"soups" news and stories

You can't talk about cold soups without talking tomatoes. Garden-fresh gazpacho is the go-to soup for summer. If you roast the tomatoes, as in this Kitchen Daily recipe, you'll add depth of flavor. On the sweeter side, though, is a chilled soup of yellow tomatoes blended with sweet yellow peppers and banana peppers, along with garlic and herbs.

Blogger Chiot's Run not only makes tomato soup, she cans it, along with pickles and sauerkraut. (See her recipes here). On a cold winter's day, to taste the tomatoes of summer (not the bland hothouse stuff that's around then), is a gift. So if you're ready to boil the Ball jars, and set up a canning operation, go for it (and check out Eugenia Bone's how-to book Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods). And for pickling, you can't beat Chris Schlesinger, John Willoughby, and Dan George's Quick Pickles: Easy Recipes for Big Flavor.

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Soup knows how to chill in August. You just have to give it half a chance. So for the next four days we're going to feature a few cold soups you may want to put in rotation when the garden is giving and the temperatures hit their peak.

Carrot and ginger are a good team, on the order of, say, Fred and Ginger, and this soup, from photographer bsmccoy and a recipe from Guy Fieri, spices it up with garlic, thyme and black pepper. But it also has a mellow side, with yogurt and honey. He uses a chicken or vegetable stock as a base, and a potato to give it more heft.

On the flip side, this Kitchen Daily recipe for chilled creamy carrot-ginger soup keeps it simple, made with little more than the two main components plus buttermilk, water and salt. Either way, you'll have the sunniest-looking soup around, the better to keep you cool.

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Barbecue ribs. Photo: biskuit, Flickr.

Oktoberfests are ubiquitous this month. For those not interested in the chug-a-thons and oompah bands, check out this list of alternative options.

Dixon Lambtown USA, Dixon, Calif., Oct. 3: Break out the mint jelly! Attendees can participate in such culinary slugfests as the National Lamb Ribs Eating Contest and Barbecue Cook-Off, not to mention a shearing competition and sheepdog trials. For the kiddies, there's Mutton Bustin' -- a buckin' bronco bruising of the woolly kind.

The Food Network New York City Wine and Food Festival, New York, Oct. 8-11: Hosted by and benefiting the Food Bank for New York City and Share Our Strength, this festival brings the toque and the home cook together. Everyone from sous chefs to casserole queens can attend wine seminars, recipe-creation panels and cooking demonstrations. For the kiddie cook, check out the Kids Get Cooking! series. Your favorite celebrity TV chefs will be there, en masse, including Ming Tsai, Paula Deen, Rachael Ray and Anthony Bourdain, as well as culinary heavyweights such as Sue Torres, Marcus Samuelsson, Odette Fada, Daniel Boulud and David Chang.

When making a beef or vegetarian soup and stew, there are some main ingredients that can create a meaty taste while stimulating the tongue's taste receptors.

For years I considered soup making a rewarding, but time-intensive process. This is mainly because I grew up watching my mother make her insanely good turkey noodle soup after Thanksgiving -- one that involved a lot of carcass simmering, cooling, and straining before adding the bite-sized new ingredients. But then I learned the simplicity and value in an easy afternoon soup.

Once, on a particularly bad day, I spent a few hours in the kitchen with my grandfather. He was making barley soup with just a handful of leftover ingredients. The relaxed ease of the recipe, and the act of sitting there and smelling the soup simmer, was just about the most calming and enjoyable experience that I have ever had in a kitchen. It is easy to make a fresh pot of soup, and it really doesn't take a lot of time. You can set something up to simmer and run other errands, you can sit nearby and read a book, or you can take a moment to reconnect with someone, as I did.

Obviously, then, I was immediately attracted to Smitten Kitchen's latest recipe -- a ridiculously easy Beef, Leek, and Barley Soup. This is the sort of soup that makes the new, biting cold wind of the changing season a bit more bearable, and one that offers so much more than merely opening a can and filling yourself with calories. It's an experience that warms the senses and makes the impending months just a little warmer.