Minestrone goulash

Minestrone has always been a winter favourite of mine. That hearty, healthy combination of vegetables, meat and pasta, served piping hot on a freezing day (preferably while it is raining outside). It’s soup but it’s not really soup, is it. Minestrone is nobody’s entrée. It’s the headliner. The star.

I made minestrone for friends on the weekend and you can possibly picture my disappointment when, after tossing fistfuls of carrots, swedes, parsnips, celery, onion, garlic, spinach, bacon and goodness knows what else into a pot on the weekend; searing them all up; (calling various members of my family into the kitchen and demanding “Smell this!” while wafting the fragrant steam towards my nose with my hands like a perfumer); then adding in stock, red wine, tinned tomatoes, cannellini beans, pearl barley, pasta and seasoning; everything simmered down to an end result of…

Bland.

I actually don’t even know how that happens! It’s the same as the mystery of the slow cooker. In goes an abundance of fresh, fragrant and delicious ingredients. Out comes wet cardboard.

About half an hour and a lot of seasoning, dried herbs and a good squeeze of lemon later, I managed to bring the flavour up to “probably tolerable,” just in time for our guests to arrive. But unfortunately, I’d also managed to reduce the liquid down to, well frankly, not liquid anymore.

“It’s goulash!” laughed my dinner-guests. “Hungarian minestrone goulash!”

So that’s what we ate for dinner. We spooned our “goulash” onto warm and crusty bread rolls, topped it with shaved parmesan and cracked pepper, washed it down with red wine, and in the end it wasn’t great but it wasn’t entirely bad, either. Nobody rejected it outright, but nobody was asking for seconds, if you catch my drift.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of leftovers. Maybe I’ll cook up some mince and make a cottage pie? Or maybe a chicken pie with a creamy sauce? What would you do? I’m open to your suggestions…

But my point is this. Sometimes, life feels a little bit like a failed minestrone. So many lovely things go into it, and yet, despite all that abundance and goodness, the flavour is missing.

And my theory in life, as in the kitchen, is that possibly there’s just too much. Too much happening, too much to do, too much on the go. None of it is bad - most of it is very good! - but it’s hard to appreciate the little things when there are a hundred little things and big things and medium things clamouring for your attention, your focus, and your accountability, at the same time.

Perhaps you recognise this feeling? It’s the overwhelm of a big and fully-lived life. The washed-out state of a person stretched so far, and in so many places at once, that they begin to lose their flavour.

I believe there were too many ingredients in my minestrone soup. My real soup, that is. None of them was allowed to sing because they were all in the same big pot fighting for the microphone.

My life is a little bit the same right now: too many ingredients, all competing to shine. It doesn’t matter how sweet the parsnip is: put it into a pot with a couple of cloves of garlic, chopped onions, a tin of tomatoes, fresh herbs, and a heap of other ingredients, and you will never taste the nuance of the parsnip.

Could we be parsnips, you and me? Like parsnips, we’re a little bit sweet, a little bit subtle, and definitely not for everyone. But we’re not going anywhere.

Life won’t always look like this, and I know the true me (and the true you) is still in there somewhere, buried in the minestrone goulash of life. (Case in point: I’ve been making mail art lately! Mail art! Who knew I even still had it in me? I’ll share some photos with you in a future letter.)

Some people turn life’s lemons into lemonade. I make a halfway-decent goulash out of a lacklustre, mostly-evaporated minestrone soup. And if I’m very clever, maybe I’ll have discovered a new recipe for a more-than-decent chicken pie.

I’ll let you know about the pie. Make of the metaphor what you will.

Yours truly,
Naomi x