i remember one time, when my dad and i went to the store to pick up the ingredients for this soup, the one he always used to make us when the weather changed and we started to feel it a bit, he told me to eat turnips, always. my eyes rolled into the back of my head whenever my dad would say something so ridiculous. “they clean your blood,” he said, “they make you feel good.” and you know what i know now? they do.
so, i’m feeling this cool weather, my lips are dry and my throat is, too. here’s what i do:
start about a cup and a half of brown rice (or any grain) soaking in a bowl of water.
preheat a big pot over medium-low heat while you chop an onion. drop it in with some olive oil then get to work washing and chopping a leek (choose leeks with long, white stems). add the leek and stir every once in awhile as you wash and chop your greens.
the easiest way to wash a bunch of greens is to fill the sink (or a big pot) with water, drop them all in and swish them about. all of the dirt sinks to the bottom! the greens i usually use for sick soup are swiss chard, turnip greens (if you’ve got turnips with the greens, that is) and flat leaf (also called italian) parsley. you could use spinach and cilantro, though, it really doesn’t matter. use whatever is fresh and abundant.
chop the greens (after taking the parsley or cilantro leaves off the stem), add them to the onions and leeks, put a generous amount of turmeric in with them, and watch them cook down while you set the kettle to boil.
add the boiling water to the greens, add the soaking rice and a couple of cubed turnips, cover, and let the whole thing cook on low for an hour or so. at this point, add some cubed potatoes and chunks of carrots, salt and pepper to taste, and let continue cooking ten minutes or so.
serve this soup with lots of lemon juice (essential to help your body absorb the iron in the greens, right?) and a large dollop of yogurt.
the first weekend that bradley and i spent together in san francisco (a year, a thousand miles, and over 500 emails away from our first meeting in a sacramento record store), we lived off nothing but knob creek and nicotine for two days. sunday night we ate our first meal together: sick soup that i had in the freezer. i guess that in all those e-mails and phone conversations we’d used to get to know each other, i never did tell him how i was with food.
he found out that night. two days of not eating or sleeping, the emotional intensity of our first meeting, the warmth of sick soup and its goodness… it isn’t any wonder that i broke down that night, smiling and crying at the same time, and told bradley about the waking vision i’d just had while we stared at each other after dinner. i had seen flashes of myself in a variety of different futures, as a teacher, a mother, an old woman, a homemaker, a professional. in every situation, i had been perfectly content, a radiantly beautiful woman. all of a sudden i realized, and exclaimed to him, “i am going to have a happy life.” ahh, sick soup.
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