I know Drac will weigh in on this one, considering the ginormous garden they have

We just made a big batch of Booyah, which as I understand it is primarily a mid-western thing and most popular in winter. It's really just a vegetable and meat stew. It's usually got about 3-5 different veggies some herbs of choice and preferably two different kinds of meat (usually chicken and beef). According to my late Grandma, the ingredients that separate it from standard veggie stews is that it has to have cabbage, a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce and be served with cheap crackers . That's probably just her take on it.

Was wondering if there are other traditional soups and stews that folks make to hold off the winter cold.

Homemade soup is always better than restaurant soup, I think it's the love that goes into it !

We make yellow split pea soup with ham. Dead easy and very filling. You can also make it with green split peas.

Sounds great Trail!

Zucchini and italian sausage stew is one of our favorites and Chicken soup made with parsnips that I learned from my mom from Austria.

Soup is awesome!

Ha, ha! Trail, you know me too well! I am thawing out a gallon bag of broccoli from the garden and making a pot of broccoli cheese soup tomorrow! Your Booyah sounds very much like my vegetable beef soup. Mine must have cabbage in it too. However, as much as I like cheap crackers, I usually make a loaf of fresh bread. Last winter, I had the meat department at our local grocery store cut up about 10 pounds of large beef bones and I made some killer bone broth. Best vegetable beef soup I ever made!

And my home made canned tomato soup rocks a grilled cheese!

Ana, your chicken soup with parsnips sounds pretty interesting - can't say I've ever heard of that combination.

I haven't made either of these for a good long while now, but I used to do Manhattan Clam Chowder and Beef Barley. Right now, I have several cans of soup in my pantry. Not the same!

I like to make at least one nice pot of Chili every winter.

I have a recipe for minestrone soup that I got from my mother, passed on to her from her best friend. It is absolutely delicious and quite economical as well. Yum!

I have limited taste buds, and am a 'plain jane' when it comes to food. But my favorite memory of home made soup comes from my childhood. My Mom introduced me to soup that her mother used to make. Boiling a meat bone to get the stock broth. Then adding onion, parsley, lots of noodles and tomato juice. I added cheese crackers and that was a meal for me. Later, when I made it just for myself, I used beef broth, V8 juice and the rest of the ingredients. .

One summer I was in the hospital for a surgery relating to my cleft palate. It required me to eat by sucking nutrients via feeding tube. I was scared of the hospital food cause my Mom hadn't made it. Knowing what would make me more comfortable, Mom worked it out with the nursing station that she could bring in an osterizer which they kept there. When she visited, she'd had a thermos full of cooked tomato soup and some cheese crackers which she dumped into the osterizer and pureed it all down to liquid. They allowed her to put the soup in to the nutrition bag which she could control the amount I was getting so I could enjoy it.

Just the other day I was thinking about making that soup again and adding some kidney and/or black beans. Hmmm.

OK, you've got me intrigued, they both sound great. Recipes please

I'm thinking the same thing, Trail!

Butterflybabe, the black beans in that soup sounds excellent!

The soup Butterflybabe describes sounds very similar to what my grandfather used to make. He made several dishes that I liked a lot but could never reproduce. He passed before I was old enough to be in the cooking stage so I just tried to go from memory - and failed.

oldbroad, after my Mom died, my sister worked to replicate my Mom's German Potatoe Salad from her recipe. It was pretty good but lack something. We couldn't figure out what it was other than the fact that Mom hadn't made it herself.

My grandmother made apple butter that was everybody's favourite. She gave us all the recipe before she died, but it never came out the same, no matter who made it. We always suspected she held one thing back...

So this totally applies to the thread and the theme that's come up in discussion. I read an article on Bon Appetit several years ago about this phenomenon, where old recipes don't taste like they did originally, according to those who experienced them both. The prevailing theory is the quality and type of ingredients. "Back in the day" food was processed differently than it is now, or it was minimally processed and usually used fresh to prevent spoilage. Also, many vegetables and even livestock are more refined hybrids, concentrating more on production than flavor quality. Since cooking is basically domestic chemistry, changes in the way food is processed could create the formation of flavor compounds that differ, sometimes even radically from the original, even if the exact ingredients were used and prepared in the same manner.

To prove this out, they made two batches of chicken soup. With one they went to a popular grocery chain and bought what was normally considered very good quality ingredients. For the other, they painstakingly searched for organic heirloom vegetables, and early breed, ranged chickens that were fed only organic ingredients.

Both started by making broths from scratch, and they used the same spices. When completed, they had each one analyzed and found the nutritional quality of the one using heirloom and organic products to be much higher than the other, and the flavor profiles differed greatly. Both were quite good, since they were prepared by trained chefs, but the difference due to the ingredients was more than they had expected. Kind of interesting eh?

Trail, I will write out the recipe this weekend.

You all are making me hungry!

Cool, thanks Ana. My sweetie at home loves parsnips, so when I mentioned your recipe her eyes lit up.

Trail, what you shared makes sense. Broth from stock off the bone is definitely not the same as using a premade bullion cube, even if it is low in salt. It's the same, but not really

Forgive me if you've heard this before, but the topic makes me think of the joke where the husband sees his wife cutting the ends off a pot roast before seasoning it and putting it in a pan. He asks her why. She replies that's how she was taught to do it by her Mom. He calls his mother-in-law who replies she learned it from her mom. So he calls that woman who tells him that she did it because her pan was too small. Sometimes it's good to understand the older ways.

I LOVE that one! Plus, it makes total sense how it was passed down!

That is a very interesting take on food using ingredients from "back then" vs. things we have now. I know for one thing, I've been disgusted with the quality of chicken available at the grocery store for a very long time. Supposedly it all comes from a couple of breeds that are good for nothing but fast growth. I tried some chicken from an on-line retailer that claims free-range heirloom breeds. I have to say it was many steps above the junk at the grocery stores, but it was quite pricey!

So, what does one do with beef that was supposed to be rib eye steaks, but is the most awful excuse for beef I've ever seen! The grocery stores here were selling them as "whole in the bag" and then would cut them to your specifications. The stuff is inedible as a steak... last night I even tried pounding it out for chicken fried steak. Still useless.

So, that means vegetable beef soup! I have 3 soup bones in the freezer and will throw the meat and bones in my big pressure cooker with carrots, onions and celery. I will pressure cook for about an hour, cool and strain to get all the broth. I give the veggies to the chickens as they are mush and have everything cooked out of them. I will dice up fresh veggies and add to the broth along with barley and the now tender meat, cut up. Since it's a snowy cold day, think I'll also indulge in some home made noodles!