Curing a cold with wild mushroom soup

Wild Mushroom Soup

A couple of weeks ago I caught a rather nasty cold. With my boyfriend away on business, there I was, in our apartment, sick and alone. And well, just a little bit grumpy.

There are certain things that I crave when I'm sick. First and foremost, I crave dry toast and flat gingerale, a combination that my mother used to feed my brother and I when we were sick as children. No, it wasn't particularly tasty but it was much better than that cough syrup that sent us running to hide under the bed.

Of course, having our mother serve the dry toast and gingerale to us in bed was part of the cure. But with my mother an ocean away in Canada, the idea of it had lost much of its appeal.

My fallback feel-good-food, since I first left home at the age of 18, has always been a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup. I'm a woman of refined tastes, clearly. And I will even go so far as to admit that I usually just made it with water, instead of milk, as was instructed on the label.
Here's where I pause for you to say "EW" and then wonder why I would do such a thing.
Well, let's just say its another one of my strange quirks. I like to pretend that it's charming. But let's move on.

I'm sure there is a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup somewhere in Paris, but with my head and chest congested and the rest of me wanting to remain firmly planted in bed, I certainly did not want to have to go looking for it. So the days passed, my health improved, but I still had mushroom soup on the brain.



Trips to the market did nothing to curb my craving, as mushrooms of all kinds spilled from the vendors stalls. I'd never made my own mushroom soup before, and there was a little devil on my shoulder telling me to just give it a go. Nowadays, I have 2 names for this little devil that urges me to be more adventurous with my cooking, and to step out of my well-established box. Sometimes, this little devil that whispers in my ear goes by the name of Tara, and at other times, Melissa.

I found a recipe from my old standby, Williams-Sonoma, that seemed relatively easy. I came home with more mushrooms that day than I had ever bought at one time in my whole entire life. It was a little bit frightening, I admit. But the soup turned out wonderfully and I think that my Campbell's cravings may just be a thing of the past.

The base of this recipe is made with button mushrooms, so don't be fooled by the picture above. It's really nothing more than a gratuitous mushroom shot. These ones, which are called Girolles, a type of Chanterelle, were sauteed and added in afterwards, but they could just as easily be replaced with your own favourite wild mushroom or left out altogether. (at which point you would have to, in good conscience, rename it simply "Mushroom Soup")

Click here to see the recipe for:
Williams-Sonoma Wild Mushroom Soup