The Soup Of Love

For decades my mother has made a beef barley soup that is about the best thing ever. Beef, broth, barley, and oodles and oodles of mushrooms*. A bit of onion and maybe some carrot and garlic. 

It is not an especially complicated soup, though she does start by making her own broth. It takes time, to be certain. To find the ingredients, to prep, to let things simmer.

I could totally handle making this soup.

But I have never made it. 

I wait for my mother to visit, just once or twice a year. We spend an afternoon shopping for the ingredients and she spends the better part of a day making the broth and then the soup. Often there are homemade rolls as well. I have some, and we freeze much of it in one-quart containers--Mom has been known to label the lids with love notes, while I do more possessive/ warning tags. "NOT YOUR SOUP!**" and the like.

Those little care packages are there for me when I am sick of body or heart, or just wishing that my family of origin were less than twelve hundred miles away.



*Truthfully, this should be known as a mushroom-barley-beef soup, but that's not the current practice.

**My sons sometimes need reminding that not all things are theirs to devour.