How to Make Soup (for those who don't know! :-) )

[Retrograde]

18. " If you have water around, you can have soup"

Soup is your basic peasant food: it uses what's on hand to stretch out often meager ingredients. Sure, you can get fancy and simmer 20 lbs of veal bones for the better part of a day, clarify the resulting liquid, and use it for the basis of a refined consomme. Or you can boil some onion skins, celery tops and other vegetable parings for a simple vegetable base, then stain and augment that with maybe some chopped vegetables, a grain, and small pieces of meat if you have some and are so inclined. I've made soups starting with everything from water to generic supermarket stocks to simmered-all-day stocks, and they've all turned out decently.

Dinner today was red lentil soup from the NYTimes recipe site, with a spoon of Costco pesto swirled into the serving bowls