Steakhouse Soup
Ironically, I used to be a vegetarian. Three times, in fact. The first time was during high school, when I was experimenting with trends like any teenager. It lasted until I got tired of not being able to eat what my mom put on the table at dinnertime. The second was during college, when I was trying to be “environmentally-minded” (I’d read Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet, which advocates vegetarianism because plants use less land and yield more volume). It lasted until I became a little more widely read, and realized that the problem was not meat itself, but the industrialization of the meat industry. The third time was just two years ago, after reading a book called Eat Right for Your Type (type being blood type). It ended when I was told that processed soy products were not doing my hormone levels any good. And, well, if you can’t eat meat replacements like soy burgers, soy hot dogs, soy sausage and so on, you’re going to struggle to get complete proteins.
I still eat edamame (raw soybeans), tempeh and tofu (both of which are fermented, and do not contain all the extra isoflavones that can negatively affect women’s health), but I couldn’t get by eating those at every meal. So about a year ago, I returned to eating meat. And the thing is, I never stopped loving it – I just stopped eating it for a while, three times in my life.
Interestingly enough, I stopped being a vegetarian for the third time just a few months before meeting Eli, and we joke that it’s a good thing I was done with that, or we would have been in food conflict from the very beginning. He’s definitely “meat and potatoes,” the kind of guy who, if served a fully vegetarian meal, would ask if that was all he was getting for dinner.
I am deliberately picky about the meat I consume, though. Eric Schlosser’s amazing book Fast Food Nation (don’t bother with the movie – it was terrible) educated me about modern industrialized animal husbandry, and I have been moving away from industrial animal products ever since. I eat venison Eli has shot himself, chicken my parents raise, pastured beef, pork, and eggs from local farms, and I lease part of a local cow share in order to have organic, raw milk. I do buy the occasional conventional meat product from the grocery store, but as I’m finding more and more local resources for organic, pastured, hormone- and antibiotic-free animal products, I’m buying less and less of the conventional stuff.
The recipe below is as un-vegetarian as a recipe can be. It’s quintessential meat and potatoes. I first had this soup at my friend Amanda’s house, and after the very first bite, I thought, “Eli will love this.” It’s incredibly simple, can be done on top of the stove or in the crock pot, can be doubled or tripled to feed a crowd, and is perfect served with a salad and some bread on the side. The flavor is truly “steakhouse,” and rightly so, as it’s achieved mainly by adding steak sauce to the broth. Chili powder and garlic add additional zip. The Yukon Gold potatoes are key, as they’re waxy rather than mealy, and won’t fall apart while they’re cooking or leach starch into the broth. Plus, they have phenomenal flavor themselves.
Steakhouse Soup
