One in ten

Never Done: First gathering of the Brooklyn Soup Swap.

I made 8 quarts of Chestnut soup (I have also never made chestnut soup before) and then 6 people came over to each pick up a quart. (I just realized -- sorry to totally interrupt -- that I have not remembered to say a Shehekhianu since the walk over the Hudson. Oops.) The soup, anointed with clove, bay leave, nutmeg, and Madeira, turned out delicious, and even allowed me to try a new cooking technique: sweating the vegetables under a round of oiled parchment.

When it was done, the soup swappers came over in waves, each overlapping with at least one other person until the last two came and stayed, talking deeply, for a couple of hours. Which I loved. Is it too much of a cliché to write about how food brings people together? I guess I could started the Brooklyn Cigar Swap, and I could have sat together for hours talking about intergenerational dating, how to comfort a profoundly sad child, the best grass-fed burgers in Brooklyn, and the lighting in the movie the Social Network, and how it relates to language classes being held in the mornings and math classes in the afternoons -- while smoking hand-rolled cigars. But somehow I don't think it would have been the same. I think that the fact that I literally thought about everyone while I was cooking, and that everyone went home with a quart of cream of Chestnut soup, which they are going to heat up and eat over the next couple of days, actually nurtured the conversation, and is actually going to make us closer. I already feel closer, and profoundly appreciative for the deepening relationships. Not to mention the best joke I have heard in months:

What's the hardest thing about being gluten-free?

Telling your parents you're gay.