Pot au Feu

J’aime la soupe! J’aime le potage! I like making it, I like smelling it while it simmers, I like eating it—it’s my favorite. I pick up Eloise at school and we walk through town and up the hill to our house, arriving at home around 4pm most days. Just in time to start something cooking.

At the shop near Eloise’s school, I spied a tidy little bundle of vegetables that looked like pre-soup to me. It bought it for less than three euros and translated the sticker when I got home: Pot au Feu. Google told me this means “pot on fire,” and is a traditional French winter soup. Swoon. Indeed, I found everything I needed to make it within the little basket:

Belgian choux (cabbage), poireaux (leeks), persil (parsley), navet (turnip), carotte (carrot), oignon (onion), Spanish celery vert, laurier, and thym (thyme). Everything was Belgian except the celery.

It couldn’t be easier—I chopped up everything except the turnip and simmered it with some chicken and broth for a couple hours. In the last 30 minutes, I added the turnip and a few small potatoes left over from the farmers market, and chopped up the chicken. Everyone liked it, except Eloise, who in retrospect was coming down with a cold. She only ate bites of crusty baguette from the corner store. Fresh bread is a prerequisite with soup and makes an astonishing mess. Sometimes I just vacuum the top of the table after dinner.

Sometimes I miss Hawaii so much I have to pretend like it doesn’t actually exist. But the other day, I stood by the floor-to-ceiling kitchen window while the soup bubbled. Rain beaded on the panes, and below on the street people hurried home. It reminded me of a rainy spring day in Japan. It was a few days after the solo Space A adventure that stranded me in Okinawa and introduced me to Hawaii for the first time, then reunited me with Chris and also my parents in California.

I flew home to cold, rainy Japan, just missing cherry blossom season. I was in a classroom in Shonandai waiting for a couple of English students, staring down the gray streets at people rushing back and forth in the rain through the floor-to-ceiling windows. And I was so happy to be HOME. Cozy, warm, back to work, back to my schedule, back to my house and my life in Japan.

That memory surprised me, because that was when I started wanting to live in Hawaii, but there I was, happy to be back in the cold and gray. In the weeks since we moved here, the dark mornings and short, gray days of Belgium feel like they’re swallowing us all up sometimes. But if I loved the gray days of Japanese spring, I think I can like it here too.

I admit I do not love Belgium yet, but…I guess I intend to. At least I’ll put the things I like in the pot on the fire and let it simmer awhile. Maybe it will make something wonderful.