Soup Chick®

Seven soups every Saturday: black bean soup recipes

In the house where I grew up, no one even thought to eat black bean soup. To us, soup meant chicken soup (homemade with matzoh balls, or canned with noodles), or tomato soup from the red-and-white can. Occasionally we had clam chowder, the real New England kind, but never homemade. So, when I went off to college and began to cook with beans, as every college kid on a budget learns to do, the whole vista of black bean soups opened up to me. Spicy, sweet, smooth or chunky, I loved them all. And, to this day, I've never tired of them.

In Harmony, a public library soup cook-off brings people together

Last week, seven local soup makers toted their slow cookers to our town's Harmony Library for the first-ever Soup Cook-Off. Despite the threat of snow, a large crowd turned out to taste the soups and vote for their favorite soup. I was one of the judges for the event, and I loved tasting each of the soups. The grand prize winning soup, made by a high school student (isn't that great?), Pepere's Pea Soup was the judges' favorite. It's a traditional comfort-food soup, a recipe passed down from grandfather to granddaughter, perfect for the slow cooker. I'll share the winner of the People's Choice Award here on Soup Chick in a couple of weeks.

Seven soups every Saturday: tortilla soup recipes

My earliest memory of really good tortilla soup involves blazing hot sun, ice cold cerveza, and a roadside restaurant in a dusty village near Lake Chapala, Mexico. We'd stopped for lunch with my husband Ted's aunt and uncle, who retired to the area many years ago, and as hot as we were, we all ordered soup to help us cool down. It's true that spicy food cools your body, and it's equally true that good tortilla soup is a comfort food 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. Lime makes this soup special, though the recipe, like all traditional recipes, varies with the soup maker.