Potato soup recipe and more RESOURCES
Recipe/Resources/Upcoming Events
This Winter, Rē is offering a mini Soup Series, where we are sharing some of our favorite soup recipes.... and a story to go with them Soup'n'Story Time! Soup means so many things. Warmth. Comfort. Hope. Leftovers and freshness and community. Recovery from being sick or a meal for a potluck. The perfect food for regeneration! And it is so delicious!
We are nearing the end of this Winter Series... and we are quickly headed towards Spring! Next week is the last week of this Soup Series.
We have been offering this Soup Series as America has been entering an increasingly dangerous time for people, the planet, and for democracy itself. So many of our friends, neighbors, and colleagues have experienced job loss, anxiety for their personal safety, and grave concern for our collective well-being. Many valuable programs have been and are on the dock to lose funding.
During these uneasy times, coming together in various forms of community, including but not only around soup and our shared love for the earth and one another, has been particularly important.
As this weekend is the transition between Black History Month (February) and Women's History Month (March), and as an increasing number of places in the U.S. are banning really incredible books, we want to take a moment to lift up some of the really cool Black women environmentalists, both in history and in the present, who have and continue to make even the possibility of regeneration viable.
We are also lifting up several upcoming events from our partners!
Amongst other events, you might notice that Sequoia Samanvaya has an upcoming ReMembering Course Informational Webinar. Ashlei participated in the ReMembering Course, and heartily recommends it. In fact, Rē even asked Sara Jolena to create a ReMembering Course mini-series for Rē - it’s still available in our library, here, and we encourage you to check it out!
Pretty soon, we are going to share with you some of what Rē's been up to behind the scenes in the last few weeks! :-) Meanwhile, do let us know if you get a chance to make this soup - and what you might be thinking about for your garden, your organizing, and your self-care.
Soup and Story
This week, we are sharing a soup recipe from our community member Jack.
From Jack:
I remember being a child in my grandmother’s kitchen, watching her make this soup on cold winter days. It was a wonderful treat when I was sick, or when it was cold, or just… soup sounded good that day. It’s the food I will always associate with her, and I hope that the comfort resonates with you too!
It means a lot for me to be able to share this piece of my grandma with others. I think it’s a pretty unique take on potato soup, and I think that she would have liked knowing it was bringing joy to others as well.
Potato Soup Recipe
Ingredients:
Potatoes
Onion
Water
Milk
Dill Seed
Salt to taste
Instructions:
My grandmother never measured amounts, so I'll do my best to explain the approximations.
Peel and chop your onion. Saute it lightly. (I use the soup pot for this to save dishes!)
Peel and cube your potatoes. Add the potatoes to your soup pot.
Pour water to just cover the potatoes. You will be incorporating this water, so don't overfill!
Boil until the potatoes are soft enough to mash. Turn the heat down to a simmer.
Mash the potatoes in the water they have boiled in; a potato masher works great if you
have one! Be careful; the water will still be hot and will burn if it splashes out.
Mash until the potatoes are at your desired consistency and texture (we always go super smooth!).
Add milk to reach your desired thickness. We usually make this soup pretty thin.
Add salt to taste.
Finally, add dill seed. How much? You should be getting “at least one seed in every spoonful”.
(That dill seed measurement is child me's one contribution to this recipe!)
Resources
Black Women Environmentalists - these are just a few of many voices out there ... and its critical to lift up these voices at a time when so many are being increasingly sidelined.
All My Environmental Heroes are Black Women, by enviornmental activist Leah Thomas, Vogue Magazine, 2022. If you are less familiar with this younger author, you might appreciate her fabulous book, The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People and Planet
Wangari Matthai - the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in the Green Belt Movement, she set the stage for much climate and ecological justice activism the world over. Her memoir, Unbowed, is beautifully written and remains deeply inspiring.
Zora Neale Hurston, author of the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an early black feminist novelist. If you know what to look for, her work is strewn with ecological analogies, love, and poetry.
As Carlyn Ferrari writes about Hurston and others: "The pervasive misconception is that Black people have no interest in the natural world and are environmentally apathetic. This sentiment stems from African Americans’ traumatic, coerced relationship with the natural world during enslavement that presumably impeded their ability to cultivate an autonomous interest in and connection to the natural world. Both in American society and in the American literary imagination, the natural world is represented as a white space with Black people existing as ecological pariahs and environmental outsiders. However, Black people are deeply, intimately, and historically connected to the environment. Their stories have yet to be told, and their environmental imaginaries have yet to be considered."
Alice Walker - probably best known for her novel, the Color Purple, we also want to lift up her first collection of non-fiction, In Search of Our Mothers' Garden.
Trace: Memory, History, Race and the American Landscape - a beautifully written tour through time, geography, geology, and race in America, this book has won multiple awards. It's one of those books I want to read again and again. As she writes: Every landscape is an accumulation. Life must be lived amidst that which was made before.
Catherine Coleman Flowers has risen to national prominence for her work for eco-justice in poor black communities in Alabama. Her book Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret, helped push the community's needs for basic sanitation closer to reality. Just this year, she has written "Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and finding hope," which she is currently doing a book tour around - maybe there's one near you!
Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to liberation on the land. - a book and one of several nexus points in a larger movement of reclaiming and revitalizing black farming and land ownership. As they remind us, it was Malcolm X who said, "All revolution is based on land."
Newkirk, Vann (2019) The Great Land Robbery: The Shameful Story of How 1 Million Black Families Have Been Ripped from their Farms. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-land-was-our-land/594742/ and video - a critical piece of the overarching story.
In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World by Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoth - this book focuses less on the crops that enslaved people grew for white landowners but instead on the crops they (especially but not only women) grew for their own nourishment in "botanical gardens of the dispossessed" - crops that shifted and shaped the "New World"'s foods. This included millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the “Asian” long bean. This is a fundamentally encouraging book.
Upcoming events
Spring Equinox and Eclipses Warm Up ● Dr. Amanda Kemp
Saturday, March 8
11am eastern/10am central/9am mountain/8am pacific
We are inviting you to join Dr. Amanda Kemp’s Spring Equinox and Eclipses Warm Up this March 8! The Regenerative School and Dr. Kemp share a strong alignment in our work, and we are excited to foster connections between our communities through this offering. Please click the button below to register.
The ReMembering Course Info-session ● Sequoia Samanvaya
Thursday, March 13, 11 am ET to 12:15 pm ET
Re-originating climate change into colonization
Full Circle Candles - 2025 Earth Day Festival ● Growing Roots
Saturday, April 12th, 10 am - 4 pm
Monteagle, TN (1202 Main Street)
Come out and celebrate our Good Earth with a day of festivities including special speakers, local craft vendors, live music, and the Full Circle Candles 2025 Youth Entrepreneurial Class! Visit the Growing Roots tea-making booth to learn about herbal teas and brew your own special cup, chat with us about food systems in our local area, and snap a momento picture at the "couple of fungis" photo cut-out board. We also invite you to take part in the annual Earth Day tradition, "Promises to the Earth," where we make promises, captured in drawings, about how we hope to love and reciprocate to our Earth in the year ahead. 🌍🌱