Chicken Soup on a Super Hot Day

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It’s too hot to cook chicken soup today, but I feel lousy. After a weekend of fun, and riding the subways of NYC I guess I picked up some bug. It is a steamy day here, not really a day you’d want soup, but when I feel like this, pretty much the only thing I want is chicken soup, and so I dragged my sorry ass out to the store to get my ingredients. I have a pressure cooker, and I use it mainly to make soup. I’ve found that the flavor you can extract from the ingredients is so much more intense when cooked under pressure, and you can have it in about twenty minutes!

My go to remedies when I feel lousy are (in no special order) chicken soup, hot and sour soup, and mushroom-barley soup. As you can see soup is the theme here. Making hot and sour, and mushroom-barley take too long and require too many ingredients for the moment, so chicken soup it is. As a child when I got sick my mom made me Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, or sometimes even Progresso’s Chickarina, I don’t recall her ever making me chicken soup, though sometimes when more than one of us got sick at once she made egg custard which she cooked perfectly, and was definitely palliative, if not the best nutritional option (all that dairy).

Soup is one of the things I think I am best at. At one time I worked at Tiffany and Co. at the Fifth Avenue store. I was the chef-manager of the employee café (which means that the place was too small to be budgeted for a chef and a manager, so one person filled both roles). I loved working there; the people were incredibly kind and hospitable. I was not a direct employee of Tiffany’s, but was a contract worker. They treated me and my staff like family. I have found that how people treat the ‘kitchen help’ is a pretty good indicator of their character in general. During my tenure with Tiffany’s Jerry Seinfeld was making The Soup Nazi famous, and many of the folks at Tiffany’s walked over to the Soup Kitchen for lunch daily, though many stopped going, saying my soup was just as good, which was music to my ears.

So now my soup is done, I have had a bowl, more or less cleaned up, and need to go nap; I am exhausted!