Stone Soup and our Semi-Celebrity Guest Chef

This week in Cooking Class, we read Stone Soup and (just like the characters in the book), everyone got to add an ingredient into the pot. This book was a Caldecott Medal winner in 1947 and is often read to children to teach lessons of cooperation and sharing. Thank you to Emmett's mom who lent us another version of the story by Jon J. Muth, which is set in China. In this version, three Monks travel to a village and discover that, due to recent misfortune, the town is lacking in joy and community. So, to cleverly solve this problem, the Monks build a fire, fill a soup pot with water, add three stones and begin to make Stone Soup. The curious villagers soon begin contributing to the soup with ingredients from their homes. Soon, everyone is eating delicious Stone Soup, celebrating, singing, dancing and happiness is restored to the village.

The Orange Room holds up the ingredients they plan to add to the Stone Soup!

Here are two children adding (with the help of our guest chef) ingredients they brought from home. 

Mrs. Dory joined the Green Room to sample their version of Stone Soup!

Everyone was so excited to add their ingredients to the pot!

The Purple Room enjoys their Stone Soup together! Thank you to Lindy and Petra's mom for assisting me in the kitchen on Friday. Not only was she an excellent sous chef (lots and lots of chopping), this was the most well documented cooking class so far (she took all the pictures on Friday)!

Recipe for Stone Soup

Corn

Onions

Celery

Potatoes

Garlic

Cabbage

Mushrooms

Peas

Parsley

Croutons

Diced tomatoes

Garbanzo beans

Cannelini beans

Broccoli

Red, orange and yellow bell peppers

Orzo

Carrots

bay leaf, salt and pepper

Chicken or vegetable stock

Here is a list of ingredients that we received from students (and a few that I supplied.) Each pot of soup was different and each equally delicious! While there are many ways to make a pot of soup, in the interest of time, we sauteed the vegetables in a pan to quickly cook them, then added them to our stock, while it was already heating up. 

Quotes of the Day: "Are we really gonna eat the stones?" "I cook things with my dad and I make things with my mom." "This soup is so good!"

Our Thursday guest chef is using American Sign Language to interpret the book while I read it! Here is a little info about Sally-Rose..............

The Thursday classes were so lucky to have Sally-Rose Cragin, (my husband’s youngest cousin on his dad’s side) as our semi-celebrity guest chef. If you are wondering what qualifies Sally-Rose to be a semi-celebrity chef….well, she didn’t really have a choice. Born and raised in New Orleans (note hyphenated name and big, gigantic bow in her hair) -- she is considered a semi-celebrity chef because everyone in the Duplantier family is a fabulous cook. The aunts, the uncles, the cousins – everybody.  And, other than weddings and one birthday party for 200 guests, they never, ever have an event catered, even though they are an extremely ceremonious bunch….so there are a LOT of events. There are some fabulous stories about the Duplantier Family cooking. For example, everything that Sally-Rose’s mom, Louise, makes is unbelievably good. Every holiday, and other random special occasions, she makes something commonly known as “The Dip”, which is a delicious layered goodness, made with sundried tomatoes, feta and goat cheese, pine nuts and other Mediterranean flavors. But, this is just a small example.  A more poignant example is when their son, Patrick, attended Catholic University and Aunt Louise and Uncle Tim would drive from New Orleans to DC to feed 200 students. They would bring French bread to make po boys and assemble them on long tables outside on my deck, vats of jambalaya would be reheated with chicken stock, and white chocolate bread pudding would be prepared in bulk from scratch. Since all this began during our first year of marriage and I was unaccustomed to these complicated cooking rituals, you wouldn’t believe the number of questions I had for my husband when these quarterly treks would occur. “So they are driving from New Orleans… just to cook…for college kids?” “They brought how many loaves of French bread?” “They need how many coolers?” Lately, Aunt Louise volunteers to cook for charity events any chance she can get. She has finally labeled herself (and anyone who helps her): “Cooks for a Cause.” In fact, every summer she volunteers as the camp cook at Krewe de Camp, a camp in Mandeville, Louisiana for special needs children, where Sally-Rose is a camp counselor. For one week, she prepares 300 meals 3 times a day…all from scratch. And remember the birthday party with 200 guests that was an actual catered event? Crazy lady that she is, Aunt Louise handmade 200 cupcakes -- six different flavors, each one better than the next.

But, wait, there’s more…family….lots more…

My in-laws (Sally-Rose’s aunt and uncle) are no strangers to cooking for large crowds. They used to regularly host their entire neighborhood (about 75 people) at their home for an outdoor fish fry. My mother-in-law makes oyster artichoke soup and the best crawfish etouffee that you have ever tasted. There is also her toffee made only at Christmas, her cornbread salad, her ham party biscuits, and her famous lemon cake. My father-in-law is always, and I mean always dismantling seafood in some way. You can find him filleting fish, shucking oysters, peeling the heads off of shrimp, picking crabs, peeling crawfish and – when he was working (because he is happily retired and having the time of his life) – it was not uncommon for him to prepare Chicken Sauce Piquant for his staff of 40 people.

One of Uncle David’s specialties is bananas foster and he prepared it in the outdoor kitchen for our engagement party. Aunt Susan’s gumbo takes 5 hours to make, 3 hours just to make the roux. When Uncle Sandy’s daughter, Michelle, announced her college graduation party on Facebook and 75 Auburn students said yes, he and Aunt Susie prepared all the food themselves…outside…in the rain. Aunt Jeanne’s macaroni and cheese is famous in at least 4 states. I could go on and on…really.

So, by virtue of being raised in this family, Sally-Rose is a semi-celebrity chef. She loves to cook and she also happens to be gluten free, which makes her experimentation in the kitchen much more adventurous. And, what is also really fun is that she is studying ASL (American Sign Language) at RIT (The Rochester Institute of Technology) in Rochester, NY………..so, she signed Stone Soup while I read it to the kids. They LOVED it! And, Sally-Rose has a few extreme food stories of her own. One example is when my daughter, Colette, turned 4 years old, Sally-Rose and her family threw the party. She and her sister Allison made and assembled a birthday cake that looked exactly like a jewelry box. It took 8 hours….now, that’s love!