J.R. Johnson

Still working on that mushroom soup recipe.

Here’s the thing: My default recipe is a little complicated.

I don’t mean that in a bad way, but in a creative sort of way. The truth is, the recipe for this soup is straightforward. Here, I’ll lay it out for you:

• mushrooms, lots
• chicken stock, lots
• sherry, ehhhh, fine, lots
• soy sauce and pepper
• beurre manie, more than seems reasonable (I usually use this much: 224g butter, 144g flour)
• also but optional: onions, garlic, herbs

The devil is, of course, in the details. I wrote out the whole recipe and discovered two things. 

One, I have a hard time doing a thing the easy way. Well, that’s not entirely true. I tend to take a recipe, strip it down to the basics, then build it back up again so that it has what I consider the essentials of taste and texture. This leads to a basic recipe with many, many caveats.

And two, my memory for little things like quantities is not great. Both of these factors are further complicated by the fact that I never quite make a recipe the same way, and the point is to hand this off to people who want it to taste the way it did at a certain time (2023) and place (the wilds of northern Ontario). 

So… stay tuned!

* * *