It all started with a pork roast. I had a small one in the freezer last week and needed something easy on a day of porch-building. Pork roast is easy: Thaw, top with chopped fresh garlic and salt and pepper and bake at 400F until just done (between 145F and 160F depending on how done you like it). Bake a few Yukon gold potatoes at the same time, make a simple gravy and serve with a salad. Done!

Except for the four slices leftover.

I put them in a small container along with the leftover gravy. Saturday came along. Mom and Jerry were coming for dinner and I had yummy, somewhat special (on account of being less often served) “rouladen,” which I realize now I intended to post the recipe for – half a year ago in my post about Mom’s bracciole! – but forgot! I promise to show you how to make them soon. The eleven yummy (but little) rouladen I made, even with spaetzle and salad on the side, seemed tight for five people. So what else can I make??

When you have onions like this growing in the garden…

…you should be thinking of onion soup – but I didn’t. I was thinking of the rouladen and that I didn’t have enough. That was the problem!

In such situations I would sometimes just add a baguette or another salad, but somehow soup came to mind. Not onion soup, just soup. Starting a meal with soup is lovely, even in the summer. I took out a marvelous SOUPS & STEWS* cookbook my daughter gave me a few years ago (she particularly likes the Greek Lamb Stew on page 125). I leafed through the book but nothing jumped at me. This is possibly because I was determined to use that bit of leftover pork roast and none of the recipes I saw asked for four slices of leftover pork roast with gravy. Imagine!

Onions. For me it often comes back to onions and this time was no exception.  Onions you have on hand (or in the garden). Onions are so amazingly delicious in so many ways. Looking through a book of great soups I couldn’t help but remember the onion soup I had at Mt. Vernon at the end of last summer – the day it rained almost the whole day and my feet were wet through and oh, how good that soup tasted! Hey, why not just finely chop the leftover pork roast and add it (along with the gravy) to onion soup? The gravy will act as the bit of thickener that made the Mt. Vernon soup so marvelous.

That’ll work. In the morning I chopped enough onions to make about 1 ½ cups and sautéed it slowly in 6 tablespoons of butter in my Dutch oven pot. When I say slowly I mean this took about an hour, at least an hour, maybe a little more than an hour. S – l – o – w – l – y. Anyway I got busy working on the porch. Shortly after lunchtime, as we were cutting the last of the decking boards – the edge pieces that require the jigsaw and more precision and measuring than the rest – I asked Samuel to finish the rest. I couldn’t switch gears at that point and come in and make food.

“Add enough water to fill the pot about halfway,” I told him. “Get some rosemary and thyme from the garden. I don’t have any chicken broth in the freezer so just add three each of the chicken bouillon cubes and three of the beef. Oh, and a splash of sherry. And chop up that leftover pork roast real fine and throw that in there too.”

The vagueness of my instructions was not clear to me. Some rosemary and thyme? Let’s see, the leaves from two 6” lengths of rosemary and enough thyme to fill in the balled-up palm of your hand. Chop up the pork real fine? Smaller than bite-size. I suspected it would break up smaller than that as it cooked (it did). A splash of sherry? Say about two tablespoons. Uh, Mom, I don’t see sherry… Right, well you’ll have to use that good port. It had been perfect in the Mt. Vernon soup…

Now don’t forget that the pork had been cooked with fresh garlic, so that flavor was in there too. This concoction simmered away s – l – o – w – l – y all afternoon while I was outside trying not to be afraid of the chop saw. By the time I came in at 4 or so, the soup had reduced some, though I can’t tell you how much. Oh, also, I had had corn on the cob this past week and one ear was leftover. I had sliced off the kernels into a small container. Saw those in the fridge and said Sure, why not? and added them to the soup as well. Salt and pepper to taste of course.

It wasn’t the prettiest soup, but oh, Onion Soup with Pork and Corn (and those spectacular fresh herbs) is soooooo tasty!!

If I had been smarter, if I had had more time, if I did not still have half of my brain thinking about soffit boxes and decking boards, etc, etc, I might have thought to make some cheesy croutons and sprinkle them on the soup before serving it when Mom and Jerry came to dinner. Oh well!

Wouldn’t you know, when I took out the SOUPS & STEWS cookbook to take a picture of it for this post, I said to myself, I bet there’s a recipe in there for onion soup. Sure thing, and not one but four recipes, including one that includes beef! Okay, not leftover pork roast with gravy, but still! You might want to try it.

Oh and by the way, after the meal with Mom and Jerry, I had leftovers of everything except salad. As my mother would say, at least I knew I had enough food!

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*Big Book of Soups & Stews by Maryana Vollstedt, Chronicle Books, 2001.