Seasoning

Last time we made this soup we ate it so fast that I never got a photo. So here it is. We made this again tonight because Sydney's going through a cold snap.

I'm on late shifts this week which means long days. Kate made the mirepoix but I did most of the rest, and mostly we were cooking in a bit of a rush, in those few spare moments that one has in the day. Which made the moment of seasoning particularly wonderful.

Proper use of seasoning is something I've come to understand relatively late. My tendency was always to concentrate on the main flavours and textures and ignore the way that salt in particular can draw out and harmonise the flavours in a dish. But seasoning is the most sensual part of cooking: the moment when you stop the mechanical processes of chopping, stirring, sieving and lose yourself in concentrating on that one sense of taste.

This soup has the red wine-infused salt on the surface to give it little touches of an even more intense flavour, plus the sour cream delivering waves of sweet fattiness whenever your spoon breaks into it. And there's some sort of forest's-edge affinity between pork, and the chestnuts they snuffle up, and the fennel that grows on the disturbed ground. So ... yum.