"vegetable soup" news and stories

• The first Israeli pork cookbook has been published. Rabbis (and pigs) everywhere protest.
• How would your kitchen fare in a health inspection?
• Fall's vegetable harvest is begging you to make this soup.
• Ça Va Todd English has a comfortable bar with decent wine. The food? Um....
• Baltimore may conjure up images of crabcakes, but fried lake trout is "the dish that working-class Baltimore craves."

To repeat an often used phrase, soup is good food. Especially this time of year, when soup warms the body, soul, and can be good if you're watching what you eat too.

January is National Soup Month, so that's a good opportunity to link to some great soup recipes, like this one for Chicken Noodle Soup over at Yahoo (though I never put onion in mine!). Food & Wine has this recipe for Sausage and Mushroom Soup, and Alton Brown has this one for Garden Vegetable Soup. Of course, there are so many soup recipes that there are usually entire sections devoted to soup, including this one over at AllRecipes.

And yes, Hobo Soup is real.

• How to bake like a pro, from Bon Appetit writer Dorie Greenspan. Includes recipes for Espresso Chocolate Shortbread Cookies and Swedish Visiting Cake.
• Healthy pancakes can taste good. Check out these Orange Cloud Pancakes.
• Boston's Ritz-Carlton has closed, to be replaced by the Taj Boston. Will they serve the Ritz Fizz there?
• How to make a better vegetable soup.
• What should the Top Chef contestants have made for the "seven deadly sins" challenge?
• This week's recipes: Green Bean and Mushroom Salad; Chicken Fried Rice; Biscuits and Eggs; Lentil Soup; and Banana Pudding.

I had a very long relationship with cauliflower. A whole head lasts one person (sometimes two) a long time, so I had to get creative. I didn't want to eat roasted curried cauliflower every night, no matter how good it was.

Cauliflower soup was an easy bet. Simply steam the florets along with whole cloves of garlic (I used four cloves and a half head of cauliflower) until the florets are impossibly soft. Puree in a food processor with the garlic, adding the steaming liquid to thin it out. You can also use about a ½ c. chicken stock or heavy cream, but I was trying to keep it as vegetarian as possible. The cauliflower on its own was flavorful enough for me. I thought about using a little bit of soy milk or silken tofu to the puree, but didn't want to interrupt the flavor of the cauliflower (though the garlic did that all by itself).

The garlic garnish are simply thin slices that fried about 45 seconds on each side in a little bit of olive oil. The soup tasted hot and cold.