Last soup'n'story of this series!

Soup Story/PAR/Events

Mar 08, 2025

We are at the end of our Winter Soup and Story series!

This is our last recipe in the series. And Spring is right around the corner! It has been great to be able to put this series together, and we hope you have been enjoying it, and maybe even trying some of these recipes at your own home.

In other words: not just reading, but participating.

Participation is key in creating regenerative cultures. It's key to shifting our political climate and our personal well-being and our ways of thinking and acting together.

Really, we can't imagine how we can craft regenerative cultures without many, many forms of participation. Including in how we learn together, think together, create frameworks for action together, do things together, and then reflect on what we did in order to better learn from it.

Which is, basically, what a Participatory Approach to learning/researching/educating is about.

And that kind of participatory approach is core to our work. Which is why are excited about being able to continually offer participatory learning spaces and action research workshops. Our next one will be co-hosted with one of our longstanding partners, and one of the great institutions in this field, Highlander Center for Education and Research in Tennessee.

If this is of interest to you, PLEASE Save The Date!

April 13-17!

At the end of this missive, which is thinking about the combination of tradition and innovation, of touching the past and eating the freshness of the present, (it's so much more than "just" about soup!) we also uplift some of the recent grass-roots anti-Kingship motions that have been happening across America.... from within Republican districts. It's been encouraging. And now, many of those town halls are getting closed down - which is discouraging and, probably, not a smart long-term move. For those of you outside of America, we welcome your thoughts and perspectives on what you are witnessing both in America and overseas.

This week, we are sharing a soup recipe from our community member Sara Jolena - who is also the editor of this newsletter!

In the closet right next to the kitchen, which is where we always gathered when I was growing up, and alongside the old cookbooks held together by a rubber band, is my mother's treasured recipe box: a small grey metal box overflowing with recipes that she has collected over her lifetime. In the age of digital-everything, this recipe box, with its cards mostly typed on an old type writer that I only vaguely recall before computers came to dominate my experience of typing, feels like a remnant of long-ago past, though it was not, really, as long ago as all that.

Recently, when friends came to have dinner with me whilst I was staying with my mother, I showed them the box, and they stood in reverence over it, holding up the stain-spotted pink and yellow and blue and faded-white note cards with great respect, as if handling a relic. They shook their heads in amazement. This is quite remarkable, they said.

I reminded them that it was once very common. They raised their eyebrows.

And so too, I think, was my mother's relationship to recipes: as guidelines. While she was quite careful with following the recipes (and writing down where the recipes came from - she was a great reader of Sunset magazine, and many of her recipes came from them), especially the first time she cooked something, she would also deviate, and the notecards have little notations on them from her experiments. And they might not include actions such as, "go to the garden and pick a fresh sprig of thyme or rosemary and drop it into the pot," but I know how to do these things, as she gave me that job from a young age, knowing how important it is for children to have the chance to harvest plants, and to talk to them, and even sing to them, as they do so.

Perhaps ironically, she rarely uses the box or the many cookbooks at all these days, preferring those recipes she already knows how to cook, or, often, not cooking at all. She is at that time of her life where cooking is not particularly interesting, and she is not certain if it is worth the effort.

I still love to cook, and so when I visit, I almost always pull out the box with a certain glee, though I could probably find the recipe for anything on my cell phone. But I want something else, too: to touch these cards, feeling the reminiscent decades when my mother was much younger and made her own bread and sewed many of her own dresses and cooked meals for friends and neighbors and canned tomatoes that she had planted in her own garden. That was before she nursed my father through his chronic illness, and then her sister, her mother, and her stepfather.

These days, when I visit her in the colder seasons, I take down the crockpot and make something stewy that fills the house with a comforting aroma. I go and sing to the bay tree in the garden and then place those fresh bay leaves in a stewy mixture in this electric cauldron, letting the simmering heat work its own aromatherapy- healing-magic.

In a world with more and more bad news, I need the practices of singing to bay trees and connecting to those who came before through the everyday homegrown practice of cooking food. In this recipe box, I connect to previous versions of my mother, as well as the many men and women, neighbors and friends and family, who gifted her recipes. And of course the people who received recipes from her.

This one is from a Sunset magazine from 1974 (before I was born!): Fresh tomato dill soup. My mother and I both love dill, an herb that she rarely has been able to grow particularly successfully, but that she will get, in bulk, from a local whole foods store that predates Whole Foods. It's one of those rare outlets that has survived many turnovers: my father would go there 50 years ago, picking up dried dill and other provisions.

And so this soup is a reminder of something both older than I am - the practice of sharing recipes and trying out new ones, just as we are doing in this Soup and Story Winter Series - and something that is perpetually new: the freshness of herbs.

It's really more of a summer recipe than a winter soup, so if it looks intriguing, then do keep it for when the tomatoes and dill are fresh in your neighborhood. I'm planning to make it this summer in August, when the dill is high and the tomatoes are plump. My neighbor grows the most delicious tomatoes. He keeps their seeds, and in a few months he will plant them, and then later he will share them with us, when there are far too many tomatoes all at once for his household.

Meanwhile, I keep making compost, which I put into his compost bin, and which becomes the soil that nurtures us all.

Fresh Tomato Dill Soup

Ingredients

Salad oil: 2 tablespoons
Onion: 1 large, thinly sliced
Dill weed: 1 1/4 tablespoons
Tomatoes: 3 to 3 1/2 pounds, fully ripe, cored and sliced
Tomato paste: 3 tablespoons, canned
Beef broth: 2 cans (14 oz each)
Sugar: 2 teaspoons
Salt: 1/2 teaspoon
Pepper: about 1/4 teaspoon

Instructions

1.) Heat 2 tablespoons salad oil in a 4 to 6-quart kettle

2.) Add large onion, thinly sliced, and cook until limp

3.) Next, stir in 1 1/4 tsp dill weed, 3 to 3 1/2 pounds fully ripe tomatoes (Cored and sliced), and 3 tablespoons of canned tomato paste. Bring to a boil. Stir often and break up tomatoes. Reduce heat, cove,r and simmer for 15 minutes.

4.) Afterward, whirl soup, a portion at a time, in a covered blender until smooth. (This can be done ahead; cover and chill)

5.)To serve, combine in a pan the whirled tomatoes, 2 cans (14 oz each), 2 cans (14 oz each) regular strength beef broth, 2 tsp sugar, 1/2 tsp salt, and about 1/4 tsp pepper. Bring soup to a simmer and serve hot. Makes 3 quarts or 6 to 8 servings.