Creamy Red Onion Soup, Truffles Optional

It’s soup season here in Umbria. Chilly days, wind and rain all mean it’s time to get out the soup pot.
Soup doesn’t have to be a long drawn out, multi-hour event. You can make this creamy red onion soup in about half an hour. That’s about the time it takes for you to realize you are hungry and to have soup in your bowl.

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Garden Soup

It’s takes about six months to make this soup. Start in the spring. Eat in the fall.

Step 1: In the spring, plant tomatoes, basil, parsley, leeks, carrots, zucchini, and maybe some onions.

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Mussel Soup with Lemon Saffron Aioli

Fish soups are called ‘brodetto’ in Italy and every Adriatic coastal town has their own version. I don’t live near the coast, I like the French Provencal style of fish soup and I don’t have to play by the rules, so here is Brodetto di Montone.

Warning: it is messy to make, it takes time, the words slow, fast and easy do not appear anywhere within this recipe. However, the words delicious and worth the effort do appear.

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Cream of Cauliflower Soup with Truffles

While summer vegetables get all the gushing praise and glossy photos, what of the lowly winter vegetables? To me, they are every bit as wonderful: all the root vegetables, leeks, cardoons, artichokes, bitter greens, they all lend themselves to hearty preparations. And now is the season of the cauliflower in all its glory. We love…

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Montone Weather Report: Soup

The local weather reports tend to be practical. None of that barometric pressure stuff, these reports are practical: wear short sleeves today, or bring an umbrella with you in the afternoon. So here's my weather report for today in Montone: eat soup. Its' drizzly, chilly and perfect weather for a bowl of every vegetable in…

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Making Soup

I could eat soup every day. And in these days of economic austerity, soup is a good choice. It’s certainly flexible: cheap, peasant, elegant, rustic, you name it and there will be a soup recipe that fits the description. Recently I’ve been on a tomato soup kick. Hell, Campbell’s made an entire empire out of…

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Philosophy of Soup

For all of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s soup season. For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere…. I hope you are enjoying yourselves! Most people, when they think of homemade soup, they think it takes days or many hours or chicken stock, or any number of reasons why they can’t make soup. But,…

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