Make Soup While the Garden Grows

Sister Grace's garden is in full bloom. The cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli bunches, celery stalks, dill weed, leeks, beets and onions are all begging to be picked. NINETY-FOUR tomato plants are gearing up to explode with tomatoes. Fortunately, Matt brought home a chest freezer from a job site. It's full of bolts of bag fabric now, but not for long. Sister reminded him yesterday to get Maggie's freezer plugged in. That requires hauling all the fabric up to the barn and somehow clearing a path through all my life's belongings to a plug in the tractor shed. The work will be worth it, as I am planning on making soup. I was raised on home made soup. My hard working mother would make big pots of soup that we would live on when she went off to her nursing job. I know now that a lot of it was canned when her garden was not in season, but it always tasted like something from home. I love making soup. All that chopping (no food processor, Mia gave me one but I use it for hand cream) by hand, frying the onions in olive oil first, all those wonderful aromas and textures and colors...hmmmmm, makes me feel good just to think about it. It's wonderful to come home from a long day at work and empty a frozen block of nutritious soup into a pot and there's dinner. Matt isn't crazy about soup for dinner, but what can I say? It's a hard life. My soup is chunky and hearty, but I think I gave him too much of it when we were first married. You have to understand, my husband, as wonderful as he is, is a real Blue Collar Male Chauvanist Pig. Women exist to please a man, in any and every way possible. When he comes home from work, and he works very hard, he sits on the sofa and waits for his "hot meal," which I dutifully place in front of him. It often takes me a half hour of jumping around to get it together, but he sits, staring straight ahead at the television, waiting. I put it down, fix the flatware, napkin and drink and stand back. Does he look me in the eye and say thanks? No...but we are still in training. My mother would say, "I don't HEAR anything!!!" And we would all chime in with hmmmm, yummy, good, but we knew if we didn't hoot and holler we would starve. I say, "Honey? Honey? What do you think, is it okay?" He may wait a few seconds, like he's not sure he's hearing anything, then turn his head and say, yeah, it's fine." I passed for another night. But when it's SOUP, I don't get much of a response at all. Soup just is not a real meal. There's no hunk of steaming meat, with buttery potatoes running over with sour cream, a pile of creamed corn, etc. Heart attack on a plate. Matt gets plenty of hearty manly meals, and makes up for his lack of enthusiasm for soup in many, many other ways. You see, I've had this situation before, and I know food is not everything in a marriage. My former husband, and it's not often you will hear me say anything about my "former life" because I can't even give him enough credit to refer to him as a husband, was even worse. And he was no where near Blue Collar. I cooked incredible, fantastic meals, which he was rarely there to eat, and he was adamant about the fact that he should not have to say anything at ALL about my efforts when he came home for dinner. We would "discuss" it with high priced marriage therapists and he would state matter of factly that he didn't think he should have to comment at all on a meal I prepared for him. At the time, it wasn't in my make up NOT to cook for my family. After all I had the children to feed. So fast forward a few years and he is married to a woman who doesn't cook. People would tell me their refrigerator had nothing in it but catsup, mustard and club soda. I would say, so, he finally got what he wanted. They even brought in a live-in to stay with the kids so they could go out and eat. The heartbreaking result of a home with no food was a pretty little girl who had to be given a hundred thousand dollars worth of growth hormones because she didn't grow. That's child abuse. I'm going to make some soup...