July 8th Summer Jam-Off Event

Preserving fruits and vegetables is the surest way to be able to eat locally and sustainably throughout the year. At the "Hull-House Kitchen Preservation Fundraiser" on July 8 during Re-thinking Soup, chefs and food preservationists will donate jars of their preserved fruits and jams. Attendees at the day's soup conversation will be the judge of whose preserves are the tastiest. Jars will be auctioned off to raise funds for future meetings of the Re-thinking Soup series.

**July 8th will be the last Re-thinking Soup before the summer hiatus. Hull-House Kitchen will briefly close its doors to evaluate the program and test out new recipes. Please join us when we reopen our doors and serve more healthy soup on Tuesday AUGUST 19 at noon. Please give us your feedback and comments about your experiences at Rethinking Soup so that we can plan, scheme, and devise new ways of opening the table and the conversation to new ideas and new people.**

Hull-House Kitchen: Rethinking Soup

Please bring your hunger for free soup and conversation every tuesday. Hull-House Kitchen: Rethinking Soup is a communal event where we will eat delicious, healthy, soup and have fresh, organic conversation about many of the urgent social, cultural, economic and environmental food issues that we should be addressing. We will meet in the historic Residents' Dining Hall, where Upton Sinclair, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B.Duboise, Gertrude Stein and other important social reformers met to share meals and ideas, debate one another and conspire to change the world.


Activists, farmers, doctors, economists, artists, and guest chefs will join us each week to present their ideas and projects. In the tradition of the Hull-House Settlement's commitment to free speech and Chicago's Bug House Square, the third tuesday of every month will feature a "Soup Soap Box." Anyone and everyone is invited to take the stage for 2 minutes each to share their projects, opinions, and visions for the future of food.


Hull-House Kitchen: Re-thinking Soup
Every Tuesday, 12-1:30pm
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
Residents' Dining Hall
800 South Halsted
FREE

(donations from $.01 to $1,000,000 gladly accepted)

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Hull-House Kitchen Rethinking Soup

Jane Addams understood that all the protest in the world would not be enough to bring about a more just world. She knew we also needed to have spaces to imagine, convene, argue, grapple with hard issues, and collectively envision the future of the common good. The Hull-House Settlement was this place for many immigrants, social reformers, writers and others who found a home in this radically democratic and inclusive public space.
As part of the first generation of American women to attend college, Jane Addams understood the importance of breaking boundaries and crossing borders- and she did this in numerous ways. She was a white person working in communities of color; a wealthy, privileged person addressing issues of poverty; and a woman who entered into the male-dominated and defined public sphere.
Hull-House also facilitated this kind of border-crossing for the communities of people who came through its doors. 9,000 immigrants a week came to Hull-House to participate in programs that included music, poetry, art, citizenship, sex education and literature classes, and also lectures and conversations about race, suffrage and economics. But the Hull-House Settlement fed more than their intellectual curiosity and the hunger for community- it also fed their bellies. The Hull-House Coffee House and the public kitchen operated from the 1890’s, and were spaces where people dined, communed, nourished, and sustained themselves and each other.
The Settlement buildings, designed by the architects Allen and Irving Pond, blurred the boundaries and confines of public and private spaces. These buildings contained a day care center, theaters, public baths, a public art gallery, private residences, community dining rooms, and a public kitchen.
The cooperative living structure disrupted the domestic space that made women’s work invisible and called into question the “women’s sphere” and “women’s work.” The Settlement house challenged the physical separation of household space from public space and the separation of the domestic economy from the political economy.
Hull-House history is a reminder that the public sphere is something that is and has always been historically constructed, creatively imagined, and the result of struggle.
The reform work that Hull-House engaged in, such as advocating for public housing and public health, working to end child labor and to shut-down sweat-shops, and establishing the juvenile justice court can be understood as forms of civic housekeeping. They extended the notion of home into the public sphere, demanding the State take responsibility for the basic needs of its people.
Hull-House reformers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Florence Kelley and Julia Lathrop used the language and vision of domesticity as a framework for their social vision and for interpreting their unconventional lives and transgression from the norms.
Throughout history, the excluded have flipped the script and creatively used what has been narrowly prescribed to them as a weapon for taking hold of and grasping cultural apparatuses. The Hull-House reformers placed old forms of domesticity into new frameworks and changed their significance.
On May 6th at 12-1:30pm, to honor this legacy, the Museum will launch one of our most ambitious and curious public programs to date- the re-opening of the Hull-House Kitchen, where the soup and conversation are organic.
We are so excited to be working with executive chef Sam Kass, whom we affectionately refer to as our “Chef in Residence” and his colleague Yoni Levy. Skillfully, through bowls of hot, steaming Carrot-Ginger-Coconut Soup and cool and inspirational Spring Pea and Mint soup, they have awakened our hunger for a better and more just world.
-Lisa Yun Lee

EVERYONE EATS
An IneviTable Project
We believe that people have a stake in each other's health. This link is what binds us together as families, communities and a nation. Nowhere are we more powerfully bound together than in the daily cultivation and preparation of food. Within food lies vast untapped potential to uplift and connect people, to provide a medium for discourse, and an opportunity to taste our common humanity along with our differences. Jane Addams understood this.
As we seek openings to utilize the power of food, we find ourselves in a fight to salvage a food system that has been ravaged by an approach of quantity over quality, of short-term gain over long-term stability. Our sustenance is now inextricably dependent on fossil fuels. The massive injection of this energy into our food system over the past 40 years has doubled the world population, yet left a billion malnourished. Ironically, overabundance now plagues this country witnessed in the excess our community carries on its hips and thighs. Scientists predict that by in 2015, 75% of Americans will be overweight or obese. The next generation now faces the real possibility that they will live a shorter life than that of their parents. Although the ready availability of food is a great achievement, the industry our society has built around food is harmful and unsustainable. It threatens our health today, and imperils the legacy of improving health we wish to pass on.
We are thrilled by the possibility at the Hull-House Kitchen to bring together people from all walks of life, to share visions for the future inspired by lessons from the past. Over delicious soup made with ingredients from local sustainable farmers, we aim to cultivate an exploration into the reservoirs of transformative power yet to be utilized within our food.
-Sam Kass

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Cauliflower Soup

1 large onions chopped
6 large shallots
(roasted at 450 degrees in hot oven until golden and tender)
3 cloves of garlic chopped
1 heaping Tablespoon of honey
1 large yukon gold potato
1 cup of dry sherry
2 heads of cauliflower chopped
1 bay leaf
1 pinch ground black pepper

1. Saute onions, shallots, garlic and honey.
2. Add Potatoes and deglaze with sherry.
3. Add Cauliflower,bay leaf, black pepper
and just enough water to cover. Cook until tender.
4. Puree and strain through chinoise
5. Season and serve!



Sweet Pea and Mint Soup

1 large spanish onion, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 pinch of thyme
1 Tablespoon of honey
1 teaspoon of ground black pepper
1 small bay leaf

2 qt. shucked english/sweet peas


1. Saute onions, garlic,bay leaf and thyme until tender
2. Puree then add honey and black pepper then chill
3. Blanch Peas until tender(2-3 minutes) in boiling water
and shock in an ice bath
4. Remove the peas from the ice bath and puree them with
just enough water to puree smooth.
5. Strain through china cap and mix with the onion base.
6. Adjust consitancy with cold water.
7. Add bacon lardons for extra deliciousness!
Along with mint leaves

Spicy Miso Vegetable Soup

1/2 cup onion
1/4 cup carrot
1/4 cup celery
1/4 cup ginger
1/4 cup spring garlic
1/2 cup shitake mushrooms

1/4 cup snap peas sliced
1/4 cup snow peas sliced
1/4 cup english peas
1/4 cup chinese broccoli chopped
1 bunch baby bok choy seperated
1/2 cup diced tofu firm
1 cup dark miso paste (rice fermented)
6 cups water
1 Tablespoon sambal oelek
1/2 bunch cilantro

1. In a food processor mix until finely chopped onion, celery, carrot, ginger, garlic, and shitake mushrooms. Do Not Puree!
2. Saute mixture over medium heat with vegetable oil until liquid has cooked out and mixture is tender. About 20 minutes.
3. Add water and bring to a light simmer, Do not boil.
4. Add miso paste to a seperate bowl
5. Then ladle 2 cups of hot broth liquid into miso paste, whisk until dissolved.
6. Add miso mixture back into soup broth.
Never bring to a boil!
7. Add veggies and sambal, cook until veggies reach desired tenderness.
8. Add cilantro, serve and enjoy!



Chicken Mushroom with Cavolo Nero

1/2 cup sliced onions
1/4 cup sliced garlic
3 cups chopped cavolo nero
1 1/2 cup quartered crimini mushrooms
2 cups chopped chicken pre cooked
1 cup pedro ximinez sherry
6 cups chicken stock
Sachet:
1 bay leaf
7 sprigs of thyme
1 teaspoon black peppercorns

1. Saute onions and garlic in olive oil until tender.
2. Add Cavolo Nero, saute until tender.
3. Add sherry and reduce by half.
4. Add mushrooms, chicken stock and sachet
5. Cook until Cavolo Nero starts to break down and fall apart.
6. Add chicken and simmer for 10 min.
7. Adjust salt, serve and enjoy.

Asparagus Soup with Green Garlic and Spring Onions

1/2 cup minced Ginger
1 cup Spring Onions
1/4 cup chopped Garlic cloves
2 cups White Wine
1 cup Lima Beans cooked
2 cups chopped Asparagus
7 cups Vegetable Stock
1 Sachet of:
2 sprigs Thyme
1 Bay Leaf
1 Ancho Chili
1 Tablespoon Peppercorn

Finish with:
1 small bunch chopped Basil
1 small bunch chopped Mint

1. Saute the Ginger, Onions, Garlic until tender.
2. Add White Wine and reduce by half the amount.
3. Add Stock and Sachet bring to a light simmer
4. Add Asparagus and cooked Lima Beans bring back to a simmer.
5. Add Fresh Basil and Mint.
6. Serve and Enjoy!

Recipe: Beef and Barley with Spring Vegetables

2c chopped onions
1/4c chopped garlic
1/2c sliced green garlic
1 heaping teaspoon tomato paste
2c red wine
2c hulled barley
4c diced beef (stew meat)
6c beef or chicken stock

Sachet
1ea bay leaf
2sprigs thyme
1Tablespoon peppercorn
2sprigs parsley stems
salt and pepper


1. Sear meat on high heat and then remove the meat
from pan when barely cooked.
2. In the same pan, lower the heat and add the onions,
garlic and green garlic. Saute until light brown scraping the bottom
of the pan every time you stir.
3. Incorporate the tomato paste and cook for 5 minutes.
4. Add red wine and reduce by 3/4 amount.
5. Add the stock, meat, sachet and barley and lightly
simmer until barley and meat are tender.
6. Season with Salt and Pepper and serve!

Recipe: Lentil with Baby Collard Greens and Spring Scallions

Baby Collards from Green Acres Farm in Indiana
Scallions from Nichols Farm in Illinois.

2 cups chopped onions
¼ cup garlic
1 cup carrots
3 cups green lentils
8 cups water
1 cup white wine
½ cup sherry

Sachet of:
1 Tablespoon Toasted fennel
1 Bay leaf
1 sprig Thyme
Chili Flakes
Garlic

To taste:
Salt and 3 Tablespoons Sherry Vinegar

1 cup spring scallions
1 cup baby collard greens
(You can add more if you want a heartier soup)

1. Sweat out onions, garlic for 5 min on medium heat
2. Add carrots, white wine, and sherry. Then reduce by half.
3. Add lentils, sachet, stir and add water.
4. Keep on medium high heat, stir often so lentils don’t stick to bottom of pan.
5. Slice greens, scallions and collards and add 10 min before serving.
6. Serve and Enjoy!

Recipe: Chicken Green Garlic Soup With Grilled Asperagus

2 large onions
6 cloves garlic
½ # green garlic bottoms sliced (reserve tops)
½ cup Maderia
8 cups chicken stock
4 cups cooked chicken pieces
1 cup grilled asparagus
1 cup sliced spinach
1 cup precooked white beans
1 sachet of thyme, crushed red pepper, black peppercorns, green garlic tops, bay leaf

1. Saute onions, garlic, and green garlic until tender.
2. Add Madeira and stir.
3. Then add chicken stock, cooked chicken pieces, the sachet, and white beans and bring to a simmer. Cook until flavors combine, add salt if needed.
4. To serve the soup, in a bowl add grilled asparagus and sliced spinach then ladle with a serving of soup.
5. Serve and Enjoy!



Recipe: Carrot Soup

2 Tbsp Extra virgin olive oil
2 Leeks chopped
1 cup Onion chopped
4 ea Cloves Garlic chopped
8 cups Carrots chopped
1 cup Dry Sherry
13 cups Water

Sachet of:
1 ea Ancho chili seeded
1 Tbsp Coriander
1 Pinch of crushed red pepper flakes
1 Tbsp peppercorns
5 ea Parsley stems fresh
5 ea Thyme stems fresh
1 Bay Leaf dried

1. First sweat the leeks, onions and garlic over medium heat until translucent (approx 10 minutes).
2. Add carrots and sherry, reducing sherry by half.
3. Then add sachet and water then cook on medium heat. Simmer until carrots are tender or fall off a fork (approx 20 min).
4. Remove the sachet.
5. Blend the contents in a blender, then pour through a mesh strainer.
6. Check for final Seasoning and adjust if needed.
6. Serve and Enjoy