This one is in honor of Stanza over at CookingOnSundays, who couldn't make it today, but the people must be fed! True to Stanza fashion, this one is a soup made from stuff I had sitting in the freezer in the garage (I don't have a closet) for too long, and that is the way it should be made, but with no onions! Any time you are looking for something in one of your many food storage options and you find there is just too much stuff you have to move out of the way, it is time to make some variant of what I erroneously call Jambalaya. Every year, we plant a garden in the back yard, and impatiently wait for all the little sprouts to sprout, and then spend a portion of each day urging the cats to keep the gophers out, and yelling at the cats that the garden is not a litter box. Then we complain that there are snails and we need to get the chickens to eat them, which ends with us flapping our arms as we chase the chickens out because they are kicking up the sprouts and eating our lettuce. Somehow, a couple months ...

I was having a discussion about economics with Stanza over at CookingOnSundays, who mentioned the Big Mac Index, which is a method of measuring the purchasing power parity of various currencies by comparing the price of a Big Mac in each country. This got me thinking (of course) about the global infiltration of onions (contained within the Big Mac). It occurs to me that no matter the nationality, if you go look through all the cook books in a book store, unless you are looking at desserts, somewhere in the neighborhood of 90-95% of the recipes contain some form of onion. Unlike the Big Mac, the onion has no branding or sacred cow liabilities, no foreign connotations, and as unbelievable as it may seem,  has managed to infiltrate more places than McDonalds and Starbucks combined. Onions like to keep a low profile. They don't like to be mentioned on labels. As much as my eyes water just thinking about it, perhaps if we could get them more recognition as the perfect purchasing power parity predictor, we could get them noticed for the overused sub-par filler they are. Update: Due to the attention this post has getting, I did  a bit more looking into it ...

I don't think they exist. Or at least I didn't until recently. Stanza , over at cookingonsundays, has a typically eyebrow raising recipe up this week, which includes a cabbage so large, well, I can't really say since it seems to change size throughout the story, but I'm certain it is bigger than a teapot! I too found a V.O.U.S. this year. It was a giant mangle beet from a farmers market. It only cost me a few bucks, and it was around 18 pounds! You can see Kernal subduing it for me in the above picture. I did a bit of research, and apparently mangle beets are grown mostly as fodder for animals like cattle, but are quite edible. After carrying it home on my shoulder like some prehistoric vegetarian, I chopped it into three pieces. The bottom I juiced and froze in ziplocks for future soup base. The middle I gave to the chickens, who happily stood inside it and hollowed it out. The top I planted, in the hopes that it would grow into a new beet next year. So far, so good.