I am always looking for good books to bond over with my child. Having recently gone to a used book sale at the local library, I stumbled upon an old childhood favorite of mine for only a quarter: Stone Soup!
I love sharing books that I enjoyed as a child with my daughter. Stone Soup is no exception!
We read it the night that I brought it home and the book was an instant hit. My daughter was intrigued by the wittiness of Mother Hen in the Tony Ross version of the story. In this tale, Mother Hen distracts a Big Bad Wolf from wanting to eat her by offering to make an elaborate soup with a stone from her yard as its key ingredient. More details about the book can be found here.
When I told my daughter that I made stone soup with my second grade class, she was immediately onboard for some quality time making our own batch at home.
The book itself does not provide a recipe, though Mother Hen does add a number of ingredients to the stone broth: salt, pepper, potatoes, turnips, barley, and mushrooms. She adds them one at a time as she enlists the wolf to do random household chores for her as the soup simmers. I decided to do a little research to find a recipe we could use as a framework, but would let my daughter choose the main ingredients.
I was surprised to find so many variations of this soup based on a children’s book!
Many of the stone soup recipes I stumbled across incorporated actual stones, but the stones can easily be substituted with a whole red potato or omitted altogether. I discovered that even Dolly Parton has a recipe for the savory soup! You can find that one here. I pored over the recipes to gather ideas. Meanwhile, my daughter found a suitable stone in our backyard. I immediately scalded it with hot water and scrubbed in hope of getting it “clean.”
We selected our key ingredients and got to work with preparing them. My daughter helped me wash the vegetables and get out her spices of choice. Above all, we spent quality time chatting about our day as I chopped the veggies. Once we had our ingredients prepped we were ready to get started.
Bonding with my child as we prepare a meal is one of my favorite ways to spend an evening.
Here are the ingredients in our recipe. It’s one for our recipe box for sure:
-
- 48 ounces of broth: we used Knorr chicken bouillon https://www.knorr.com/us/en/products/bouillon/chicken.html
- the stone!
- one onion, chopped
- 2 garlic cloves, minced
- salt, to taste (we didn’t measure! perhaps a 1/2 tsp!)
- pepper, to taste
- thyme, to taste
- lemon pepper, to taste
- kale and chard, 2 cups
- 1 yellow potato, diced
- 1 red potato, diced
- 1 yam, diced
- 2 carrots, chopped
- 1/2 cup of tomatoes, freshly diced
- 1 cup of green beans, chopped
- 1/2 cup of sliced mushrooms
We added the ingredients in the order listed and allowed the broth to simmer for 30 minutes. We devoured the soup once it was ready. In short, stone soup was a delicious meal for our whole family to enjoy!
