How can you whine about cold weather when there's soup to be eaten!

There's this really incredible thing about Florida, and it's called flip-flops in January. It's a truly beautiful thing. So far this winter there's been nary a flip-flop to be seen as we are in the midst of an atypically frigid and atypically enduring cold snap. Thankfully, in lieu of flip-flops this January there have been warm blankies, cozy sweaters, afternoon coffee, cuddling (my favorite!), fires and soup. Ahh...soup, last on my list but definitely not least in my heart.

I remember when I fell in love with soup. Soup always seemed, well, rather lame as a meal to me. In downtown Iowa City, about a five minute walk from the University of Iowa campus there is a soup restaurant. There may have been a small selection of sandwiches or salads but they took a significant backseat to the array of steaming, aromatic and flavorful soups. After my roomie and suitemates, this soup restaurant was the high point of that grey, cold and depression laden fall.

I found the soup restaurant (actual name unknown) through my my mom's friend Julie. I grew up with Julie's daughters and in true surrogate-mom fashion she took me there for lunch one day in an attempt to drag me from the doldrums I had fallen into. It didn't pull me all of the way out but it certainly helped, far more than I even recognized at the time. After finding it, I went to that soup restaurant almost every other day that fall and winter. In the worst and darkest days of an eating disorder, soup was pretty much the only food that that I didn't feel guilty for eating, I can only guess as to why. Without being dramatic or exaggerating I can honestly say that for over a month, this soup was the only food that truly ate. I'd go after my super femi-nazi English lit class and with a bowl of soup and the most humongous Diet Coke possible, sit at a small table by the windows. There, eating my soup and reading my way through Joyce, Kafka, Woolfe and Bronte, I was warm, fed and felt protected from loneliness, anxiety and doubt.

Even now, from a so much better place that it's unrecognizable as part of the same life, and with a distinctly more 'foodie' sensibility I get that same feeling from soup: warmth, comfort and insularity. This past week I've been reveling in the cold weather that has made soup a dinner option, and oh the options of soup! French Onion, spicy lentil, hearty vegetable and potato leak soups have all graced my dinner table the last few weeks. Last night it was a white bean and kale soup, sourdough bread with melted goat cheese and a glass of white wine. Curled up with a book on World War One, I again felt warm, fed and safe from loneliness and all doubts.