So the story goes, a group of soldiers, trudging home after the Napoleonic Wars (or, pick your war – soldiers always end up trudging home when it’s over, no matter who wins), walked into a village and asked for food. “We are starving here already, “ the villagers answered, “Soldiers like you stole all our food and left us nothing; begone!”

The soldiers looked at one another and reaching into one of their packs, one of them pulled out a bag and a big pot. “Well, it’s too late for us to move on; we’ll just make stone soup.” One of the other soldiers took the pot to a nearby stream for water while the others made a good fire. The villagers hovered nearby; intrigued by the thought that soup could be made from a stone.

“You know,” one of the solders was heard to say, “I once had stone soup where they’d added cabbage – it really does a lot for soup.”

One of the other soldiers said, “Yes, that is right – a cabbage is a wonderful addition – but I once had stone soup where just a little bit of salted meat was added – much better than with cabbage, in my opinion.”

A third solder replied, “Well, the very best stone soup I ever had was when we found a carrot and a couple of potatoes. Now THAT was soup that even Napoleon would eat with relish.”

The villagers were amazed. One carrot? A few potatoes? A cabbage? Soup fit for the Emperor? This they had to see and one by one, they stole away to their hiding places and brought out bits of this and that to give the solders for the pot which produced, interestingly enough, wonderful delicious soup and enough for everyone in the village. The next morning they pooled all the money they had and offered to buy the stone for the village, but the soldiers refused, saying, “You already have the stone right here – it’s just a stone. It’s all the little bits and pieces that were put together which made the wonderful soup. You can make it any time you want.”

And they marched away, leaving the villagers to divide up the leftovers.

Soup (which is basically edible stuff cooked up in a lot of liquid, which is distinguished from stew, where it’s edible stuff cooked up in a lot LESS liquid) was probably one of the first ‘dishes’ created by human beings once some sort of waterproof container was devised. There is nothing like eating a hot bowl of soup (though there are chilled soups as well) to warm you on the inside while you are trying to warm yourself on the outside.

It snowed twice this week at Chez Siberia and I can tell you that our minds were definitely hovering around making soup. We are not fans of commercial soups at this house – the amount of sodium in them is heart-stoppingly shocking. Although we do keep low salt beef and chicken broth on the shelves as helpers, we take a hard look at any commercial broth in terms of the amount of sodium it has.

I did not have time or inclination to go out shopping today to make soup, so I decided to do ‘clean the fridge’ soup. In said fridge, I found: the decidedly lonely end of some celery, some left over cooked turkey and cooked meat of some sort plus a couple of down on their luck kohlrabis. In the bin, I always have onions and I went out to the garden and dug up a huge carrot. On the shelf, I had a can of garbanzo beans (somehow, we ran out of black beans, which would have been my first choice, but garbanzos it is), and some canned low-sodium beef broth and lots and lots of home canned tomatoes.

If you examine this list, you will see one common element: strong flavors. If there is one thing no one at our table will eat, it is soup that has wimpy flavor. Now, all of these things (ok, I admit that having kohlrabis in the fridge is a Chez Siberia thing because we grow them in the garden, but anything from the cabbage family with a strong flavor would do: kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts…) are relatively accessible and any cook worth his or her frying pan should have them in the fridge and the shelf (you DO have them, right? If not, it’s time to put $5.00 in your wallet just for staples and every week when you go grocery shopping, pick up a few things to stock up). That way, you can whip up a pot of soup to feed a crowd whenever you need to.

So, here are the basic directions:

Clean The Fridge Soup

Equipment: knife, chopping board, dutch oven with a lid or other big pot with a lid.

Ingredients:

• A little olive oil to sauté the veggies in – use the light colored one.
• Veggies – as many and as much as you’ve got in the fridge – make sure two choices are onions and celery. Coarsely chop.
• Liquid base: If all you have is low salt chicken or beef broth, use that. I used a quart jar of home canned tomatoes and one can of low salt beef broth.
• Meat: Whatever leftovers you have in the fridge. I don’t care if what you have is chili, hamburgers, breakfast sausage, Italian sausage, Chorizo sausage (sausage sausage?), cooked turkey or chicken, left over roast — anything. Whatever you have, chop it up. The stronger the flavor, the better the soup. If you have the sort of roast with a bone in it, put that in and cook along with everything else and take it out when you are done.

How To:

1. Put the pot on the stove on a low heat with a couple of table spoons of olive oil. Throw in the chunked up meat and veggies, stir it around, cover and turn down the heat to low. If you have a bone from a roast, put that in too.
2. Stir occasionally until the veggies are limp.
3. Put in the liquid soup base and stir. Raise the heat to medium until it starts to bubble, turn down to simmer.
4. Simmer until it is hot and all the veggies are nice and soft – carrots, turnips and kohlrabi take a while. If you put in a bone, pull that out now.
5. Taste. If it tastes a little bit flat, put in a teensy (like a couple of shakes..no more) of salt or a half-teaspoon of light soy sauce. That should perk it up a bit and does not add an appreciable amount of sodium to a whole pot of soup. If it still needs a little bit of oomph, put in up to one quarter teaspoon of pepper (white, black or hand ground) to the pot.

If you want to and have left over pasta or rice in the fridge, throw that in the pot now and bring back to a simmer and serve.

Additions: it does no harm to serve this with salad and some form of bread.