“If you can cook good soup, you can cook anything”

I was so lucky to have the best cooking mentor ever. Food was her love language and everyone around her felt that love. When I was a toddler, she would pull out pots, pans and mixing bowls while arming me with wooden spoons and canned goods. I would sit right in the kitchen floor and “cook” with her side by side. When I got a little older, she would put me on a step stool and I “helped”. I’m not sure how much I really contributed when I was that little, but those experiences set off a snowball that continued to run downhill. Fast forward; right around my 19th birthday, I got serious about cooking. It all started in a town which was famous for its residents like Martha Stewart and David Letterman (Westport, Connecticut). I had taken a leave of absence from university and was traveling around the country. Westport, which is 35 minutes by train from NYC was my first stop on this journey from school into “the real world”. I was there to rent a room in a friend’s family home while I was saving money to drive cross country to CA. 

I ended up getting a job in a delicatessen. It was in a strip mall where there was a grocery store a few doors down. The owner had purchased the business for his ne’er do well son (who I didn’t meet for the first few months as he was in the Bahamas partying for most of that time.) It was named The Carousel because the owner absolutely loved the Coney Island Carousel and, in fact, we had an original Coney Island Carousel horse in the front window worth a small fortune. We also had carousel mirrors lining the walls between the entrance and the order/pickup counter in the back. 

Initially, my job was making sandwiches, taking orders, running the cash register, etc. We had a chef who cooked the breakfast sandwiches and made the daily soups. He was a nice guy, but always in trouble and was let go. The owner tasked the baker we ordered our bread from to make our soups and they were just awful. The vegetable soup was basically water with boiled vegetables. His bread was unbelievable but this man was a baker and definitely not a cook. I told the owner I could do better than that (even though I didn’t have a clue if I could). I called my mentor. Moonie’s advice was that if you could cook soup, you can cook anything and I believe she was right. Soups are the one thing a beginning cook can use as a spring board. 

The owner told me I could shop for ingredients at the grocery store and use money from the cash register. I had free rein to cook whatever I wanted, so I bought some cookbooks and the next thing I knew, customers would line up and some would even come in each morning to see what was on the stove for lunch. I made every kind of soup you could think of and repeated many of the favorites to put next to new experiments “just in case”. It was on of the most fun jobs I’ve ever had. I meant really… There is no greater compliment for a Cali girl than to have your New England Clam Chowder requested by New Englanders! Cooking has been one of my biggest passions ever since and I’ve never looked back.