My parents moved back to their hometown of Rimersburg, Pennsylvania this summer. Their food situation is pretty much a fantasy to me. My grandmother, uncle, and now my mom upkeep my grandmother's large gardens and orchards. My uncle also raises bees in hopes to make honey, my dad and some of his brothers hunt more deer than they have room for, and a couple of the uncles are really into mushrooming*.
The gardens give my (huge) family far too much produce and fruit to keep up with, so my mom does a ton of canning. I saw my parents at Thanksgiving and mom brought everyone crates of canned veggies and fruit. One of the highlights were a couple of jars of chanterelles.
I don't know what pulled this soup together so well, but this is hands down the best vegetable soup I've ever made. I followed a recipe something like this. Mine has carrots, portabello and chanterelle mushrooms, sweet potato, celery, onion, zucchini, jalapeno, and garlic. I used low sodium organic chicken broth as the stock. I sautaeed the veggies in a few teaspoons of olive oil and a tablespoon of butter. I let them brown well and added a bunch cippolini onion & rosemary salt one of our other grandmothers gave us. The broth turned out rich and delicious. I hope this wasn't a fluke. I'm crediting the butter, cippolini onion salt, and chanterelles (and their juice from the jar). It's delicious.
*My uncles got really into mushrooming several years ago. They're known to pull off the side of the road and look around for mushrooms anytime they're going anywhere. My favorite story is when one of my uncles took another out in the middle of nowhere to his "chanterelle spot". They walked pretty far into the woods and when they found some, my uncle said, "listen, don't you dare tell anyone about this spot!" and the other responded, "well I don't know where the hell we are so don't you worry".
