Faux-poix

Mirepoix is a French culinary term with a strange and unclear etymology and definition. Well, at least the definition used to be strange, now it has a set meaning: chopped onions, carrots, and celery "either raw, roasted, or sautéed with butter" to be used as a flavor base.

I pretty much only use the sautée version for soup, but I usually use olive oil, so I guess that it's technically soffritto, or whatever.

The real neat thing about this is you can just take the big soup pot (I'm all about minimizing dishes), and make the mirepoix in it before you begin adding other things.

A side note on celery: remember when you were a kid and you used to put food coloring in a glass of water with a stalk of celery, and it'd suck up the colored water and make the celery all blue or red? This very same property makes celery really good at sucking up pollutants and pesticides, so it might be worth it to go the extra mile for organic celery. Beyond that, did you know that proper fresh celery leaves taste something like parsley? Even the stalks have a lot of flavor. Do your grocery store celery stalks taste that way? When you taste truly fresh (i.e. farmer's market fresh) celery, it suddenly makes a lot more sense why recipes call for only one or two stalks.

Anyway, all of this is leading to a realization I had about a fasting recipe I encountered in When You Fast, a cookbook for Orthodox fasting seasons. This book is great and helpful, but not without qualification (lots of TVP and Tofu, as well as some really truly intensive and elaborate recipes that take half a day to make, but more later). As you might imagine, it's difficult to properly make mirepoix if you're supposed to skip the oil (strict fasting days) and butter (all fasting days). But one day, when I was using a recipe in When We Fast as inspiration for whatever soup catastrophe I was making, I realized the first ingredients and steps were an attempt to make mirepoix without oil or butter. For those of you following along at home, it's the "Lentil Soup" recipe on page 60. I'll just recount the relevant parts of the ingredient list and directions:

Ingredients:
1/3 cup water
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 large onion, chopped
2 large carrots, peeled and diced (N.B. I skip peeling whenever I can, such as with organic products, because lots of the goody-goodies are either in or right under the skin)
2 stalks celery, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
[spices]

Directions:
In a 6-quart pot (who actually makes sure to use the right size pot for stuff like this? how often does it matter? seldom), combine the 1/3 cup water, sugar, and salt. Bring to a boil over high heat. Add the onions, carrots, and celery and cover. Cook, stirring frequently (the pot is covered?!), until the water is almost boiled out. Uncover and add the garlic, [and the spices]. Cook, stirring almost constantly (that is an important step), until the mixture starts to stick and brown. Add [the liquid and the rest].

Now, depending on your soup, you may not want to go all the way to "stick and brown," but going to "almost boiled out" will allow the onions, carrots and celery to cook and their flavors to mingle a bit sans oil or butter, allowing you to get on your way with your soup activities.