Five Ingredient Soup for the Soul

And a dive into modular eating + maximizing your bones

My week was a mother fucker, and the only way out of it was soup.

When I started cooking, I was not really thinking I’d end up doing so for a living - I was getting sober, missing my mother, and trying my best to recreate recipes from my childhood. I lived in a horrorshow of an apartment in Detroit, had a bizarre (but wonderful) roommate named Steve, no heat most days and an elderly downstairs neighbor I had to rescue from falling in her shower more than once. Some pretty life altering things happened to me in this apartment - I got an abortion, I bought my first couch, I got sober, and I learned how to make this soup. At different times, different things felt like the canon event, but I’m learning the time I spent in this cold, drafty apartment was some of the most foundational suffering of my adult life - and as a child of the USSR, we consider suffering as a necessary toughening of one’s character. Or something like that.

My life in this apartment was pretty routine - I would go to my dead end barbacking job, ride my bicycle home, put on many layers of fleece, and sit on my bed, longing for some sense of comfort. During the day, I’d find a recording from my local Buddhist temple, bundle up and walk for miles. This is how I got sober, and I think it was in that particular post-walk hunger that I started phantom smelling my mother’s cooking. I had no idea how to cook at this point - I knew about steaming vegetables, making pasta and that’s about it. But I’d be sitting at the little kitchen table and suddenly - a waft of borscht, lamb fat, saffron frying in butter - my entire mind was consumed with the recreation of some of this food.

There is not a source on the internet for the food cooked by a woman who was born in Azerbaijan, persecuted by the Soviet Union, living in Leningrad and then coming to America, pregnant as hell and doing her best to source our ingredients at the middle eastern market - a woman fluent in sumac and dill horrified by rose water and cilantro at the Arabic grocery. I remember the delight my parents shared when they’d find a familiar treat - a dried apricot “the right color”, lavash thin enough to tear under the butter knife, black rye bread that smelled like home. I never had the opportunity to see my homeland of Baku, Azerbaijan, and sure, I missed the authenticity of those markets - but this was my portal, and I was transfixed.

There were a few foods I’d think about more often than not - my ma’s golubtsi - cabbage stuffed with minced meat and herb stems, cooked low and slow with quince and canned tomatoes, saffron plov flipped upside down with precision, and this soup - simple as all hell but all day and full of technique. The lamb (or sometimes beef) must be fall off the bone tender, the chickpeas peeled, the broth clear and the potato soft like butter. As I get older, I lose a lot of memories of my mother - but days spent peeling garbanzo beans while lamb fat steams up our kitchen are vivid to me.

I think a lot of food preparation techniques which appeal to the masses right now are rooted in French and Italian techniques - sear, deglaze, braise, add wine, more more more. Don’t get me wrong - I love that shit. But there’s more out there - and you can make the toughest cut of lamb turn into jello with water, salt and a little heat for a long time. I don’t think anything on earth tastes better than this soup, and of course, I’ve got emotional truth wrapped up in that - but I think you should try it, and you should keep the modular nature in mind:

meat on bone + onion + water = stock

stock + bean or grain + vegetable = soup

Do not buy premade stock. You don’t have to, and it’s a colossal waste of your money for boiled onion peels and a fuck ton of salt. You do have time to make your own, because it’s passive, and you can freeze it. You better not let me find out you’re buying bone broth - and if you want a post on that, I’m happy to oblige.

This recipe isn’t even really a recipe - it’s just five things cooked separately and then together. We fill the equation here with bone in lamb chops + onion + water = stock, stock + garbanzo beans + potato = soup. But you can fuck around with this infinitely - chicken carcass + garlic + mirepoix = chicken stock + noodles + egg = chicken noodle soup. Or my favorite chef on Earth, Talia Clarke’s go-to - beef shank + onion + water + white beans + yoghurt + aleppo (a meal we shared often in a much happier apartment).

The point here is - you really can thrive with very little. The world’s tastiest food comes from the poorest places - and ingenuity is most often forced out of a lack of options. I will add - you can add as much as you want to this soup, and I often to - garlic, saffron, tomato paste, escarole, whatever. But first, let’s get the basics.

For four servings, you’ll need:

4 bone in lamb loin chops

2 cups garbanzo beans, dry, soaked overnight

1 onion, halved

4 medium sized gold potatoes, peeled

1 bunch dill

• You must use dry garbanzo beans, and I recommend getting more comfortable using dry ingredients. Aside from the looming apocalypse - we should limit our single use vessel consumption where we can, and buying garbanzos in bulk is so cheap, so easy, and honestly texturally divine.

• You can use any other on the bone meat here - a lamb shank, a beef shank, etc.

The night before, rinse your garbanzos thoroughly and cover them with 3x cold water and some salt. Let them soak.

The day of, drain your garbanzos and rinse them thoroughly. Add to a pot with potatoes and simmer until fork tender, about 45 minutes to an hour. Don’t boil, simmer.

While your garbanzos are going, heat a dutch oven with no oil over medium high heat. Generously salt your lamb on all sides, and place chops fat side down in the pan. Sear and brown on all sides, and once some fat is coating your pan, add your onion, flat side down. Once everything’s nice and brown, cover with 3 qts of water, add a teaspoon of salt, cover and simmer for about two hours or until lamb is extremely soft.

When your garbanzos are soft, drain and set aside to cool. Rinse with cold water and peel those fuckers - yes, you can peel them, it’s fun, and it totally changes the texture. Set those aside with your potatoes.

When your lamb is done, inspect your broth, add peeled chickpeas, fresh dill, potatoes and salt as needed. Serve with a little bit of everything - in my opinion, the onion is the tastiest bite.

You now have a perfect soup - protein, fat, fiber. I loathe the term “clean eating” because it is rooted in shame and privilege - so let’s use a different term: primitive eating. This is a primitive dish - my ancestors cooked this in yurts over an open flame, with horse and goat and melted snow. I think that’s why I feel so immediately healed when I eat it.

By the way, four servings cost me $12, and you can’t fucking beat that these days. Remember that any meat on the bone will work, and you should totally start saving all your produce bits for future stocks - but sometimes, we just need to spend the day smelling lamb fat rendering and peeling the damn garbanzos.

If you make this, I want to see it! Tag me on Instagram or just send me a message. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

Finally, in the last few weeks, this Substack has exploded way beyond the audience I ever expected. For this I’m so grateful, and the engagement is something very precious to me. I’m working on another $100 week, some green powder comparisons/advice, and some info about Colostrum - but if there’s any other musings you’d like to read, let me know!

IN HEALTH,

A