Soups and Stews Books

A few years ago I got this book as a gift and haven't stopped using it since. The soups are fantastic! They are easy and healthy and a fantastic way to fall in love with soups and fresh food! The recipes are inspired from all over the world. The directions are simple and easy to read while you are cooking. And my favorite part of the book: it is organized into seasons. On a cold night have Curried Spinach and Potato Stew. On a hot summer night try some Garden Gumbo. It really highlights what is in season. I use water for the vegetable stock for all the recipes and they have been very filling without the need for meat, or chicken base.

I highly recommend this book!

This has everything from soups to bread. These recipes are high quality and really fun to make. This book gives a kick to cooking!

I was compelled to write this review (my first on Amazon) because I wanted to let others know how fundamental this cookbook has become for my kitchen. I bought this book off the shelf at a Borders (sorry Amazon!) when a friend of mine spotted it there-- just what I was looking for and the instructions seemed to be written in a straightforward manner. My first attempt was the GardenFest Gazpacho, which I made one 4th of July weekend. It got great reviews 'round the table. I later tried the Roasted Sweet Corn and Sweet Potator Chowder, to which I can just say "wow." And those were just the summer soups. As I type this, the Moroccan Lentil and Kale Stew is simmering on the stove... Although the author recommends fresh ingredients, I have substituted canned and frozen plenty of times with fine results. Although I haven't tried them, the author does also include breads and other treats to accompany the dishes. I heartily recommend this cookbook to those who can already picture a hot bowl of stew, a mug of cider and a blissful evening to enjoy both.

The book is well written, easy to follow,will be liked by the experts and novices alike.The author uses low-fat alternatives to cream and whole milk,in addition a large variety of veggies and spices. I have picky eaters at home, and now I get them to eat lots of healthy food and love it as well. The parts I found difficult were some ethnic recipes. Not all grocery stores carry those ingredients, and the one we have locally is regarded as well-stocked. Nevertheless, I think this is an excellent addition to my recipe collection.

Jay Solomon offer up some of the most interseting stories for many excellent recipies. He should consider a sequal.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this book. It contains recipes which soothe the soul (soups) and satisfies the palate. The recipes are easy to follow and don't require hours in the kitchen.

This cookbook hardly gets put back on the shelf--we're always looking for something else to make in it. Every sandwich we've made has been so good they taste like we've ordered out. This is a great cookbook.

Thanks to this simple cookbook, my reputation in the kitchen has improved by leaps and bounds. The recipes are time consuming (for a simple sandwich) but wait until you taste them! If I want to knock someones socks off I prepare the Shrimp Sandwich with Mango Relish! The name cannot impart how delicious this dish is! This recipe alone justifies the cost of the book. (I have substituted chicken w/ equally good results.) Buy this cookbook. You won't be disappointed!

Having decided how I would review this cookbook, I then read the other three reviews already here. Amazing that we all came away with the same impression: marvelous stuff here, not easy but delicious. I first tried the Fall Squash Soup with Chorizo and Spicy Cinammon Croutons, and it was a knockout dish. Everyone just marveled at its layers of flavor, so well blended. This is truly a beautiful book, and the regulars at her restaurant for lunch are blessed.

A must read for anyone entering the 21st century

At first I was surprised at how thin this book was given the price; however, it proved to be worth it in the end. This book is a wonderful reference for a wide variety of one-pot, slow-cooking stews. There's something for everyone here, even vegetarians. Any of these recipes can be done "the old fashioned way" in a slow oven; however, there's no reason why they couldn't be done in a slow cooker or on the stovetop instead (just use a flame diffuser to prevent burning). Even though winter is almost over, I am most certainly going to try many of the very varied dishes in this specialty cookbook.

I love this book. Finally, cholent recipes that have real amounts listed. A wide variety of types of cholent, normal and weird (see Spleen Cholent and Chocolate Cholent). My favorite so far is Red Cholent, which is a beany, barley, ketchupy type like I always attempted and failed.

This fabulous set of cookbooks not only offers wonderful recipes, but also educational information about the traditions behind the foods as well as amusing stories and charming anecdotes. A must for any collector of Jewish cookbooks!

Soup lovers, do not be deterred! This wonderful little book is worth searching for. I started by copying a few recipes from a friend's and quickly realized that I wanted to make them all and bought the book. I make soup every week and this book is a favorite source. Recipes are clear, relatively simple, and always delicious. Also has a solid selection of vegetarian soups or easily adaptable recipes. Directions are well written and the beautiful color photographs let you know where you are heading. This a well worth having in your collection and you will really use it.

This book is truly value for money. I bought it 2 weeks ago and have already made and enjoyed several of the soups. Each recipe is accompanied by a color photograph and easy to follow directions. I am doing the South Beach diet and most of the recipes are easily adaptable to this diet as well as the Atkins diet - this book made it easy for me to lose 10 pounds!

I would recomment starting with the Harira (a Moroccan soup). It tasted excellent and was easy to make too - most of the ingredients were available from the normal grocery store.

I have been collecting as many of the "Cook's Encyclopedia of..." books as I can find. I have twelve currently. Like the Soup book all these books have colored pictures of each recipe and illustrations on how to make each recipe. I love that the soup book is not full of common soups, because I can get recipes anywhere for those. Of course these recipes are not so strange or unappetizing that you won't make them. In fact they look down right delicious. Most are simple and easy to follow. These recipes range from hot, chilled, vegetarian, creamy, spicy, seafood, seasonal, from other countries... The point is there is a great variety of soups to choose from. I never considered making home made soup until I found this book.

I have five books from this series, and they are all uniformly excellent. Whenever I see another one, I immediately buy it without bothering to look inside. Not one of the recipes I've made from these books was a dud, and most of them were exceptional.

The most recent recipe I made from this book is Spicy Chicken and Mushroom Soup, which turned out to be one of the best things I have ever made. Many of these recipes are somewhat exotic, pairing ingredients that you would never think to pair, like watercress and orange, but the results are often spectacular.

The book wanders the world, delivering absolutely-authentic recipes. When a friend called to say his date had cancelled, so instead he was bringing a Moroccan friend, I was quickly able to serve what she enthusiastically claimed was the best Harira she'd ever had.

Sometimes, the author will take an ethnic soup, and greatly modify it, to its eternal benefit. One recipe I was already familiar with -- a Ghanaian recipe for okra and banana soup, gets completely transformed here by the addition of smoked cod.

But don't let me put you off by suggesting that this is a purely exotic cookbook: of the 30-odd recipes I've made, five of them were variations on tomato soup. Since there are 200-odd recipes in the book, there are still eight variations on tomato soup that I have not yet tried.

I have four or five cookbooks that are dedicated only to soup -- this one is my favourite.

`The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy' is the first cookbook by culinary journalist, Domenica Marchetti, published by Chronicle Books, the old San Francisco war-horse publisher of trade paperback cookbooks. The biggest problem this book faces is the fact that there are already numerous fine books, including some outstanding titles dedicated to soups. Leading the pack among recent titles is Deborah Madison's `Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen' and Anne Sheasby's `The Soup Cookbook'. Even more challenging is the glut of great Italian cookbooks.

Before comparing Ms. Marchetti's effort with other books, it is important to point out her strongest feature, which is the fact that her soup recipes are divided into the four seasons, with fifteen recipes per season. Less impressive is the fact that among her 60 featured recipes, only a minority (28) are for soups. The remaining 32 recipes are nominally stews; however, many such as the Stuffed Beef Roll in Tomato Sauce and the Oven Braised Endive look a lot more like casseroles, braises, roasts with sauces, or even frittatas than they do stews.

In comparison to Ms. Marchetti's Italian 28 soup recipes, Michele Scicolone's encyclopedic `1000 Italian Recipes' has 41 soup recipes, all of which are quite certainly soups. Also, the authoritative `Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking' by Marcella Hazan has 35 soup recipes. So, you are not really getting more soup for your dollar in this book if you already own one of these other large Italian recipe cookbooks. Another caveat I have is that while Ms. Marchetti indeed covers virtually all the different varieties of Italian soups, her recipes tend toward her interpretations or variations on classic recipes, rather than the original classics themselves.

I must be clear on the fact that the book contains more than 60 recipes, in that it includes an introductory chapter with seven (7) recipes for broths, sauces, and egg pasta. It also has a chapter of accompaniments with 11 recipes for crostinis, croutons, risotto, polenta, and tarts. So we get 78 recipes with 28 soup recipes for about $20 or $0.25 per recipe. This is getting close to being pricy, so the value of the book depends a lot on how much you like soup, and how big your collection of Italian cookbooks is already.

For this price, the author also gives us 25 pages of instruction on basic kitchen skills that the average experienced home cook can easily skip over with no danger of missing anything important. On the other hand, a novice who reads this may be struck by the irony in Ms. Marchetti's statement that you don't really need many pieces of equipment, after which she reels off 26 classes of equipment needed to make soup, including a few obvious redundancies such as a potato masher and food mill, and a few unnecessary items, such as a garlic press. Her glossary of ingredients is much better, but no better than you can get from a standard text such as Senora Hazan.

All this carping should not take away from the fact that the recipes are all very well done. My principle arguments with them are with the brodo recipes, which add the vegetables in too soon, and the egg pasta recipe that does with a food processor what a good Italian Nonna would do with the classic well method. With these good recipes, organized by season, there is also an organization within season by thinner to thicker soup, which Ms. Marchetti describes in the introduction. My problem with this is that cookbook readers don't read introductions (generally), so it would have been nice to categorize each soup plainly in a header, or in a cross table of contents of soups by type.

This is a decent, respectable book. It's main problem is that it has taken on a field in which there is a lot of stiff competition, and no aspect of the book dazzled me, unlike Ms. Madison's excellent book on Vegetarian soups. If you like the concept behind this book, but your shelves are already sagging with Italian cookbooks, I suggest you try `Twelve Months of Monastery Soups' by Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette' which has over 120 soups arranged by month.

Ultimately, I think this book is great for all those who really like the seasonal cooking principle, and are always on the lookout for good books based on this idea.

Ms. Marchetti has written a wonderfully clear cookbook on a topic near and dear to my heart, the cooking of Italy. She has focussed this book on soups and stews but does include a few other dishes. I have prepared a number of her recipes and have found them to be easy to follow and, most important, delicious.

The book is laid out in seasons, winter, spring, summer and fall giving the reader the opportunity to select recipes based on what is fresh. It also includes an opening chapter of useful basics on how to make stocks, tomato sauces and pasta dough.

Unlike many cookbooks, this book contains a number of recipes that I would like to use and add to my repetoire. The mushroom soup, the sausage with lentils and the Christmas calimari are among my favorites.

I have given this book along with a ladle as a wedding gift. It is accessible for the amateur cook and to the more seasoned chef as well.

The lovely photography by William Meppem really bring the food to life.

"The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy" is a beautifully written and produced cookbook that goes beyond mere recipes. Ms. Marchetti includes numerous anecdotes that make it a pleasure to read, and Mr. Meppem's excellent photographs make one's mouth water. The recipes are written clearly and in detail. Those we have tried so far have been very good indeed. Clearly the author has an extensive background in Italian cuisine.

Highly recommended.

We are passionate cooks who went to cooking school in Tuscany two years agao, and my huge cookbook collection has its share of Italian cookbooks. This one is unusual, though, in its emphasis on traditional family-style recipes with seasonal ingredients that nonetheless are outstanding meldings of flavor. The recipes are organized by season, with excellent commentary. Although the recipes are not particularly simple, they are clear and straightforward and do not depend on exotic ingredients or unusual tools.

The first three recipes we tried were all superb, and the Zuppa di Pesce is the best we've ever had, whether at home or in a restaurant! We are eagerly waiting to try some recipes until the ingredients come in season, and we're continuing to try the winter options. Delizioso!

This book was actually given to us and we have loved it. We have only tried a few of the recipes but so far every one has been a fun, delicious experience. My favorite is the Carrot Soup with Cilantro Ribbons. It's fantastic, easy and a guest pleaser.

For those who love to warm the home and heart with great soups but can't take the whole day to cook this is a terrific resource. The recipes are based on common ingredients, the instruction is clear and the results are a treat!

This is a great cookbook to have on your "everyday" shelf - to grab when it's cold and rainy outside and you don't really want to run to the market to prepare a great dinner.

Enjoy...

Before I had a copy of "A Good Day for Soup", soup to me was chicken noodle in a can (yuck, those mushy noodles!). Now, having sampled over half the recipes in this culinary treasure, soup is not only warm and delicious, but a fun and creative experience. There is a recipe for just about any mood or any ingredient in your fridge, from Curried Chicken Chowder to Ball Park Soup. This cookbook guarantees a warm, nourishing meal for one or for a crowd. I hope the authors read this review, because I'd like to offer them my thanks.

We recently bought this book based on its design. A smart looking cookbook with no pictures? Definately. As we have been trying the receipes, we have been very impressed with the subtle flavors of the various dishes and less impressed with the design of the book. The fish soups, and in particular, the Carrot and Mussel soup, are wonderful. I have been less impressed with the "slender soup" section, but then of course, that may have something to do with the lack of fattening ingredients and better offerings in other vegetarian cookbooks for example. My one complaint with the cookbook is that I would have preferred an order to the soups based on main ingredients rather based on themes such as "festive" or "slender". The ingredients used are generally easy to find here in Seattle, and most of the receipes seem to be reasonably easy to prepare and economical.

This book is as pleasing to the eye as it is to the stomach. Beneath the pages of beautiful art, this cookbook has innovative, delicious and health conscious recipes. The Potato green chili soup has the perfect amount of spice creating rich and zesty soup that will revitalize any cold winters day. I could make comments on each and every soup, salad, bread and spread recipe in the book but you really have to try it. This cookbook is filled with luscious recipes appropriate for guests, your family or just yourself. It is great for the most novices of chefs all the way up to the experts. It is practical in that you can actually find the ingredients and it doesn't hours of preparation to make a scrumptious out of the ordinary meal. The work has really been done for you. Ladle, Leaf and Loaf is true science that compiles ingredients in the most interesting ways to create delicious meals perfect for any season.

This is an amazing book -- recipes! writing! Art! If you understand the idea & experience of "Bell Tones" in music, you will know what I mean when I say that these recipes deliver the Bell Tones of taste! Still my best gift "offering" to friends, new and old, who have not seen it yet!

A nice little surprise. You can find the ingredients and when you sit to table, as we say in our house, it tastes better than you expected. Her salads are just new and different enough to widen your pallet--well, mine anyway--with combinations both unsuspected and attainable. Where have you been canola oil and how come no one uses you? You're great!

The soups and breads are within range of my patience and understanding of food chemistry. And from the way they turn out, you know you've done right (always a nagging question with my cooking!).

My only, and very minor, quibble are the breathless chapter intros. Found that not reading them made me like her, and the food she led me to, a little more. Guess the paper cuts are nice too, but they're inedible.

More than worth the candle.

This is not just another cookbook. Not only are the recipes divine, but the author's own illustrations are charming and sophisticated.

The Lemon Quick Bread recipe is worth the price of the bookÐ- Light, chewy and delicious, with a zingy lemon flavor coming from both lemon rind, and fresh lemon juice. With sweet pecans and non-fat buttermilk, this recipe was inspired by the angel of Flavor and Texture who also cares about your health! It is low-fat, low-sugar!

For anyone who really loves good food, and wants a sure thing, don't miss this one.

This book may be small but packs in great information and recipes. Every soup I have made from this book has turned out great. I have been very impressed. In addition to the recipes, the book has small tutorials and/or explanations of ingredients, techniques, etc. The pictures and explanations are easy to follow. I have plenty of other cook books (Fannie Farmer, Moosewood, Indian & Asian cookbooks, etc.) but I am always using this one.

I checked "Perfect Soups" by Anne Willan out of the library and was so delighted with the easy-to-follow and beautifully photographed recipes that I bought two copies-one for my own kitchen shelf and one for a gift. Anne Willan has written a cookbook for beginners as well as long-time cooks. The step-by-step recipes clearly tell the cook what equipment is used, what ingredients are needed, how to master cooking techniques, what the finished product looks like and how garnishes can be prepared and used to make each bowl of soup a masterpiece. I loved this cookbook and have never seen another book of soup recipes that included such good and healthy-sounding soups.

This book and the rest of the series are fantastic. They are small, have great pictures and meticulous directions. That said, the book tackles really good food. I recommend all of Ms. Willan's books to some degree, but the "Look and Cook" and "Perfect ----" books I particularly recommend especially if you like to see what your food is supposed to look like when it's done.

This soup book was priceles and her "Perfect French Country" book is dog-eared. In fact, the French food in that book is so good my teenaged son will eat it.

Even though this book is so tiny, doesn't mean it doesn't have some really neat tricks to make your soups extra pretty.

One of my favorite ideas from this book is the idea of oven-toasted heart croutons. There are also ideas for cream decorations that are so easy to make, yet look so gourmet.

This book is divided into 9 sections: Super Soups, Making Stocks, Ingredients & Preparation, Creamed & Pureed Soups, Hearty Soups, Light Soups, Cold Soups, Short Cuts and Presentation.

This book is geared to new cooks and gives great advice on how to prepare the ingredients with step-by-step pictures.

Some of the recipes in this book for Fall:

Butternut Squash Soup
Pumpkin & Apple Soup
Borscht
French Onion Soup
Hungarian Sour Cherry Soup

Most of the soups contain a short list of ingredients and could not be easier to make. You will also find information on how to freeze soups (my favorite thing to do so I always have a soup ready to heat up), use your microwave to speed up preparations or make garnishes or even piroshki to serve with soup.

No difficult cooking tricks...this book is just filled with easy-to-make treats!

The soups in this book are delicious, healthy and simple to make. Most of the soups here have a good mix of meat or fish and different kinds of vegetables, are light and healthy, and it's really easy to make. Of the receipes I've tried, it takes less than 30 min prep time after the 3 try (by then I'm familiar with the receipes), and thne just let it simmer. I've tried 5 soups over the past 2 years (I'm not a great cook.) and everyone loved them. My roommate who's a great cook loved my receipes so much so I bought another copy for her as a gift. Also one nice thing about this book, is that there is a color picture for most of the soups, so you can pick out what you want just by flipping through instead of having to read the receipes.

I like this cookbook so much that I bought a dozen of them to give as gifts to best friends and family. The recipes meet two major needs. First, when I'm exhausted and hungry and want real food, these soups can be made in 30 minutes with a minimum of fuss. Second, the results are amazingly complex in flavor. There is something restorative about the combination of little effort and great results. Don't mess with the recipes the first time around. You'll be surprised how good they are. Some of the ingredients will not be regular inhabitants of your larder, so pick out a few soups you want to try every week and buy the ingredients to have on hand. Because of the short cooking time, the recipes call for fresh herbs added last thing, but if you don't have any just add dried herbs with the liquid ingredients and you will get good results.

My wife often buys me cookbooks that I wouldn't think of, with mixed results. THIS one became an instant favourite. Gorgeous fonts and use of color; perfect layout - mostly a photo on one page (for us visual-oriented males ;-), and the complete recipe on the facing page. Most important: very tasty, visually-appealing, and quick recipes.

There is nothing in the book that isn't a photograph or recipe, yet I still think of it more as a COOKBOOK than a recipe book -- after you've made a few of the soups, you'll find yourself absorbing and adopting the common philosophy behind all these recipes. Even the photographs suggest new ways of making and serving soup.

I hardly need the actual book any more -- I just head off to the produce section and grab whatever is freshest and most appealing.

Favourite recipes? Out of the 60-odd here, I haven't found a dud yet.

The books in this series are wonderful. The crab chowder, Middle Eastern sausage and bean stew and curried mushroom tortolloni soup are tasty and satisfying without having to stand at the stove a long time, so you don't have to wait till a day off to make them. Tip: the first time you make them, the recipes will take just a few minutes longer than the book says.

`S.O.U.P.S' by Michael Congdon, with a subtitle of `Seattle's Own Undeniably Perfect Soups' reinforces the picture we in less benighted metropolis that Seattle is challenging New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Houston as a major national presence in good food service. It must be all those Microsoft business lunches! This book is a welcome; quality addition to the literature on soup making and it is notable for both its great accomplishments and its weaknesses.

Good soup books seem to come in two flavors. The `upper tier' of books by major American culinary writers and figures such as Barbara Kafka, James Peterson, and Jasper White, published by Wiley and Scribners cover all the classics and the authors' variations on classic recipes. The lower tier by, for example, Paulette Mitchell, the `Daily Soup' chef/owners, and our current author Conned, published by new, small publishers such as Hyperion, Chronicle, and Sasquatch Books present collections of soup recipes which are honed to a fine edge in small restaurants over a long time.

The most obvious question is whether Herr Congdon's soups live up to their billing as `perfect soups'. My humble opinion is that the soups produced by these recipes are very, very good, at the cost of a level of effort that may be beyond most home cooks on most days of the week. Thus, what Congdon has done is to give us a collection of excellent recipes for special occasions. He has enhanced his presentation by giving us the recipes by season, and I find no violations to his suggestions for cooking seasonally. His recipes are very similar to soups done in New York's `The Daily Soup Cookbook', where every soup is meant to be the center of a complete meal. There are practically no soups like some in books by Kafka and Peterson that may be nothing more than a broth and two or three greens and a pistu garnish. Thus, most recipes except for the summer cold fruit soups have a lot of ingredients on top of the ingredients needed to produce the vegetable or chicken stock. Most of his soups also make great use of both mild and hot chiles (more on this later), which distinguish Congdon's recipes from many others. If you happen to be a chile head, then I suggest you drop what you are doing and order a copy of this book.

In addition to the 69 soup recipes, the book gives an especially nice introduction to soup making equipment, herbs and spices used in these soup recipes, soup making methods, recipes for soup accompaniments, and recipes for the three major soup stocks, vegetable, chicken, and fish. The two books to which I am comparing this volume each give similar material. One consideration is that both `Daily Soup' and Congdon's recipes both tend to give restaurant sized batches of 12 or more cups of soup, although there are several which deliver between four and eight cup servings. When you are dealing with a dozen or more ingredients, scaling this down to half becomes quite a challenge in this non-metric world of measurements. And, unlike Ms. Mitchell's `A Beautiful Bowl of Soup', Mr. Congdon does not systematically give recommendations on refrigerator and freezer shelf life for these soups. But, as Ms. Mitchell's book is limited to vegetarian dishes, the real competition is in a comparison between Congdon and the `Daily Soup' crew.

One thing that struck me throughout Mr. Congdon's recipes is that the length of cooking time for many recipes is longer than for many other writers. By far the most dramatic example of this is the recipe for chicken stock that calls for overnight simmering of the stockpot. I have read dozens of chicken stock recipes, and there may be only one other I can remember which takes it out to such great lengths, and, this was not from a recognized culinary expert. I really like the fact that the vegetables are cooked and removed before the marathon session, but even this step is relatively long, as I have seen expert opinions which say that vegetables in stocks should be cooked not much more than an hour or they will cloud the stock. Even more experts state that cooking fish for stocks should be limited to one hour, while Mr. Congdon recommends `no less than two hours'.

One thing that surprises me is Mr. Congdon's use of the food processor rather than either a Waring style or immersion style blender. Most authorities recommend a blender over a food processor for soups. And, I think a glass blender beaker is a lot easier to clean than the plastic food processor chamber. It may also have been useful for the author to specify a china cap (chinois) for filtering finely pureed soups, unless he found he painted himself into a corner by criticizing Emeril Lagasse for using a lot of equipment to produce his TV Network soups.

My biggest problem with Mr. Congdon's writing may be due to no trained copy editor at Sasquatch Press, as strange statements asking us to melt our olive oil and dissolve flour so it can coat ingredients make me worry that the final text may simply not have been adequately proofread. This probably contributed to Mr. Congdon's highly inconsistent use of the terms chile and peppers, where he goes against standard practice in the culinary world in calling fresh items `peppers' and dried items `chiles'.

If you really only want one book for thick, high quality soups, the `Daily Soup' volume may be the better choice for its cleaner writing and typesetting, but if you really like your soup and enjoy every recipe you can get your hands on, then this book is for you. I would only suggest you consider simpler recipes for chicken and vegetable stocks. For chicken, especially, I prefer the recipes that either use carcasses or save the meat for other dishes using poached chicken.

Highly recommended if you really like soups.

Hopvine has some of Seattle's best lunches, in my opinion, with hearty, healthy sometimes-vegetarian fare that goes way WAY beyond "pub food." The seasonal wasabi spring salad is to die for, and the artichoke/gouda sandwich is fantastic. Don't get me started on the soups: the amazing chilled strawberry soup in the summer, the creamy potato leek with lavender in the winter, the miso soup that's more like a meal.

And now, imagine my delight to see that Hopvine's chef, Michael Congdon, has released a whole book full of his amazing soups! Michael has an amazing concept of taste...once, when I sat by myself sipping his vichyssois, he came by my table and whispered conspiratorially "the taste will really pop with a little of this hot sauce." I do not like hot sauce. I lean towards un-spicy food and had never (seriously: NEVER EVER) added hot sauce to anything. But the way Michael suggested it, I figured I'd give it a shot. Just a tiny little dot of hot sauce on the top of the cold, creamy soup. And that tiny dot totally transformed the soup. There were many more dots after that, and I learned to trust Michael's advice absolutely.

And now there's this book! The whole first chunk is all about spices and tools, and might seem old hat for experienced chefs, but for culinary dullards like myself, it's sheer genius. And the soups! Dear god. I cannot wait to try some of these. Bonus: there are salad, cookie, and other non-soupy recipes in the back.

Soup is my favorite food! After eating at the Hopvine and enjoying the soups for quite some time, I was overjoyed when Michael Congdon brought many of those soups to us in the cookbook. I got my copy in the first week it was available, and made my favorite - the Southwestern Pumpkin - shortly thereafter. Delicious! I've also made the wonderful Potato Leek and the White Bean with Caramelized Shallots and Rum. A friend of mine purchased a copy of S.O.U.P.S. for me for Christmas, not knowing I already had one... but hey, it just meant that she now has a copy of her own. :) She and her guy made the Moroccan Lentil soup and loved it! That's going to be what's in my pot next, too. Michael, thank you so much for sharing your recipes with us!

The number of Seattlites who greet new residents and visitors to the city with the statement "Go to Capitol Hill and eat soup!" is unnerving, but those who take the advice aren't disappointed.

Michael Congdon, the talented, appealingly edgey, and occasionally irrascible cook at Seattle's Hopvine pub eventually wearied of being besieged for soup recipes and caved to pressure to write a book.

S.O.U.P.S. is the happy result. The book is as unpretentious and charming as the pub and its tattooed skinhead chef, but don't be fooled - it offers an extraordinary variety of well-written formulae for seriously tasty soups. (The "Butternut Squash with Pears and Cranberries" on page 125 is my current favorite, but ask me again tomorrow.)

Five star cooking from a venue that can't be bothered with stars. Now shut up and eat.