I've been participating in a Ladies Soup Swap with a group of fantastically hilarious soupies for several years. A couple of years ago it became a swap of the vegetarian variety, which fits in nicely with the types of soups I choose to make and eat. The way the swap works is that you make and bring 6 quarts of one kind of soup to the swap. Everyone picks a number and then in order of those numbers, you take the soups one by one until they're all gone. So, you come with 6 quarts of one kind of soup and you leave with six different soups. It's so hard to choose, because you'd really love to leave with one of everything. With that in mind, for this swap I made two different batches of soup, one Red Lentil with Coconut Milk and Moghul Garam Masala and the other a Mulligatawny. I brought 12 quarts of soup, thinking I would get to leave with one of everything, but this particular swap had 21 (22?) participants, so I still left feeling like I missed out on some great selections (Surabhi's Sambar and Anne Marie's Tortilla soup WITH toppings thank you very much, come to mind). I thought I'd take a picture of the 12 soups I did come home with, when I (or someone in my house) consumes them. Honestly, they're really too pretty not to share. In some cases, I'm not sure whose soup I picked, I just couldn't pass them up because of the color, or the story that was associated with it during 'the telling of the soup'....but I hope you'll still get a sense of the beauty and the variety of the score that I came home with. And thus begins the 12 days of soup posts....
Soup 1: Amy's Tom Kha