Today I made my favorite vegan soup that has kale, collard greens, beet greens, white cabbage, red cabbage, carrots, lima beans, green peas, cilantro, baby potatoes, and fresh rosemary.
N doesn’t like it and calls it “the blockade soup” in reference to the blockade of Leningrad by the German troops in WWII when people had nothing to eat and had to make soup out of wilted leaves and tree bark. So I made baked turkey legs for N.
Clarissa's Blog 
Different context, but I have a friend from another part of Eastern Europe who refuses to eat beans because that’s all she ate when her city was a war zone. It’s interesting how food can bring out these strong war-time associations.
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L would love it, and I love the name for it. Is there a recipe?
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You just drop it all in the water, starting with carrots, then potatoes, then when the water boils, the cabbage, then green lima beans and green peas, then all the leafy stuff, ending with the cilantro. Add salt and herbs to taste.
I think it’s delicious.
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Do you think N night like cactus soup?
I’ve got literally about a ton of smashed saguaro cactus lying in my side yard now waiting to be cleaned up. For flavor, you can also add the leaves from the mesquite tree that fell on it.
Arizona is in the monsoon season right now, with periodic short but fierce storms. My neighborhood got hit by a “micro burst” (essentially a miniature tornado) over the weekend, and there are trees and cacti down all over the place.
The mesquite tree in my backyard split down the middle — the half still standing with continue to live — but the falling half took down my 20-ft.-tall saguaro cactus, which hit the cement wall surrounding my back and side yard, and splattered all over the place.
Actually, I was quite lucky: The falling cactus didn’t hit my house or the swimming pool system equipment or the other tree almost in its path, and the cement wall wasn’t damaged. (A neighbor around the block had a mesquite tree smash through his living room window.)
A new saguaro cactus would cost $1,000 a foot, so I probably won’t replace it.
Anyway, free cactus if you want any!
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It’s a long-standing dream of his to try cactus soup, actually.
I’m glad you only suffered limited damage from the storm!
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