Last week I wrote a post about Alton Brown’s concept of a personal Horcrux dish (see that post here if you missed it).

After some contemplation, I came up with two….well, one dish and one category.

I have to say my lifelong Horcrux dish is Spinach Lasagna. I’ve been making that consistently since I was maybe 15? That is because around that time, my youngest brother who was around 8 decided to become a vegetarian.

Now, back then, vegetarianism wasn’t nearly as much of a lifestyle as it is now….or at least not among white middle class Washington DC suburanites. He and my mother fought about it for a while. She worried that a vegetarian diet wouldn’t provide the nutrients he need to grow. Eventually, he stopped fighting, but just didn’t eat any meat served to him. He didn’t argue, he didn’t complain–he just didn’t eat it. Defeated, my mother began studying vegetarian cooking and discovered she could fix him healthy meals that would support his continued growth. So she started making vegetarian meals for him. My middle brother, on the other hand, was a total meat and potatoes guy at that time. I had lots of food allergies, including nuts, which is one of the big protein sources for vegetarian. So my poor mother made several versions of our nightly dinner.

We continued to eat our traditional holiday meals: turkey and all the trimmings for Thanksgiving, a roast beef buffet for Christmas, grilled hot dogs and hamburgers for 4th of July, etc. The only thing was that we added a spinach lasagna as the vegetarian entree. Making the spinach lasagna became my assignment for all the holiday meals.

So spinach lasagna evokes family and celebration to me. I can’t even imagine how many I’ve made over the years. When I made it for my birth family, my mother bought the ingredients and I always used the same brand of spaghetti sauce, lasagna noodles, mozzarella cheese, etc. But Alton says that a Horcrux dish is also one that you continue to fiddle with, trying different variations depending on the circumstances and your whim at the time. Especially since I’ve gotten into sustainable local food, I’ve tried lots of different things. Sometimes I make my own tomato sauce with the heirloom tomatoes at the Farmers Market. Sometimes I make my own ricotta from local fresh milk. Sometimes I make my own pasta noodles. Sometimes I replace the noodles with vegetables, like zucchini or eggplant. Sometimes I’ve done ethnic variations, like Mexican Spinach Lasagna with tortillas (sometimes even homemade tortillas) instead of pasta and Mexican spices and cheeses replacing the traditional one. It’s still the week of Passover, and I’ve made Matzo Spinach Lasagna once or twice.

However I make it, spinach lasagna is associated with community, holidays, and special meals with special people. And it’s fun, because there are so many ways to make it differently each time. So I think that’s what Alton means as a Horcrux dish.

But if I can also choose a category, I would say it would be soup. Which is ironic, because I almost never had soup growing up. I didn’t grow up with memories of “Nana’s homemade chicken noodle soup” because I never lived close to my grandparents. Much of my childhood, we were living in England while they were in the US. I don’t remember my grandparents ever making me a single meal.

So when I was growing up, I only ate soup when I was sick. And when I had soup, it was Campbell’s. Which gets the job done, I suppose, but isn’t really a culinary delight.

My attitude towards soup changed when I started cooking for my then-boyfriend, now-husband, who LOVED soup. When my son came along, he was also a great soup lover. So, obviously, it was time for me to get on the soup bandwagon.

What I’ve since discovered is how varied and healthy (or not), filling, and delicious soups can be. It turns out there is a whole WORLD of soup possibilities beyond the limited options provided by Campbell’s.

Since then, I’ve made dozens of different soups. But some of my specials are:

• Stews: Some combination of meat, potatoes, and vegetable in a thick broth is my husband’s favorite. He prefers beef, but I usually make them with chicken or ground turkey
• Oriental Soups: My son, who has been a vegetarian for a few years now, is really into Asian soups. So he likes vegetarian varieties of soups like pho or ramen. After his semester abroad in Indonesia, he wanted me to make Sayur Nangka dan Nasi Kuning (Curried Jackfruit Stew with Yellow Rice). But did he bring me an Indonesian cookbook? NO! Of course, I had never eaten this and had no idea what it should taste like. But we visited our local Asian markets and came up with a version that he thought tasted reasonably authentic.
• Spicy Lentil and Sausage Soup: This soup is a favorite of one of my friends. She is such a giving person, so if she is sick, or even for no reason at all, I’ll sometimes make a batch to give or to share with her. My husband and I really like this soup as well, so it’s not like its a sacrifice to make it for her lol. But it has special connotations for me, because I think of it as her soup.
• NOT-Cream of (fill in vegetable here): If I’m going to make a vegetable soup, I want it to be healthy, right? So why drown the vegetables in a sea of heavy cream? I’ve experimented with lots of other, healthier ingredients that, when pureed, produce the same kind of creamy backbone to the broth in which the designated vegetable is embedded. NOT-Cream of Tomato and NOT-Cream of Broccoli are my most common ones, but it is a go-to for me whenever I overbuy vegetables at the Farmers Market.
• Lasagna Soup: My Horcrux crossover! I often bring food to potlucks and such at our Spiritual Center. The thing is that we have a lot of people with specialized diets: vegan, gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free, no nuts (that’s ME), and such. So Lasagna Soup is my favorite in that context. I make a vegan tomato soup with spinach (see above). Then I bring mix-ins. First, there is pasta. I usually use cavatappi, which is a tubular pasta like penne but shaped in a spiral, which evokes the curled edges of lasagna noodles to me. I have a container of ricotta and grated mozzarella for those who want their soup richer. I also bring grated parmesan for those who want a little cheese boost without the fat and calories of ricotta. I also bring chopped spicy Italian sausage for the carnivores. This allows everyone to customize their soup bowl to their needs/preferences.
• Creamy Chicken Chipotle Corn Chowder: This may be my personal favorite. As Saturday Night Live character Stefon would say, “This soup has everything.” It has the luscious mouth feel of real cream, contrasting with the tongue tingle produced by a heavy load of chipotle chilis. That is also offset by the corn’s sweetness and dark chicken meat’s chewiness.

If you use the search engine to the right of the website and type in “soup,” you can explore some of the many soups I’ve discussed in prior posts.

Anyway, you get the picture. Once liberated from the idea of soup as Campbell’s, there are so many different directions in which you can take this thing called soup. It is something I serve at holiday meals as well as for everyday food. It is also something I bring a lot to people who are ill or grieving.

But what really makes this a Horcrux food for me is Damon Young’s essay published in The Washington Post by entitled “Soup is so much more than food“. He describes what soup has come to mean to me so much more beautifully than I can. I think you should be able to read his thoughts here at https://wapo.st/3RnOJK5 as a gift article from my Washington Post subscription.

So those are my Horcrux foods. Please share yours in the comments below.