OXTAIL SOUP STORY

Okay kids, gather round. When I was a little kid, sometimes Grandma would go to Paris to visit Mimie, your great grandmother for a couple of weeks. They would go to fancy restaurants in the 15th arrondissement (a fancy word for neighborhood or quarter in French) because Mimie was a real bon vivant and lover of fine foods.

Meanwhile, at home, Grandpa would take care of us. Sometimes this meant things were quieter. Sometimes this meant he'd wash his dark socks in the bathroom sink like the old days when he was a student at Cornell or Columbia.

Then he would start cooking things he never usually cooked since no one was there to stop him. Sometimes this meant dumplings. Sometimes this meant egg rolls with some stuff in them we normally didn't eat. Then my friends, he would make Oxtail Soup, or as he told Mom it was called, Russian Oxtail Soup.

He's bring home the oxtails from the Kroger butcher, wrapped in paper usually which made them seem even more disembodied and sinister. I caught sight of one once -- looked like a long turkey neck. Anyway, he'd make a soup of them with cabbage and garlic and so on. I've blocked out the precise ingredients. A really big pot of it, too. Big production. I stayed out of the kitchen so I wouldn't have to see the tails.

We ate this every dinner until it was finished. Along with some other good stuff. It tasted a bit like butt and the worst slimiest vegetables you can imagine. So when the soup-level would go down in the Dutch oven, which would be brought out, ladeled from, then put back in the fridge, I would keep my fingers and hairs and toes crossed because I was afraid he would do the THING.

Guess! Guess what he did!

He poured a quart of water into the little bit of soup left and would say, "Now we have more soup!"

Oh, my face must have been the definition of "disappointment". Maybe even "devastated". He felt very proud about this thrify move. I'm sure today I'd give anything to sit with Grandpa and eat some of that horrid soup again. I don't have the recipe because I never wrote it down, for obvious reasons. But here's one that doesn't look too bad. Try it if you dare. Russian Oxtail soup usually has tomatoes, cabbage, the kitchcen sink in them. Ugh.