Chicken Soup For the Soul

When I was in 4th grade our teacher would read us Chicken Soup for the Soul. These were basically accounts of people's hardships, but they had some sort of lesson incorporated and they would make you feel better. From what I remember the table of contents focused on different themes such as love, sickness, or death. Our teacher would let us choose the theme, and for whatever reason we always chose death.

The year before one of our classmate's dad had died in a motorcycle accident, and that year we had a classmate whose mom died of breast cancer. Perhaps death was something that wasn't talked about much so we wanted exposure to it. Maybe we were sick in the head, who knows.

Yesterday I gathered with a few friends, and we made a butternut squash soup for ourselves, and for our friend who has Covid. If you ever want to make butternut squash soup my recommendation would be to cut the squash in half put it in the oven at like 375-425 (double check this) until you can easily put a fork or knife through it (fork tender) (probably takes 45 min - 1 hr) and then when the squash is cooled down enough to handle you can easily peel the skin off. Recently I've been working hard (not smart) and peeling the raw butternut squash myself.

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Last year I traveled to Mexico with a friend and we stumbled upon an amazing food stand that served chicken soup. This was one of if not the best meals we had on the whole trip, and one of the best meals I've had in my life. This blog post is really the way to save this information somewhere else so I don't have to keep bugging my friend for the details. Surely there are better ways to save this info like the star feature on google maps, but whatever.

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A very unexpected chicken soup is Molokhia which is an Egyptian soup that uses a leaf called jute mallow. One set of my great grandparents come from Egypt and Syria and that's how the soup has been introduced to my family.

Then there's the soup of my birthplace (Colombia) ajiaco. A reminder that in Spanish the j sounds more like an h!

Food provides an amazing way to bond with each other. On its own food nourishes us, but so do the conversations at the dinner table or at the food stand. Preparing a meal for someone can be very vulnerable what if they don't like the food, what if they find hair in the food? Cooking a meal together though is a wonderful way to bond, everyone takes part in the collective success or failure.

The book title Chicken Soup for the Soul is evoking the metaphor that in the same way that food heals us, learning about other's experiences can be healing for our soul. We can do both though! Food can heal the body and mind, stories can heal the body and mind, and food along with stories can be combined!

Thanks to my mom's insistence and structure basically every dinner I had growing up involved the whole family sitting at the dinner table. These days that my brother and I are out of the house they have their cat join them at the dinner table. When you think about the liter box to dining table pipeline it's kind of bad, but cats are clean!

In school, lunch was another key recreational social component. Interestingly enough the same teacher that read us Chicken Soup For the Soul incentivized us to behave by allowing us to watch movies during our lunch time in her class. This meant that this teacher sacrificed her alone time to allow us to watch movies. Although, I look back on that experience fondly I wonder if we missed out on connecting with each other even more during lunch.

Whereas in elementary school you couldn't leave your seat throughout the duration of lunch in high school we were afforded the ability to walk around the courtyard and chose where we wanted to sit which included sitting outside.

In middle school I do recall taking part in a food fight. There's definitely this notion when watching movies where something like a food fight occurs that movies exaggerate reality and that a lot of what happens in a movie wouldn't happen in real life. It's nice to be able to live your own movies, and to fulfill the loop of life imitates art, and art imitates life.

When we think of someone dying we even ask them what their last meal would be. It's also super cool how varied dining experiences can be. You can have something simple and delicious like the chicken soup food stand I mentioned, or you can experience the other end of the spectrum at a Michelin star restaurant. I think it's great when the food serves the dual purpose of nourishing you, but not stealing the spotlight to allow conversation between those eating. The combination of food and conversation is where the magic happens.

I was procrastinating buying some fruits by writing this, so I'm off to buy some food and maybe cook some lunch!