Cauliflower Soup

When Coleen was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, I was like most husbands. Lost and helpless. I didn’t understand the disease, diagnosis, treatment or the future. I was scared for Coleen, for us and for our family and I wanted to fix her. There had to be some answer on the internet or hidden somewhere that could provide a cure for her. There had to be something I could do to make a difference.

Coleen was always very interested in food. Even as a child she would sometimes read cookbooks and that never stopped for her. She loved to find recipes, make them and serve them with love to her family and friends. It was one of her many ways of showing love. Of course, Coleen loved to eat good food too and I always thought that was why she liked to cook so much. During her initial rounds of chemotherapy, Coleen didn’t always have much of an appetite and sometimes struggled to take in the proper amount of nourishment. It was important for her to maintain her strength and eat well and I tried to help with that.

Never an active cook, I consider myself underrated in the kitchen. I learned early with Coleen that we worked best together with me helping her with menial tasks like chopping vegetables and opening wine. She was best left alone with her art of cooking while I provided conversation, a willing appetite and after dinner clean-up duties. But when she was in treatment, she didn’t always feel up to the task and had to assign me some cooking responsibilities. She found easy recipes that contained healthy foods that were considered cancer fighters and when she wasn’t feeling up to making them herself, she trusted me with them. One of the those was cauliflower soup. It was easy to make, tasted good and required little clean-up. To this day, those are the three key ingredients to any recipe I make. The soup required cauliflower, chopped onion, chicken stock, some seasoning and a touch of pepper jack cheese. I chopped, sautéed, boiled, and lightly pureed at the end. Then served the soup with a sprinkle of the cheese on top. Coleen liked it, I liked it and I felt that I had made a contribution to her care.

Now that I live alone, buying food and cooking for myself has become a challenge. I enjoy it, I just want to get better at it and buy the right amounts of the right ingredients so that I can cook and eat well while minimizing waste. That’s probably a goal of most cooks I guess. Coleen certainly left me with enough recipes to last a long time but I could not find the one for the cauliflower soup. Admittedly, it had been a long time since we made it but the recipe had to be here somewhere because she always kept the good ones. I couldn’t find it so I consulted my friend Google and found hundreds of recipes for cauliflower soup. There was one that was similar to our original and met my required standards of easy, good and quick clean-up.

I love that recipe and I love that soup. I have made it three times now during the past month and it keeps getting better. I learned from Coleen to never be afraid of modifying a recipe when you figure a way to make it better. She did that a lot. When I made the soup yesterday, I added a pinch of crushed red pepper and a potato and instead of pureeing it at the end in a blender, I used a potato masher and did it by hand. That left the soup with small chunks of the vegetables instead of creaming it all. I liked it much better that way.

The past week wasn’t without its share of challenge for me and it all caught up to me yesterday. I was feeling out of sorts and like I had lost some of my traction. After a very healing reiki session and advice from Lindsay and Rebecca, I was feeling a little better. Tired, but better. I stopped for groceries and the first thing I saw in the store was cauliflower and even though I had just made the soup two weeks ago, I bought another head. It just felt like I needed it.

Can cauliflower soup be therapeutic? In my case it mostly certainly is. It takes me back to Coleen and her fight and reminds me that I helped her with that. I think of her when making it and I know she would be happy with my interest, effort, and hopefully, the results. My cauliflower soup provides the perfect diversion for me. It gives me a task that is easily performed and completed and leaves me with warmth, comfort and satisfaction. I can put on some music, open a beer, and have homemade soup within the hour. It’s not the exact recipe as before, but it’s close. That’s okay though, because nothing is exactly the same anymore. It’s like that branch falling off the tree and a new one growing to replace the fallen. Same type of branch, different spot, different shade. Same type of soup, different recipe, different taste. Different me.

Here’s the recipe I found for Dad’s Creamy Cauliflower Soup Bon Appetit!

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