That’s right. When I was just nine years old, I was the winner of the Florence (SC) County 4-H corn muffin contest. It was my first competition of any sort and at age nine, a great beginning to my 4-H career.

I no longer make muffins, just good old-fashioned cornbread. The kind you bake in a cast iron skillet, though you could use a glass casserole dish or a metal cake pan–I’ve done both with success. But nothing quite compares to cast iron for cornbread.

These days, we make our cornbread with home ground meal from our homegrown Painted Mountain*corn. This corn is so pretty you can just use it for decoration. But it sure would be a shame to miss out on its delightful taste (though when we hang the ears up to dry in our bedroom, we keep them there for months for the sheer joy of admiring them).

Our grinder is pretty basic so our meal has a coarse texture that adds a delightful chewiness. If you have the chance to try this recipe with a coarsely ground meal, do! Otherwise, use what you can buy at your favorite grocer’s. I won’t judge. It’s a great complement to soup.

Carole’s Prize-Winning Cornbread

Preheat oven to 400.

• 1 cup cornmeal
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2-4 Tablespoons sugar (optional, but …)
• 4 Tablespoons melted butter
• 1 1/4 cups milk
• 2 eggs, beaten

Melt butter in your skillet or other pan while oven is preheating.

Meanwhile, sift and mix dry ingredients together in a large bowl. (Note: we never sift. It works out fine.)

In smaller bowl, combine all liquid ingredients except butter.

Swirl melted butter to cover bottom and sides of your baking dish, then pour remainder into other liquid ingredients.

Stir liquid ingredients into dry ones.

Bake about 25 minutes or until toothpick or sharp knife comes out clean.

* Painted Mountain corn is an open-pollinated corn and can be purchased from Territorial Seed Company, Johnny’s Seeds, Baker’s Heirloom Seeds and other seed companies.

Sorry, but I don’t recall where we found the original of this great recipe. Something makes me think it may have come from one of Frances Moore Lappe’s books. It’s ridiculously easy and oh, so tasty.

As usual, over the years, we’ve tweaked according to our own tastes. That’s what you’ll see here. This recipe is easy to modify according to your own preferences.

Saute in large pot for three to five minutes:

• ¼ cup olive oil
• 1 cup onion (you could easily double this if you’d like more onion)
• 3-4 sliced carrots (cut larger slices into smaller pieces)

Add 1 teaspoon thyme for last minute

Add:

• 3 cups of your favorite stock (or water mixed with bouillon cube or powder)
• 1 cup rinsed, dry lentils
• 2 Tablespoons chopped parsley (if we don’t have fresh parsley, we just omit this step. Still great.)
• 1 quart home-canned tomatoes (or you can use a 28-oz store bought can)

Bring to boil, then simmer in covered pot 45 minutes.

Now comes the part that makes this soup truly special:

Fill the bottom of each bowl with 1/4 cup grated Swiss cheese; ladle steaming hot soup into bowls; to each bowl add about 2 tablespoons dry, white wine of your choice. (The chef gets an extra swig or two! ) You could omit either of these two ingredients, but IMO they’re what takes this soup from good to terrific.

Want a really great complement for this dish? Pair with my prize-winning cornbread recipe.

Way back in the last century–the mid-’70s to be exact–when the Gnome and I thought we were hippies (we were so not), my brother and his wife gave us a treasured gift: The Mother Earth News Almanac.

We devoured it. In particular, we devoured this soup whose recipe was on the pages of the almanac. We fell in love all over again. In the course of a couple of moves and boxes long left unpacked, we lost track of the book–and the recipe. Ultimately, we forgot the source of this recipe. But on many a cold winter night we just recalled it, reminisced about it, and mourned its loss forever.

Or so we thought. A couple of years ago when we were sorting through our small library, we came across our beloved, well-worn Mother Earth News Almanac.

You know how it is when a reader comes across an old book (any book, really). To heck with the job at hand; I had to at least scan its pages. I noticed one that was bookmarked. Guess what it was. You got it–our favorite cheesy potato soup!

This recipe is for two hungry people, but can be doubled or tripled easily enough.

CHEESE POTATO SOUP

• Boil 2 potatoes (a little larger than medium-size, whatever that is)
• Drain, but save the liquid
• Mash the potatoes
• Add drained liquid back into the pot to obtain desired thickness. If you’ve added all the water and the mixture is still too thick, add more water.
• In a small skillet, brown 2 ½ Tbsp flour in 2 ½ Tbsp melted butter, stirring constantly to prevent burning.
• Add browned mixture to potato-water mixture; bring to a boil and cook while stirring for 2-3 minutes to thicken.
• Fill each soup bowl 1/3 full with small chunks of cheddar cheese (the sharper the better, we think).
• Cover cheese with soup. You want the soup hot enough to soften, but not necessarily to melt the cheese.
• Add 2-3 tablespoons of diced onion and a few sprinkles of apple cider vinegar to taste. (We like the extra zing of the vinegar, so we add anything from 2 Tbsp-1/4 cup–you might want to start lighter and go from there.)
• Add salt and pepper to taste.

As good as the cheese-potato mixture is, the addition of the onion and vinegar is essential to make this recipe extraordinary (not to mention that they are the healthiest ingredients).

Rib-sticking thick, this soup is a great comfort food for a chilly wintry day. Add my prize-winning corn bread recipe for a tasty, filling combo.

I make a kiss-ass vegetable soup. My dad said so—well, no, if you knew my dad you’d know he’d never have used such language! But he loved, loved, loved the homemade vegetable soup I began making when I was ten or twelve years old. Of course, I learned how from my mother, but I added a few secret ingredients that made it all mine.

My mother was a busy woman. Like many homemakers of the day, she opted for the new convenience foods lining grocery shelves. Other than my vegetable soup, the only soups we ate when I was growing up came out of those iconic red and white cans. With the exception of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato, I wasn’t a fan. I assumed I just didn’t care for soup. I had no idea how homemade soups tasted and couldn’t imagine what it took to make them.

Until recently. A few years ago, we tried a lentil-carrot soup that’s easy and at the same time sophisticated the addition of Swiss cheese and white wine. Easy. That’s a word I’d never associated with soup. But it’s the right word. My vegetable soup is the most complicated soup I’ve ever made and that’s just because there are so many ingredients to gather, chop, and pour in the pot—not because there’s anything hard about it.

Quite accidentally, last January turned into soup month up here on the diagonal. First, it was the package of beef flavored vegetarian bouillon I received as a giveaway from a gardening blog I follow. That gift led to a delicious French onion soup, a delicacy I thought I’d given up forever when I became a non-meat eater more than twenty years ago. Then it was the potato-leek soup I’d been looking forward to ever since we planted our first leeks last spring. A look in the fridge told us we had some Swiss cheese that needed using, which turned into that delicious lentil-carrot soup.

Then the most serendipitous thing happened. We were sorting through our bookshelves (January is such a good time for decluttering and organizing) when we came upon an ancient copy of the Mother Earth News Almanac, a gift from my brother and his wife way back in 1975.

We curiously turned to a bookmarked page and were ecstatic with what we saw: our favorite easy, cheesy potato soup recipe from all those decades ago and whose loss we’d mourned for decades. The book had been tucked away in one of our moving and storage processes, and after a while we couldn’t remember where the recipe had come from in the first place. We sadly assumed it was gone forever. Naturally, the soup got made—and lovingly savored—that very day!

Lots of pumpkins line the shelves of our root cellar, calling to us to use them before they go bad. One of our favorite pumpkin recipes (aside from pumpkin pie, of course) is a cream of pumpkin soup made even better when topped with cinnamon croutons. We made that soup two separate times in January.

And then I happened upon a tomato soup recipe I wanted to try with our home canned tomatoes, so that soup made it into the January soup line-up too, paired with grilled cheese on homemade rye.

But even a small batch of soup will give our twosome two generous meals, often three. If you do the math, that means we had soup suppers every night for close to three of January’s weeks. Delicious, all. And not a vegetable soup among them!

(I’m posting these recipes as quickly as I can. If you don’t find the one you’re looking for, keep checking.)