Thinking Allowed: Soup Week

While I have always had a certain fondness for soup, not all of my children share my feelings. Sophia has a soup heart like me and has always eagerly encouraged any soup making whims. It isn't that the other girls don't like soup. They just really really like certain kinds of soups (rather than soup in general) and feel it is a decent meal at most once a week. Which is fair enough as although for many families soup is an accompaniment, generally when I make soup it is the entire meal. If a bowl of soup is not filling enough then a second bowl can be had. Aurora especially loves to moan when I talk about how wonderful soup is and show her images of all the soups we could be eating. I really wanted to win her over to the soup club and have been toying with the idea of a soup based menu for awhile. Aurora is passionate about bread so I figured if I built up the concept of what bread would best pair with what soup then it might be of interest. At first when I proposed a whole week of soup dinners Aurora sort of gave me a look of exasperation. Sure enough though when I started talking about bread and we sat down to look at soup recipes her excitement grew.

Soup week was a great hit with the whole family. I sort of can't believe how much we all enjoyed the menu. It helped that I made sure not top make any soups I figured the girls wouldn't like. Tova was particularly gushy over her compliments of the soups each evening and took pleasure in illustrating our menu for us. The soup we were most excited by - fennel - gave us the most headaches. I scoured so many shops for fresh fennel to the point where I was having nightmares of searching for fennel. With my nightmares turning into reality, I was forced into an alternate plan. Miraculously, once I went out to shop for a simpler potato leek soup the grocery store across the street had fennel! We all cheered as we were excited to taste the soup, alas, we were all underwhelmed by the actual soup. The German bakery, provider of the telltale dark rye, decided to close for the week (shops here seem to never think twice over shutting for a few days if work is infringing on fun) so we had to make do with the darkest bread we could find elsewhere. Aurora got to make Naan for the first time. Tova got to make onigiri she's been dreaming of making since leaving Japan. We got to fill our freezer with a few leftover containers of soup. And best of all the kids all seem to have a renewed sense of pleasure and praise of soup. Tova even went so far as to say we should just run soup week on repeat.