I’ve done it and I am the first to admit that I rarely
get away with it…. I like to hide the leftovers in my homemade soups. A boiled potato here, a few diced tomatoes there and maybe if I am lucky the green beans from two days ago. But never, never does it go without comment.
“Hmm…err mom, I think this looks familiar.” Busted!
I feign innocence but I do not have a God-given poker face. They know I’m trying to be tricky but do they really know I am just trying to save that little potato? Wouldn’t it be better to be eaten as part of a cozy heartwarming soup than to be tossed aside, useless, in a trash bin?
I actually know women who open their refrigerator doors on Friday mornings and dump each and every leftover from the week’s nightly dinners into a pot and serve it to their family as Friday night’s “Surprise!” supper. They don’t even pretend it’s not leftovers, they hold these dinners as a sign of their homemaker thriftiness. The fact that their families eat these concoctions, usually under the threat of starving children in foreign lands, is completely beside the point.
There is also the problem that if
the soup or chowder is actually good, it can never
be recreated, as one would not know the actual contents of the soup to begin with.
This chowder recipe seems to have started out as a “dump soup” experiment, as the ingredients are varied and interesting but some intelligent person took the time to measure and write as she dumped to make sure each chowder could be recreated and delicious every time. Enjoy!
A first-rate soup is more
creative than a second-rate
painting.
Abraham Maslow
Taste of Home columnist Sandy (Anderson) Holthaus lives on an alpaca farm in South Haven, MN
with her husband, Michael, and their children Zoe, Jack and Ben. Her heart remains on the North
Shore where she grew up with her parents, Art and LaVonne Anderson of Schroeder. She enjoys
writing about her childhood and mixes memories with delicious helpings of home-style recipes.
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