“Soup”

I want to commend to you, with tears even, the sublime serrendipity to adding, after gently sweating an onion, a carrot and a little garlic together in a smooth golden elixir of oil, a great fat section of pork–it doesn't matter what cut, it's hard to tell what it is when you dig it out from the very back of your second freezer–and cover it with water and a little powdered stock, and boil it for two days, and then, and this is the serendipitous part, you open a tin (heheheheh, that's my motto for the new year, “And then we opened a tin”), two tins actually, of white beans, and add the contents to your boiling cauldron. And then you dig out some cabbage and whack it into great big sections and arrange it around the pork and put the lid on, and let it cook for another two hours. It's the cabbage, you see, and the white bean, and the pork. The three come together in this most extraordinary unity of rich, unctuous…hang on, I need to go find a thesaurus…gosh, my dictionary app suggests the use of the word 'Soup'. Well, I mean, yes. I ate mine out of the bowl, with a spoon, but Soup is a poor shadowy word for the contents of this pot. But I've left out a fourth element. You might have had a bag or red potatoes sitting on a shelf in your garage. And with a red potatoe you would normally want to take the trouble to peel it and boil it and mash it with a little butter and a modicum of cream. But you didn't have this pot of pork and cabbage and white bean bubbling for two days because you had time to peel a potato. No, you've had a long school day. You just wrap the potatoes in a little tinfoil and shove them into the oven. And when you pull them out, a while later, and cut them open and lather them with butter, and pour golden steaming pork laden Soup all over them, you have practically ascended into the heavenly realm.

And then you let the children clean the kitchen and you quickly go to bed before the State of the Union because you can't conceive of ruining your warm, cozy evening.