kleenexwoman | Behold, soup.

My brother made some tasty slow-cooked chicken with mysterious spices, so I threw some of the leftovers in a pot with some sweet potato and spinach and a little paprika and garlic. It was very good and I just wanted to memorialize it. Soup will be forthcoming.

Now: How to make awesome cabbage soup.

Get something to drink first. Chopping up shit is thirsty work.

First, you get a cabbage. I used red, because it seemed prettier. And it was! Look at that pattern. Did you know such beauty existed in a vegetable that is known primarily for smelling like farts?

Cut the cabbage up. The layers will stick together even when they're in small pieces. Don't worry about that, since they'll come apart like they should when you boil them.

Then take some potatoes and cut them up. However many you want, whatever size you want, doesn't matter. Cutting potatoes is oddly soothing, isn't it?

Potatoes take a long, long time to cook; do them first. Putting them in the microwave dries them out, but boiling them in just water will leach out vitamins. I boiled them in a can of the broth I'd use later and just set that aside.

Put whatever root vegetables you have in there. Like these carrots. I hate raw carrots, they make my mouth go numb. But I had these, and I didn't want to waste them because that's just not cool. So I cut 'em up and boiled them in some more broth (not shown). They took longer to get soft than the potatoes.

Onions! You do need onions. Peel your onion carefully; the papery old skin on onions is what makes people cry. I've never had to cry when chopping onions because I get that skin off.

Also, garlic. You can never have too much garlic.

Put the onions and garlic in a pan with some oil, fry that shit up, then add the cabbage and some lemon juice and paprika. Do it in shifts if you have a lot of cabbage.

This will be delicious.

While that's frying up, get out your meat. I used ground chuck because it was less expensive than the good stuff but less gross than hamburger. Brown it separately to get decent-size chunks.

I got impatient with the beef and chucked it in the pan with the cabbage. In the background: The root vegetables waiting their turn.

Dump everything into a nice big pot and pour broth over it. Get out a bay leaf or two and put that in, too. Simmer.

A note about broth: It turns out that beef broth and vegetable broth behave differently. Vegetable broth will stay thin and sort of clear.

Whereas beef broth will cook down into something that's a little thicker and more opaque, which was still good, but not exactly what I wanted.

Brian ended up adding some seasoned salt, chili powder, and other stuff. He didn't tell me about the chili powder.

This goes really well with sour cream, especially if you get the real, thick kind instead of the gloppy thin crap. If you can scoop it out like ice cream and it sticks to the spoon, it's real.