Mom’s Soup
Picture yourself sitting on the couch during the cold winter months. Snow is covering every of the outside world for as far as you can see. The sky is gray and everyone around you is glum.
You slide as close to the fireplace as you can and wrap yourself into a blanket burrito. However, this isn’t enough to warm your soul. The heat of the fire and the comfort of the blankets cant lift your spirit.
What you truly desire is a large, hearty bowl of chicken soup. The cure-all for any illness and a bowl full of palatable happiness. Despite the gray scenery of your life at the time, the first taste of chicken soup brings instant light to the world around you. However, this culinary happiness does not appear magically.
Unfortunately most people haven’t experienced the level of joy that I have when I taste my mother’s homemade chicken soup. Tasting her soup for the first time is like taking a vacation to heaven. I’ve never eaten anything as heart warming as the magic concoction my mother brews on the most frigid winter days. Her chicken soup makes your taste buds happy and keeps your stomach craving for more.
The process of making her soup is intriguing. It takes hours of cooking and preparation time to make sure she gets it perfect. And she does…every time. Not only does the soup taste good, it looks and smells phenomenal. She starts by cutting a wide assortment of vegetable such as carrots and celery. She then continues with her chicken prep. The chicken is seasoned, tossed into the crock pot and shredded. While she is waiting for the chicken to cook she begins the process of making matzah balls which will also be tossed into the soup. Once her prep is complete, she begins to combine all of the elements together in a large pot that already has over a gallon of water and chicken broth boiling. Over the course of the next few hours, the vegetables, matzah balls, and chicken start to bind and cook together. During the cooking process, the inviting aroma of the soup lingers around the house, teasing your senses. I could eat this soup every day for every meal. The contents of the mixture have the perfect texture and consistency. However, no one flavor is overwhelming to the others. Despite my wishes for endless soup, my mother only makes it every now and again. When she does make it, the soup hardly lasts a couple hours before someone eats it all. My mother learned to make her soup from her mother and has shared the recipe with friends and other family members. However, no one comes close to making it as perfectly as she does.
My mother’s soup is not something you can pour out of a can. It is not something you can order off a menu. It isn’t something you can ask your own mother to make.
Her soup is made with the special ingredient of love- an ingredient that changes from mother to mother and soup to soup. Her soup makes the season and outside temperature irrelevant.
The special blend could take anyone to their happy place and make them forget the world around. This soup is truly one of a kind. My wish for the world is that one day everyone can experience this culinary phenomenon.
