My Most Popular Soup Recipe Was Also My Most Disliked—Until Now

Once upon a time, I wrote a weekly column here, a project called “Twenty-Dollar, Twenty-Minute Meals.” It was a catchy idea in support of my first cookbook that inspired me to consider whole food grocery products—cans of beans, cartons of stock, jars of sauce—as shortcuts to flavor and cooking time. The column stretched my imagination of where real food can come from, like an enormous feature in a magazine I had grown accustomed to writing. Since then, my projects since have been more personal and focused on storytelling, but creativity and good home cooking remain at the center of all I do.

Now, eight years later, I am known as “Soup Lady” first and “Caroline” second among some of my friends, which is an accurate depiction of my identity, if you ask my husband. I have fallen into a life where I make an absolutely ridiculous amount of soup every week for nine months of every year—the rainy months in Seattle, referred to as “soup season” in my house, where “souping” is also a verb—for the past three years. (As you read this, I’ve just started my fourth.) I don’t want to digress too much, but suffice it to say that this soup-obsessed life found me and my ties to it are profound and emotional. I am not exaggerating when I say I believe it saved my life.

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* This article was originally published here