Phew. I think we’re finally caught up? These last few recipes – for Mare’s chili, Vera’s pasjul, and Swim Cafe’s Potage St. Germain should be the last stragglers from our final Soup & Bread of the 2012 season. Some of our other cooks posted recipes on their own sites – Mike Sula’s recipe for authentic Southern Illinois burgoo can be found over at the Reader’s food blog, while the team of Ellen Malloy and Grant Kessler provide the recipes for their First Step Soup and Spring Garlic Soup on the blog for their new 100 Meals Project–a noble endeavor in which Ellen and Grant hope to eat 100 meals with people involved at various points in the process of growing, foraging, processing, distributing, selling, and cooking food across the United States–and in the process build some bridges between groups in an increasingly factionalized foodscape.

With these recipes we’re officially wrapping the 2012 Soup & Bread season at the Hideout, but I’ll be posting erratically in the coming months to let you know about upcoming events and general misadventures on the soup trail.

In the coming week, I’m looking forward to talking soup, art, and hospitality at the University of Chicago, to sharing soup with the Sunday Soup visionaries, to wrapping the Re-Thinking Soup season at Jane Addams Hull-House, and then to sitting down at ThreeWalls for a salon-style discussion on “food and farming as regional artworks.” That’s all between Friday and Tuesday, which tells me, if nothing else, that the cultural appetite for soup, bread, and all that surrounds it may not be satiated just … quite … yet.

Ingredients
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 red and 1 green bell pepper, chopped
2 carrots, grated or sliced thin
1 1/2 cups corn
1 zucchini, diced
2 cans kidney beans
2 15-ounce cans diced tomatoes
1/2 cup water (skipped the water on the 2nd batch. If you use canned kidney beans, there will be plenty of water)
1 1/2 tablespoons chili powder
1 teaspoon cumin
1 big sloppy dash Bronco Bob’s Mango Chipotle Sauce
dash Tamazula hot sauce

Preparation
Combine all ingredients in a crock pot or slow cooker. Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours.

From Vera Videnovich

I didn’t get a photo of Vera, or her soup, at the final S&B of the year — so here’s one from 2009, shot when I took a trip out to her farm in Western Michigan. There, on land she shares with her brothers and a flock of adorable sheep, Vera grows okra, delicious tiny cucumbers, eggplant, beans, tomatoes, and all manner of peppers — all using minimal pesticides and no chemical inputs. She also spins and dyes her own wool, and sells both her produce and her yarn and knitwear at local farmers markets and craft fairs, and runs a CSA vegetable subscription with pickups at the Hyde Park Art Center and the Empty Bottle — and supplies local restaurants like Nightwood and Revolution Brewing with farm-fresh veggies to boot. One of the hardest-working people I know, she is also a good cook! She shared this Serbian standard, along with a plate of zeljenica, on April 11.

Ingredients
1 bag dry Great White Northern beans
carrots (chopped)
celery (chopped)
onions (chopped
bay leaf(s)
dried chili peppers (optional)
salt (to taste)
zapraska (see below)

Preparation
This is a basic recipe so feel free to figure out your own quantities. Just add everything to a large pot and cook below boiling for a few hours until the beans are soft. Great Northern beans will collapse and make their own “čorba” (stew). Our family recipe includes a flourless roux called zapraska to add a little peppery flavor. Serbs love their peppers. If your soup is watery you can add flour to the zapraska but you will have to cook the soup for another half hour for the flour to “cook.”

*Zapraska
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon paprika

Heat the oil in a small frying pan then add the paprika and stir, let it slightly darken, be careful to not burn it, then add to the stew.

From Swim Café

“OK, I love the French,” reports Swim owner Karen Gerod, purveyor of this classic fresh pea soup. “French language, French cooking, French kissing – wait, they didn’t invent that. Well, you get my drift. And I love dishes with a short list of ingredients, things so simple they almost don’t need a recipe. Things that make one ingredient sing. So this is my Swim ode to spring.”

Ingredients
6 leeks, white parts sliced thin
1 pound butter (really!)
salt
fresh ground black pepper
4 pounds fresh peas, or frozen petit pois
4 cups vegetable broth
3 sprigs of mint (about 10 leaves)
6 cups half and half

Preparation
Sweat leeks in the butter with the salt until soft. Add one pound of peas–if using fresh, cook until tender, if using frozen do not thaw first. Puree the pea and leek mixture with the mint in batches in a blender until very smooth, adding broth to the batches to thin he mixture. Return to the pot. Stir in the peas, again cooking until just tender if fresh, otherwise frozen. Add the half and half and copious amounts of fresh ground black pepper and more salt to taste. Voila! Bon appétit! Top with sour cream if desired.

In the ten days since we wrapped Soup & Bread for the 2012 season, I started a new job, met up with my family for a long-planned vacation, did my taxes, cleaned the house, picked up a big plaque from Time Out Chicago, went square dancing, and slept a lot. What I have NOT done is catch up on emails and recipes from the final Soup & Bread, of which there are many. But, you know, soon. I promise.

Thankfully, while I was lolling around the pool in Tucson, other people stepped up to the job of documenting our blowout Soup & Bread (& Pie): Louisa Chu, blogging at WBEZ, provided her own recap, in which she says some embarrassingly nice things. Mike Sula dished up the background on his burgoo over at the Reader. And Ellen Malloy and Grant Kessler, who kicked off their own community building project at Soup & Bread, provide this overview on their “100 Meals” site.

I *can* report, with deep pleasure, that with this final Soup & Bread we decisively hit, and passed, our $30,000 goal for total soup dollars raised to date. Donations the last few weeks have benefitted the Warming Center in Logan Square, the Seton Sandwich Kitchen, and the Irving Park Community Food Pantry. On their behalf, thanks again, so much, to all who came, cooked, ate, and gave generously.

Lastly, just in case you haven’t gotten enough soup in your system, you have a few more chances in the coming weeks. This Thursday, April 26, the kind people who run the Public Square’s Cafe Society program have invited me to WBEZ’s north side bureau in Rogers Park to talk and eat soup with all comers. That’s at 6 p.m. and it’s free.

Then, on Saturday, May 5, the Smart Museum symposium Of Hospitality, part of the ongoing exhibit Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, wraps with a community Soup & Bread dinner. That’s at the U. of C.’s new Logan Center for the Arts at 5:30 p.m.; it’s free but registration is required. I’ll be there with books, and (even better) the LA-based Fallen Fruit collective will provide liquid refreshment, in the form of vodka infused with found local fruit.

On Tuesday, May 8, I meet up with Fallen Fruit again for a salon-style discussion at ThreeWalls titled Rooted: Food and Farming Initiatives as Regional Artworks. Joining us are Eric May (who I wrote about last year for Time Out), Fereshteh Tootsi, and Bitter Melon’s Andi Sutton. I am really looking forward to meeting and talking about food, art, and community with all these arty types, whose work I have long admired from afar. If you do to, you should join us! The ThreeWalls salon starts at 7 p.m. at the gallery, 119 N. Peoria.

New ideas for summer and beyond are simmering, slowly, on the back burners of the Soup & Bread brain trust. Stay tuned for more as they come to a boil. And, in the meantime, enjoy this coming respite from bad soup metaphors in online prose.

And thanks again to all — especially Sheila Sachs, Hope Williams, and everyone at the Hideout — for a swell soup season. We could not do it without you.

A hearty potato and chicken soup, ajiaco is the official dish of Bogota. Paz brought it to Soup & Bread on the same day she (finally) got her green card. Feel free to substitute small Yukon Golds, she says, if you can’t find the Andean model below.

Ingredients
1-2 pounds chicken (I use a mixture of boneless chicken breast and bone-in leg quarters)
2 pounds (20 or more?) papas criollas, an Andean potato.  Leave whole. (Chicagoans can get them frozen at La Unica on Devon just east of Clark. )
4 large russet potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes
5 medium Red Potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 ears of corn on the cob (cut into about 2-inch rounds)
1 large Spanish onion, diced
4 large cloves of garlic, minced
salt
black pepper
guascas (NO SUBSTITUTE — this is an Andean herb you can also get at La Unica)
water
oil

Garnishes
sour cream
capers
avocado

Preparation
Brown the chicken in a little vegetable oil. Add the onion and the garlic and cook until golden. Fill half the pot with water, and add salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer. When chicken is done, take it out and shred it by hand. Add potatoes, corn, and add a healthy portion of guascas (like, a handful). Add enough water to cover potatoes, but don’t make it too watery. Bring to a boil, then simmer until potatoes have pretty much disintegrated. Put most of the shredded chicken back, but you can leave some on the side as a garnish, although it’s not a requirement. When soup is done, serve with a dollop of sour cream, capers to taste, and some chopped avocado.

Simple, cheap and hearty as f***.