, and boil, uncovered, stirring occasionally, for about to minutes, more or less, depending on how firm you like your pasta. Add a 6-ounce ladle of the hot pasta water to the tomato salad. Drain the pasta in a colander, and acid it immediately to the tomato salad. Toss thoroughly, and divide the pasta among four soup plates. Sprinkle generously with the Parmesan cheese, and serve immediately.

Onion Soup Gratinée YIELD: 4 SERVINGS ONE OF MY greatest treats when working in Paris was to go with my fellow chefs and commis to les Halles, the big market of Paris that spreads through many streets of the Châtelet neighborhood. The excitement in the streets and cafés started a little before 3:00 A.M. and ended around 7:00 or 8:00 A.M. Our nocturnal forays would, more often than not, finish at Le Pied de Cochon (The Pig’s Foot), the quintessential night brasserie of les Halles. There, large, vociferous butchers in bloody aprons would rub shoulders with tuxedoed and elegantly evening-gowned Parisians stopping by for late-night Champagne and a meal after the opera or the theater. The restaurant was famous for its onion-cheese gratinée; it was one of the best in Paris, and hundreds of bowls of it were served every night. For this recipe, you will need four onion soup bowls, each with a capacity of about 12 ounces and, preferably, with a lip or rim around the edge that the cheese topping will stick to as it melts to form a beautiful crust on top of the soup. 2 tablespoons unsalted butter 3 onions (about 12 ounces), cut into thin slices About 7 cups good-quality chicken stock, or a mixture of chicken and beef stock About ½ teaspoon salt, more or less, depending on the saltiness of the stock ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 16 slices of baguette, each cut about ⅜ inch thick About 3 cups grated Swiss cheese, preferably Gruyère, Comté, or Emmenthaler (about 10 ounces) Melt the butter in a saucepan, and sauté the sliced onions in the butter over medium to high heat for about 8 minutes, or until lightly browned. Add the stock, salt, and pepper, and boil gently for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Arrange the bread slices in a single layer on a tray, and bake them for 8 to 10 minutes, or until they are nicely browned. Divide the toast among the bowls, and sprinkle ¼ cup of cheese into each bowl. When the stock and onions have cooked for 15 minutes, pour the soup into the bowls, filling each to the top. Sprinkle on the remainder of the cheese, dividing it among the bowls and taking care not to push it down into the liquid. Press the cheese around the rim or lip of the bowls, so it adheres there as it cooks and the crust does not fall into the liquid. Arrange the soup bowls on a baking sheet, and bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until a glorious brown, rich crust has developed on top. Serve hot right out of the oven.

Not every declaration is a spoken statement. Sometimes we just describe, refer to, talk about, think about, or even act in relation to a situation in ways that “create a reality by representing that reality as created.” For example, let’s say the waiter brings my friend and me two identical bowls of soup, placing one bowl in front of each of us. Without saying anything, he has declared that the bowls are not the same: one bowl is my friend’s, and the other bowl is mine. We strengthen the facts of his declaration when I take soup only from “my” bowl and my friend takes soup from his. When “his” bowl is empty, my friend is still hungry, and he asks permission to take a spoonful of soup from the bowl in front of me, further establishing the fact that it is my bowl of soup. In this way declarations rise or fall on the strength of others’ acceptance of the new facts. As Searle concludes, “All of institutional reality, and therefore . . . all of human civilization is created by . . . declarations.”4

They sat around the dining table looking innocuous as they awaited my chilled avocado soup. The mango-cilantro salsa made a colorful garnish. But when I brought it out to the table, Todd, the painter, said he was allergic to mangoes, and Carlos from Guadalajara hated cilantro. How could a Mexican hate cilantro, I thought as I spooned out the garnish from Carlos’s bowl. Margo, the macrobiotic, wouldn’t eat avocado since it wasn’t native to the Northeast, and Robert, the banker on the Pritikin diet, was banned from eating it because it was high in fat. Things got progressively worse. Niloufer, the daughter of a Turkish diplomat, took one look at my dolma and said, “That doesn’t look like the ones my grandmother made.” Reza, the Iranian consultant, announced that he wouldn’t eat Turkish food, since his ancestors were murdered by Turks. Todd, I discovered, was allergic not only to mangoes but also to cabbage. He was the only one in the group who touched my umeboshi-cranberry sauce, which the entire group pronounced inedible. Olivia, my fashionable Italian friend, stated that she “simply couldn’t” eat the pine nuts that I had liberally included in my dolma stuffing, and spent the entire meal scratching her plate to spot and discard the offenders. With each dish, I had to recite its ingredients in excruciating detail and answer questions—had I used stone-ground flour? Was the produce organic (it wasn’t)? —all of which determined who would deign to eat my delicacies.

1 large aubergine, cut into bite-sized chunks (about 2cm) 150g shiitake mushrooms (or brown, chestnut or white mushrooms), stems removed, thinly sliced 10 cherry tomatoes, halved 800ml coconut milk 400ml good-quality vegetable stock 100g tenderstem broccoli, cut into large chunks 100g dried rice vermicelli noodles, or other thin noodles 2–3 tbsp kecap manis 1–2 tbsp rice vinegar or white wine vinegar Sea salt, to taste Coconut oil or sunflower oil, for frying Kerupuk or prawn crackers, to serve Lime wedges, to serve For the spice paste Large bunch of coriander 4 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced 2 small banana shallots or 4 Thai shallots, peeled and sliced 4 long red chillies, half deseeded, all sliced 2cm piece of ginger (about 10g), peeled and sliced 1 lemongrass stalk, outer woody layers removed, thinly sliced 1 tsp ground coriander Pick some of the coriander leaves from the stalks and set aside to use as a garnish. Place all the coriander stalks and remaining leaves, along with the other spice paste ingredients, in a food processor and blend to a smooth paste. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a wide, deep saucepan or casserole dish over a medium heat and fry the spice paste until fragrant, about 10 minutes. Add the aubergine chunks and sliced mushrooms with another 1 tablespoon of oil and cook, stirring, for 2–3 minutes. As soon as they have started to soften, add the tomatoes, coconut milk and vegetable stock and bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer for 30 minutes. Add the broccoli and simmer for a further 5 minutes. Meanwhile, place the noodles in a heatproof bowl, pour over boiling water and leave for 10 minutes (or follow the packet instructions). Drain and toss with a little oil to prevent them sticking together. When ready to serve, check the vegetables are soft and the aubergine is cooked through. Add the noodles to the soup and warm through. Season with kecap manis, vinegar and salt. Taste to check the seasoning, then serve immediately garnished with the reserved coriander leaves, and the crackers, lime wedges and sambal on the side.

We visited Gwangjang Market in one of Seoul's oldest neighborhoods, squeezing past crowds of people threading through its covered alleys, a natural maze spontaneously joined and splintered over a century of accretion. We passed busy ajummas in aprons and rubber kitchen gloves tossing knife-cut noodles in colossal, bubbling pots for kalguksu, grabbing fistfuls of colorful namul from overbrimming bowls for bibimbap, standing over gurgling pools of hot oil, armed with metal spatulas in either hand, flipping the crispy sides of stone-milled soybean pancakes. Metal containers full of jeotgal, salt-fermented seafood banchan, affectionally known as rice thieves, because their intense, salty flavor cries out for starchy, neutral balance; raw, pregnant crabs, floating belly up in soy sauce to show off the unctuous roe protruding out from beneath their shells; millions of minuscule peach-colored krill used for making kimchi or finishing hot soup with rice; and my family's favorite, crimson sacks of pollack roe smothered in gochugaru, myeongnanjeot.

He shoved the soup bowl closer, making it slosh slightly. Then he sat in a chair across from me. “You’re not eating?” I asked. “I’m fine,” he retorted. My stomach clenched with hunger, so I scooped up a bite of the soup with a simple spoon that had been next to my bowl. Immediately, spices exploded over my tongue, filling my mouth with warmth, every ingredient the perfect texture and packed with flavor. “Oh my gods, so good,” I practically moaned. I looked up as Sam moved in his chair slightly, looking vaguely uncomfortable. I ignored him, eating more of the soup until the bowl was almost gone, at which point Sam got up and served me another one, sliding it over without hesitation. He brought me a glass of juice as well, which tasted of fresh oranges.

Following the crowds came the blog entries. My early favorite read: “I thought for sure the soup would have a ketchup flavor to it, so I was surprised and thrilled to eat such an authentic, delicious bowl of ramen. Sorry, Ivan, for thinking such negative things about you.” Every news article, blog post, TV interview, and conversation focused on the gaijin angle. Every positive review started, “I expected Ivan Ramen to be terrible, but …” The online forums were alive with conspiracy theories. Some people said I was a front for a large Korean corporation; others claimed that I was just a front for a Japanese chef; my favorite one speculated that I was really Japanese and was just pretending to be a foreigner.

Soup bowls made from the sawed-off tops of human heads. Chairs upholstered in human flesh. Lampshades fashioned of skin. A boxful of noses. A shade pull decorated with a pair of women's lips. A belt made of female nipples. A shoe box containing a collection of preserved female genitalia. The faces of nine women, carefully dried, stuffed with paper and mounted, like hunting trophies on a wall. A skin vest, complete with breasts, which had been fashioned from the tanned upper torso of a middle-aged woman.

There are drafts of manuscripts spread over the floor where they slipped off the edge of the bed in the night. There is the unfinished canvas tacked to the wall and the scent of eucalyptus failing to mask the sickening smell of used turpentine and linseed oil. There are telltale drips of cadmium red staining the bathroom ­sink—along the edge of the ­baseboard—or splotches on the wall where the brush got away. One step into a living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life. ­Half-­empty paper coffee cups. ­Half-­eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work..

There are drafts of manuscripts spread over the floor where they slipped off the edge of the bed in the night. There is the unfinished canvas tacked to the wall and the scent of the eucalyptus failing to mask the sickening smell of used turpentine and linseed oil. There are telltale drips of cadmium red staining the bathroom sink — along the edge of the baseboard — or splotches on the wall where the brush got away. One step into the living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life. Half-empty paper coffee cups. Half-eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. This is how I live, I am thinking.

Carlita’s Homemade Minestrone Soup Recipe Ingredients: 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 lb. Italian sausage, sliced thin (we used turkey sausage) 1 cup diced yellow onion 3 cloves garlic, minced 2 cups finely shredded carrots 1 tsp. Italian seasoning 2 small zucchini, cubed 16-oz can diced tomatoes, undrained 16-oz can cut green beans (optional) 2 – 16 oz. containers of beef OR chicken stock 3 cups finely chopped cabbage 1/2 tablespoon salt 1/2 tsp. pepper 16-oz can Great Northern Beans, undrained Directions: Brown sausage, onion and garlic in oil. Stir in carrots and Italian spice blend. Cook for 5 minutes. Add zucchini, tomatoes, beef stock, cabbage, salt and pepper.  Bring soup to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer covered for 30 minutes. Add Great Northern beans and green beans, and cook another 20 minutes. Sprinkle parsley and Parmesan cheese over soup in serving bowls.

Chicken Salad à la Danny Kaye YIELD: 4 SERVINGS TO MOST AMERICANS, Danny Kaye is remembered as a splendid comedian and actor. I think of him as a friend and one of the finest cooks I have ever known. In every way, Danny was equal to or better than any trained chef. His technique was flawless. The speed at which he worked was on par with what you’d find in a Parisian brigade de cuisine. Danny taught me a great deal, mostly about Chinese cuisine, his specialty. Whenever I traveled to Los Angeles, Danny picked me up at the airport and took me to his house, where we cooked Chinese or French food. His poached chicken was the best I have ever had. His method was to put the chicken in a small stockpot, cover it with tepid water seasoned with salt, peppercorns, and vegetables, and cook it at a gentle boil for only 10 minutes, then set it aside off the heat for 45 minutes. As an added touch, he always stuck a handful of knives, forks, and spoons into the cavity of the chicken, to keep it submerged. The result is so moist, tender, and flavorful that I have used the recipe—minus the flatware—ever since. CHICKEN 1 chicken, about 3½ pounds ½ cup sliced carrot 1 cup sliced onion 1 small leek, washed and left whole 1 rib celery, washed and left whole 1 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon black peppercorns 2 sprigs thyme 2 bay leaves About 7 cups tepid water, or more if needed DRESSING 2 tablespoons Dijon-style mustard 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar 1 teaspoon finely chopped garlic ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper ½ teaspoon Tabasco hot pepper sauce 5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil GARNISHES 1 dozen Boston lettuce leaves, cleaned 2 dozen fresh tarragon leaves FOR THE CHICKEN: Place the chicken breast side down in a tall, narrow pot, so it fits snugly at the bottom. Add the remaining poaching ingredients. The chicken should be submerged, and the water should extend about 1 inch above it. Bring to a gentle boil, cover, and let boil gently for two minutes. Remove the pot from the heat, and set it aside to steep in the hot broth for 45 minutes. Remove the chicken from the pot, and set it aside on a platter to cool for a few minutes. (The stock can be strained and frozen for up to 6 months for use in soup.) Pick the meat from the chicken bones, discarding the skin, bones, and fat. Shred the meat with your fingers, following the grain and pulling it into strips. (The meat tastes better shredded than diced with a knife.) FOR THE DRESSING: Mix together all the dressing ingredients in a bowl large enough to hold the chicken salad. Add the chicken shreds to the dressing and toss well. Arrange the Boston lettuce leaves in a “nest” around the periphery of a platter, and spoon the room-temperature chicken salad into the center. Sprinkle with the tarragon leaves and serve.

the mistake of calling an assiette à soupe (soup plate) a soup bowl (bol) because it has sides to hold in soup.

As my father likes to say, “Humans are the only animals on the planet that self-domesticate.” The relationship between the boy and his grandmother forms a part of the Dream of the Planet, and the lunch between the grandmother and her grandson is a basic example of how domestication and self-domestication within the Dream occurs. The grandmother domesticated her grandson in that moment, but he continued to self-domesticate himself long after that. Self-domestication is the act of accepting ourselves on the condition that we live up to the ideals we have adopted from others in the Dream of the Planet, without ever considering if those ideals are what we truly want. While the consequences of finishing a bowl of soup are minimal, domestication and self-domestication can take much more serious and darker forms as well. For instance, many of us learned to be critical of our physical appearance because it wasn't “good enough” by society's standards. We were presented with the belief that we weren't tall enough, thin enough, or that our skin wasn't the right color, and the moment we agreed with that belief we began to self-domesticate. Because we adopted an external belief, we either rejected or tried to change our physical appearance so we could feel worthy of our own self-acceptance and the acceptance of others. Imagine for a moment the many industries that would cease to exist if we all loved our bodies exactly the way they are. To be clear, domestication regarding body image is different from wanting to lose weight in order to be healthy, or even having a preference to look a certain way. The key difference is that with a preference, you come from a place of self-love and self-acceptance, whereas with domestication you start from a place of shame, guilt, and not being “enough.” The line between these two can be thin sometimes, and a Master of Self is one who can look within and determine his or her true motive. Another popular form of domestication in the current Dream of the Planet revolves around social class and material possessions. There is an underlying belief promulgated by society that those who have the most “stuff” or who hold certain jobs are somehow more important than the rest. I, for one, have never met anyone who was more important than anyone else, as we are all beautiful and unique creations of the Divine. And yet many people pursue career paths they dislike and buy things they don't really want or need all in an effort to achieve the elusive goals of peer acceptance and self-acceptance. Instances such as these (and we can think of many others) are the ways in which domestication leads to self-domestication, and the result is that we have people living lives that aren't their own.

Eventually, the boy reaches the threshold of his grandmother's patience, and when the carrot doesn't work, she reaches for the stick to impose her will upon him. Like many grandparents and their parents before them, she crosses the line of respect for his choice and adds punishment—in this case, guilt and shaming, which is the second tool of domestication. “Do you know how many children don't have anything to eat around the world? They are starving! And here you are, wasting your food. It's a sin to waste food!” Now the young boy is concerned. He doesn't want to look like a selfish child, and he really doesn't want to be seen as a sinner in his grandmother's eyes. With a sense of defeat, he relents and subjugates his will. “OK, Grandma, I will finish my soup.” He begins to eat again, and he doesn't stop until the bowl is empty. Then, with the tenderness that makes her grandson feel safe and loved, Grandma says, “That's my good boy.” The boy learns that by complying with the rules of the dream, he can earn a reward; in this case, he is a good boy in the eyes of his grandmother and receives her love and encouragement. The punishment would have been to be seen as a selfish child, a sinner in her eyes, and a bad boy. This is a simple example of domestication in action. No one doubts that the grandmother has the best of intentions; she loves her grandson and wants him to eat his lunch, but the method she is using to achieve that goal has negative unintended consequences. Anytime guilt and shame are deployed as tools to provoke action, this counters any good that has been achieved. Eventually, these negative elements will resurface in one way or another. In this case, let's imagine that when this boy grows up, the domestication that occurred around this issue is so strong that it still has an imposing power over him well into adulthood. For instance, many years later he goes into a restaurant where they serve a big plate of food, and halfway through his meal his body signals to him the truth of that moment: I am full. Consciously, or subconsciously, he hears a voice: It's a sin to waste food. Consciously, or subconsciously, he answers Yes, Grandma, and continues to eat. Finishing his plate like a good boy, he responds to his domestication rather than his needs of the moment. In that instant, he completely goes against himself by continuing to eat after his body has already let him know that he is full. The idea is so strong that it overrules his body's natural preference to stop. Overeating may damage his body, which is one of the negative consequences in this case of using guilt and shame as a tool. The other consequence is that he is experiencing internal suffering by reliving a past moment of guilt and shame, and it is controlling his actions in the present.

Finally, note that his grandmother is not even present in the current situation, as he has now taken up the reins of domestication and subjugated his own will without anyone's else's influence. In the Toltec tradition we refer to this phenomenon as self-domestication. As my father likes to say, “Humans are the only animals on the planet that self-domesticate.” The relationship between the boy and his grandmother forms a part of the Dream of the Planet, and the lunch between the grandmother and her grandson is a basic example of how domestication and self-domestication within the Dream occurs. The grandmother domesticated her grandson in that moment, but he continued to self-domesticate himself long after that. Self-domestication is the act of accepting ourselves on the condition that we live up to the ideals we have adopted from others in the Dream of the Planet, without ever considering if those ideals are what we truly want. While the consequences of finishing a bowl of soup are minimal, domestication and self-domestication can take much more serious and darker forms as well. For instance, many of us learned to be critical of our physical appearance because it wasn't “good enough” by society's standards. We were presented with the belief that we weren't tall enough, thin enough, or that our skin wasn't the right color, and the moment we agreed with that belief we began to self-domesticate. Because we adopted an external belief, we either rejected or tried to change our physical appearance so we could feel worthy of our own self-acceptance and the acceptance of others. Imagine for a moment the many industries that would cease to exist if we all loved our bodies exactly the way they are. To be clear, domestication regarding body image is different from wanting to lose weight in order to be healthy, or even having a preference to look a certain way. The key difference is that with a preference, you come from a place of self-love and self-acceptance, whereas with domestication you start from a place of shame, guilt, and not being “enough.” The line between these two can be thin sometimes, and a Master of Self is one who can look within and determine his or her true motive. Another popular form of domestication in the current Dream of the Planet revolves around social class and material possessions. There is an underlying belief promulgated by society that those who have the most “stuff” or who hold certain jobs are somehow more important than the rest. I, for one, have never met anyone who was more important than anyone else, as we are all beautiful and unique creations of the Divine. And yet many people pursue career paths they dislike and buy things they don't really want or need all in an effort to achieve the elusive goals of peer acceptance and self-acceptance. Instances such as these (and we can think of many others) are the ways in which domestication leads to self-domestication, and the result is that we have people living lives that aren't their own.

Never sell the promise of tomorrow by the bowl of soup presented today when you are hungry.

Chicken Francese, or lamb chops, or plump spinach gnocchi that she'd roll out by hand and drop into boiling salt water. When her brothers came home for the holidays, she'd spend days in the kitchen, preparing airy latkes and sweet and sour brisket; roast turkey with chestnut stuffing; elaborately iced layer cakes. She'd stay in the kitchen for hours, cooking dish after dish, hoping that all the food would somehow conceal their father's absence; hoping that the meals would take the taste of grief out of their mouths. "After my father died, I think cooking saved me. It was the only thing that made me happy. Everything else felt so out of control. But if I followed a recipe, if I used the right amounts of the right ingredients and did everything I was supposed to do..." She tried to explain it- how repetitive motions of peeling and chopping felt like a meditation, the comfort of knowing that flour and yeast, oil and salt, combined in the correct proportions, would always yield a loaf of bread; the way that making a shopping list could refocus her mind, and how much she enjoyed the smells of fresh rosemary, of roasting chicken or baking cookies, the velvety feel of a ball of dough at the precise moment when it reached its proper elasticity and could be put into an oiled bowl, under a clean cloth, to rise in a warm spot in the kitchen, the same step that her mother's mother's mother would have followed to make the same kind of bread. She liked to watch popovers rising to lofty heights in the oven's heat, blooming out of their tins. She liked the sound of a hearty soup or grain-thickened stew, simmering gently on a low flame, the look of a beautifully set table, with place cards and candles and fine china. All of it pleased her.

It crossed his mind, halfway through the third bowl, that the soup might be drugged, but by then it was too late and he considered the possibility of being drugged worth it just to eat this marvellous soup.

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget. When Lana was finished, the audience clapped, whistled, and stomped, but I sat silent and stunned as she bowed and gracefully withdrew, so disarmed I could not even applaud.

Glenn recounted what he learned from an old lady who, at age 16, gave a Jew a bowl of soup. It was a death sentence at the time and she was sent to Auschwitz: “She said, ‘Glenn, remember, the righteous didn’t suddenly become righteous. They just refused to go over the cliff with everybody else.’ That’s all we have to do: Know what our principles—not our interests—are today. And as the world goes over the cliff, I’m not going to change my principles. Treating human beings, whether they’re like me or not like me, whether they’re the same religion or a different religion, with love and respect.

The much-ballyhooed Internet of Things (what is a smart bin? In my day that was a dog) will see a surge in demand for rare metals, forcing up their price. Combine that with the invention of the brain-computer interface and there will be times when the spare capacity of human consciousness will be a cheaper option for processing and storage. For a nutritious bowl of soup we’ll be plugged in, with a thousand others, running algorithms to more precisely push a new wonder mop to lonely housewives idly googling through a Valium comedown.

Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books. Roman tyrants invented a further refinement. They often provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble, always more readily tempted by the pleasure of eating than by anything else. The most intelligent and understanding amongst them would not have quit his soup bowl to recover the liberty of the Republic of Plato. Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, “Long live the King!” The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them. A man might one day be presented with a sesterce and gorge himself at the public feast, lauding Tiberius and Nero for handsome liberality, who on the morrow, would be forced to abandon his property to their avarice, his children to their lust, his very blood to the cruelty of these magnificent emperors, without offering any more resistance than a stone or a tree stump. The mob has always behaved in this way---eagerly open to bribes that cannot be honorably accepted, and dissolutely callous to degradation and insult that cannot be honorably endured. Nowadays I do not meet anyone who, on hearing mention of Nero, does not shudder at the very name of that hideous monster, that disgusting and vile pestilence. Yet when he died---when this incendiary, this executioner, this savage beast, died as vilely as he had lived---the noble Roman people, mindful of his games and his festivals, were saddened to the point of wearing mourning for him.

Gloria’s Pork Ribs and Red Beans YIELD: 4 SERVINGS BEFORE I MARRIED Gloria, I knew nothing about Caribbean cooking—Puerto Rican or Cuban. She introduced me to many dishes that through the years we have transformed into our own family recipes. When Roland, my brother, came to visit, one of the first dishes that Gloria would prepare for him was pork shoulder ribs with red beans, which she usually serves with rice and onion pilaf. This dish is great when made ahead, and any leftovers can be served with fried eggs for breakfast, a type of huevos rancheros. With the bones removed, it can be puréed into a sturdy, flavorful soup in a food processor. Although dried beans are typically presoaked in water before cooking, this is not necessary if the beans are started in cool water. 2 tablespoons good olive oil 4 shoulder pork chops with the bones or country ribs (about 1½ pounds) 1 pound dried red kidney beans 2 cups fresh diced tomato flesh or 1 can (14¾ ounces) whole Italian tomatoes, with juice 3 cups sliced onions 1½ tablespoons chopped garlic 1 jalapeño pepper (or more or less, depending on your tolerance for “hotness”), finely chopped, with or without the seeds (about 1 tablespoon) 2 bay leaves 1 teaspoon herbes de Provence (available in many supermarkets) or Italian seasoning 6 cups cold water 1½ teaspoons salt 1 small bunch cilantro Cooked rice, for serving (optional) Tabasco hot pepper sauce (optional) Heat the oil in a large saucepan (I like enameled cast iron), add the pork chops or ribs, and sauté gently, turning once, for 15 to 20 minutes or until they are browned on both sides. Meanwhile, sort through the beans and discard any broken or damaged ones and any foreign matter. Rinse the beans in a sieve under cold water. When the chops or ribs are browned, remove them from the heat, and add the tomatoes and their juice, onions, garlic, jala-peño, bay leaves, herbs, and water. Stir in the beans and salt, and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, pull the leaves from the cilantro stems. Chop the stems finely (you should have about ¼ cup), and add them to the beans. Reserve the leaves (you should have about 1 cup loosely packed) for use as a garnish. When the bean mixture is boiling, reduce the heat to low, and boil very gently, covered, for 2 to 2½ hours, or until the beans and pork are very tender. Divide among soup bowls, sprinkle the cilantro leaves on top, and serve with rice, if desired. Pass the Tabasco sauce for those who want added hotness.

I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and crap out a less conceited statement than that one.

One step into a living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life. Half-empty paper coffee cups. Half-eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. This is how I live, I am thinking.

I brought soup just in case you changed your mind. Are the pains easing up at all?” He manfully kept the hopeful note out of his tone. “All the activity must have set them off. They seem to be getting farther apart, and they’re shorter in duration. From all the research I’ve done, that means false labor.” He felt like a man given a reprieve right before a death sentence, but he kept his features expressionless. He wanted her to count on him, and she couldn’t do that if she knew he was petrified of delivering a baby. “Will you try to eat something?” He walked farther into the room and set the tray on the end table. “It might help.” She flashed him a smile that told him he didn’t know what he was talking about, but she picked up the bowl of soup and spoon, sank down in the middle of the bed, tailor fashion, her back against the headboard, and regarded him steadily.

Kimchi Jeon There are many different kinds of Korean pancakes using vegetables, seafood, or meat in Korean cuisine. We call this type of pancake "jeon." Among them, this kimchi pancake snack is one of the most popular Korean pancakes. Today, I want to share some secrets to make really tasty kimchi pancakes with you. When I was little, I used to visit an aunt's house and she made kimchi pancakes for me. I love kimchi pancakes, and her kimchi pancakes were the best ever. She gave me some tips about how to make good kimchi jeon. Some people asked me, why I call some Korean dishes "pancakes," even though they are not sweet, and not even close to the American pancakes that you might be imagining. Another word that could describe Korean pancakes is "fritter" - batter mixed with different kinds of ingredients: vegetables, seafood, meat, and so on. Yield: 1/2 Dozen 8-inch Pancakes Main Ingredients 1 Cup All Purpose Flour 1/3 Frying Mix (or 1/3 Cup All Purpose Flour) 1 Cup Well Fermented Kimchi 1/3 Cup Kimchi Broth 1/4 Cup Milk 1/3 Cup Water 1 Egg 1 1/2 tsp Sugar 1/8 Generous tsp Salt Directions Chop 1 cup of kimchi into 1-inch pieces. The most important tip for delicious kimchi pancakes is using well-fermented kimchi. Sour (old) kimchi works great too. When you cut kimchi on your cutting board, the cutting board will get stained. Here is a tip: Put some wax paper on top of your cutting board before cutting the kimchi. :) In a bowl, add 1 cup of all-purpose flour and 1/3 cup of frying mix. To make the pancakes a little crispier, I like to add some frying mix to the batter. However if you don't have the frying mix or don't want a crispy texture, you can use another 1/3 cup of flour instead. Add 1 1/2 tsp of sugar and a generous 1/8 tsp of salt into the bowl. Mix everything together. Adding some sugar is a secret ingredient from my aunt. Depending on how salty your kimchi is, you might need to adjust the amount of salt. Pour 1/4 cup of milk and 1/3 cup of water into the dried ingredients. Milk is another secret ingredient from her, but if you cannot eat milk or do not have it, you can use another 1/4 cup of water instead. Add 1 egg and 1/3 cup of kimchi broth. Several people have asked, "What is kimchi broth?" While the kimchi is fermenting in the jar, a liquid forms from the fermentation process of the napa cabbage. That is what I call kimchi broth. You can use it for other kimchi dishes such as Kimchi fried rice or kimchi soup, so don't throw away your valuable kimchi broth. It will give these dishes an extra burst of kimchi flavor. Before you add the kimchi to the batter, stir the batter until it doesn't have any chunks and gets a consistency like pancake batter. Add 1 cup of chopped kimchi into the batter. If you don't have enough kimchi broth, you can add a little more water and kimchi to get enough flavor. Mix thoroughly. Oh, it already looks delicious, even without frying. In a non-stick pan, add generous amount of oil. Heat the pan on medium-high. I said generous! =P According to your pan size, get 1 or 2 scoops of batter and pour it into the pan. It is important to spread the batter out thinly for crispy pancakes. ;) When the surface of the pancake starts to cook, flip it over. Pressing the pancake with a spatula helps the pancake fry better and makes it crispier. Occasionally flip the pancake, but not too often. When both sides of the pancakes are nicely brown and crispy, it is done. Again, it is a very simple and delicious dish. You should try this someday, especially if you love kimchi.

Ingredients:   4 whole boneless skinless chicken breasts, cubed 1 box of stuffing mix 1 can of cream of mushroom soup 1/2 cup water 2 celery stalks, diced ½ green pepper, diced     Directions:   Spray slow cooker with Pam. Place chicken breasts at the bottom of the slow cooker. In a separate bowl, mix stuffing, green pepper, celery, soup and water. Pour over chicken. Cook at low for 6 – 8 hours.

The wind chime sounded like a spoon clanging against a cereal bowl, and I was glad I was having soup for breakfast.

When you piss in a cereal bowl and let it cool down to room temperature, it behaves a lot like chicken noodle soup under the same conditions.

...I thought maybe heaven wasn't only in the great big sky with comfy furniture and fireplaces. I figured it lived in small places too, like a bowl of good soup or the folds of an origami crane" -Grace

Cream of Cheat Mushroom Soup (This is one of Edna Ferguson’s recipes and she named it herself.)   2 cups chicken broth 8-ounce package sliced mushrooms (fresh, from the grocery store) with 12 perfect slices reserved for garnish 1 can (10 ¾ ounces) condensed Cream of Chicken Soup (undiluted) 2 cans (10 ¾ ounces each) condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup (undiluted) 1 cup heavy cream 8 oz. shredded Gruyere (or any good Swiss cheese, or even Monterey Jack) ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper   Combine the chicken broth and the package of mushrooms (remember to reserve those 12 perfect slices for the garnish) in a blender. Zoop them up. Add the can of Cream of Chicken soup to the blender. Zoop it all up. Spray the inside of a 4-quart slow cooker with Pam. Add the contents of the blender to the crock-pot. Add the cans of Cream of Mushroom soup to the crock-pot. Stir. Add the heavy cream, shredded cheese, and ground black pepper. Stir again. Cook on LOW for 4 to 5 hours. Ladle into bowls. Sprinkle with parsley and float

Cream of Cheat Mushroom Soup (This is one of Edna Ferguson’s recipes and she named it herself.)   2 cups chicken broth 8-ounce package sliced mushrooms (fresh, from the grocery store) with 12 perfect slices reserved for garnish 1 can (10 ¾ ounces) condensed Cream of Chicken Soup (undiluted) 2 cans (10 ¾ ounces each) condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup (undiluted) 1 cup heavy cream 8 oz. shredded Gruyere (or any good Swiss cheese, or even Monterey Jack) ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper   Combine the chicken broth and the package of mushrooms (remember to reserve those 12 perfect slices for the garnish) in a blender. Zoop them up. Add the can of Cream of Chicken soup to the blender. Zoop it all up. Spray the inside of a 4-quart slow cooker with Pam. Add the contents of the blender to the crock-pot. Add the cans of Cream of Mushroom soup to the crock-pot. Stir. Add the heavy cream, shredded cheese, and ground black pepper. Stir again. Cook on LOW for 4 to 5 hours. Ladle into bowls. Sprinkle with parsley and float several mushroom slices on top as a garnish. Irma York tested this recipe. She couldn’t write down how many cups it makes because her husband, Gus, kept sneaking it out of her slow cooker.

You ask him to pass the salt, he gives you a bowl of soup. Because you know what, soup is better. Abed is better. You are all better than you think you are.

BROWN RICE TORTILLAS Phase 2 Elimination This is one of the most popular recipes from our blog, NourishingMeals.com. Use these tortillas to make Black Bean, Yam, and Avocado Tacos (here) or Pomegranate Chicken Tacos (here). You can also serve them alongside your favorite soup or stew for dipping. They are soft and pliable when warm, but straight out of the fridge, like most gluten-free tortillas, they will crack. All you need to do to make them pliable again is to place one on a wire rack over a pot of simmering water and steam for 30 seconds on each side. I use an 8-inch cast-iron tortilla press to get them super thin, and then cook them in a cast-iron pan. 1¼ cups brown rice flour or sprouted brown rice flour ¾ cup arrowroot powder or tapioca flour ½ teaspoon sea salt 1 cup boiling water virgin coconut oil for cooking In a small mixing bowl, whisk together the brown rice flour, arrowroot, and salt. Add the boiling water and quickly mix with a fork. Knead the dough a few times to form a ball. It should have the texture of Play-Doh. If it is too wet and sticky, add more flour. If it is too dry, add a little more boiling water. Heat a 10-inch cast-iron skillet over medium heat. Divide the dough into six to eight equal-size balls. Place a piece of parchment paper on the bottom of a tortilla press, then place one of the balls in the center and cover with a second sheet of parchment. Press to form a thin, round tortilla. Add about 1 teaspoon coconut oil to the hot skillet. Gently remove the parchment paper and place the tortilla in the hot skillet. Cook for 2 minutes on each side. Repeat with the remaining dough, adding more coconut oil to the skillet each time. Place the cooked tortillas on a plate with another plate flipped over on top of it to keep them warm and soft. Let them sit for about 20 minutes inside the plates; this way, they will be nice and pliable for serving. Yield: 6 to 8 tortillas

brown on the bottom and cook the other side until it is golden brown. Serve hot. I love to serve these with big steaming bowls of soup on a cold night. Enjoy!