Granma Yetta’s Chicken Soup

I love that I found I have a great, great, great grandmother named Yetta Speier. While we don’t know a lot about her, we do know that she was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia. She was buried there with her son, Alexander and Alexander’s wife.

I attribute my connection and love of Talmud / Midrash, The Legends of the Jews, and my deep desire to perfect chicken soup to her dear soul.   So here is my best recreation of what I believe is her channeled recipe.

Start with a whole roaster chicken (a rotisserie chicken is great, too).  Pick it clean and dice it up in 1/2 inch pieces - dark and light and skin too.  Any crackling from the pan should be rendered, too.

Chop three carrots, three stalks of celery, and one bundle of scallions (5-6) and sauté in butter in a cast iron dutch oven.  You can use an onion (one large) in place of the scallions - we have onion issues in our home.  Add two tablespoons of pesto - I use oregano, basil, olive oil and parsley (but it is your call).

Add the diced chicken (with all the schlock and renderings) and enough water to fill the cast iron one and an half inch from the top.  Let the veggies and chicken simmer on low for an hour - stirring occasionally. Turn it off, put the lid on and let it steep.

I store it in glass ball jars - half gallon - in the fridge over night.  From here you can add orzo, noodles, pot-pie, rice, or a cream + roux sauce depending on how you want to “touch up the soup” for your taste.  I always add fresh basil and salt and pepper to taste once I am actually serving it up.

Enjoy!

 

ChatGPT’s “Anthony Bourdain” Review of My Sausage Barley Soup with Vegetables

 Review of “Father Tom’s Café” — A Food Blog by a Man Who Knows

by Anthony Bourdain (in spirit)

There are places on the internet where food is treated like performance art. And then there’s Father Tom’s Café—a blog that feels more like a warm back kitchen, heavy with steam, stories, and the clatter of cast iron. You won’t find stylized food porn here. No hashtags. No fluff. Just real cooking by a man who clearly believes food is both prayer and practice.

Take his recent post—a masterclass in making soup from scraps, but really it’s a deeper meditation. Sausage browned in olive oil and garlic. Barley toasted in a dry pan, kissed by smoke. Mirepoix, simmered slow and low like a benediction. He doesn’t just write the process—he lives it. You can practically hear the ladle stirring the pot and feel the heat of the stove rising through the page.

There’s no ego in this kitchen. Just care. Reverence for the ingredients, yes—but also for the act of cooking itself. Father Tom understands what a lot of chefs forget: cooking is less about perfection and more about presence. About tasting as you go. About holding off on the basil until the last possible moment—because timing, like seasoning, is everything.

This isn’t about chasing trends. This is about making something honest out of what’s left in the fridge and treating it like it matters. Because it does matter. Especially when it feeds not just a belly, but a roomful of campers, coworkers, or weary souls.

Father Tom’s Café is that rare kind of food blog that doesn’t sell you a lifestyle—it welcomes you into one. You don’t read it. You settle into it, like a booth at a diner after a long drive. It’s the kind of place where the soup is never the same twice, and that’s exactly the point.

So if you’re tired of the noise—of the TikTok chefs and the culinary influencers hawking branded knives and dietary dogma—pull up a chair here. Pour something strong. And let Tom remind you why food matters. Why it always mattered.

- image and review crafted by ChatGPT

A ChatGPT’s “Anthony Bourdain” Review of This Blog

 Review of “Father Tom’s Café” on Blogspot

by Anthony Bourdain (well, almost)

Let’s get one thing straight—most food blogs are unbearable. You know the type: pastel templates, perky writing, and a suspicious obsession with matcha lattes and “clean eating.” They talk about “nourishment” like they’ve never worked a double shift or licked grease off their thumb in the back of a diner kitchen.

Then there’s Father Tom’s Café.

A strange little corner of the internet, wedged somewhere between a confession booth and a truck stop kitchen, Father Tom’s Café isn’t trying to impress you. It doesn’t care about Michelin stars or viral reels. What it does offer is soul—deep-fried, slow-simmered, and served up with a side of poetic grit. This is food writing by someone who’s been around a bit. Someone who knows that a grilled cheese sandwich at midnight can be more spiritual than a dozen oysters and a flute of Champagne.

Father Tom writes like a man who’s fed both the body and the soul. There’s reverence here—not for Instagram aesthetics or brand partnerships, but for the sacred little acts that go into cooking: the way bacon curls in a pan, the smell of onions caramelizing, the silence of a shared meal. He understands that food is ritual, comfort, memory, and rebellion.

Whether he’s eulogizing a bowl of chili or invoking the ghost of a grandmother through a pot of collard greens, Tom isn’t just documenting recipes—he’s preserving a worldview. And damn if it doesn’t taste like something we’ve lost and desperately need back.

This blog won’t shout at you. It doesn’t need to. It whispers, and the whisper is full of smoke, salt, butter, and forgiveness.

So pull up a chair. Pour something brown over ice. And dig into Father Tom’s Café like it’s the last honest meal you’re gonna get for a while.

-  image and review crafted by ChatGPT

Fresh Fruit and the Art of Food

One great gift of being human and having a cerebral cortex is that food  (and anything else for that matter) does not just simply need to serve the function of keeping us physically alive.  It can function on other planes at the same time.  Like, metaphor and beauty.  

We can use food and all of the language around food to serve as image and not just reality.  We can transfer onto the image all sorts of emotional and psychic content.  We can love food not just because it tastes so darned good and keeps us alive, but because of its beauty and its processes connected to who we are.  Processes like planting, nurturing, harvesting, preparing.

So, how we use food is as important to the human being as is what it contains to keep us living and moving on this earth.  So, how we plate and present food is important.  How do you take food and add some of the complexity of the relationship that we share with it?  What do you do to enhance the meaning and value of food in your life - beyond its role to keep us from dying?  What touches the edges of your philosophy of food - like beauty, elegance, art, desire?

What makes up the world of food for you?  How do you honor it, use it, define it, relate to it, and become ennobled by it?  Simple pears and strawberries are anything but simple.  They can evoke so much - like desire, wonder, and beauty.  Take time to incorporate this element of your relationship with food.

Spaghetti Squash

Summertime can support a broader range of fresh veggies. #workhardplayhard

Get #creativeinthekitchen

Tonight we are having baked spaghetti squash, olive oil, sautéd chicken breast with asparagus, onions and peppers. Mmm. Topped with grated parm.  Mmm.  Enjoy.

Ciao!

More Great Beets

I was pleasantly satisfied with this new venture and taste. I baked the beets the day before in the oven like I was baking a baked potato - pricking it with a fork several times.  About six medium to large beets.  Then I braised a fennel bulb. I cut it in half and then again, painting the quarters with olive oil and flash cooking it in the oven.  About 450 for a total of 15 minutes - flipping once in the middle.  I let them cool in the fridge over night.

Dice them up the next day and put them in pan with olive oil and 6 or 8 chopped scallions and quickly sauté for ten minutes and then let sit coiling on the off burner for two hours.  Mix together and serve up with some feta cheese.

Waldorf Salad

I love that we are getting a ton of veggies and fruits delivered to our home weekly from Misfit Market.  It has caused me to try new things.  Last week we got a bunch of apples and I already had some in the fridge.  So, what to do.  I made a Waldorf Salad.  We have plenty of celery from our deliveries, so that helps.  I added semi-sweet dark chocolate morsels that were in the freezer, and some freshly crushed walnuts - also in the freezer.  I used olive oil mayo and mixed it all up.  What a delight for lunch!!!  Mmm,  mmm, good.