One of the soups that I remember fondly from my childhood is the Sorrel Soup with a hard-boiled egg. Sorrel, also known as, Spinach Dock, is a leafy garden vegetable, cultivated across Eastern Europe and mostly used in soups and sauces. It resembles spinach but is much more acidic in taste. I have never seen sorrel in any of the stores in the West, but maybe only because I wasn’t paying attention. The other day, though, when I was leafing through an old issue of my German food porn, I saw the recipe and the accompanying luscious photo of the cream of spinach soup with a boiled egg. The yummy memories of sorrel soup came back to me in waves, and since I couldn’t find sorrel in the supermarket (I will now be on the lookout), I decided to make the spinach soup version. Although I am not a huge spinach fan (correction, I like it raw, but not cooked), it seemed like this soup had it drowning in white wine and cream anyway, and how could that ever be a bad thing? After I made the soup, it turned out that I was very right, wine and cream can do no wrong. This spinach soup must be one of the tastiest soups I ever made, it is very rich but at the same time, it is extremely satisfying. It sounds weird but when I eat this soup, I feel like it satiates some primal, deep-seated hunger in me.
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The first sentence of Chuck Klosterman’s great novel Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs reads: No woman will ever satisfy me. That pretty much sums up my feelings toward salads. You see, I do not come from a salad-eating culture… we, Poles, have always been the potato, vodka and kielbasa people, not green salad people. And although I’ve lived in America for a while, where salads are considered meals in themselves, eating a salad has always felt weird to me. It’s not only that it made me feel like I’m a cow, chewing on a handful of grass, with pieces invariably sticking in all possible directions, refusing to fit in my mouth all at once, falling down and sprinkling me with dressing… no, that’s not the only thing. What made me most uncomfortable about eating salads is that I always felt like a fraud. I would order a salad because I’d be in a healthy mood but what I secretly wanted to eat was bacon. Halfway through my salad, I didn’t feel like finishing it or being healthy anymore, I only felt like stabbing myself in the eye. I finally came to peace with salad eating when I discovered that I do like salads when they incorporate some of my favorite foods and if they have a tasty dressing. The below is a very simple salad which fulfills these criteria beautifully, plus… it contains bacon.
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