However, these are very expensive and time-consuming recipes. If you follow them exactly, you'll get excellent soup. You'll also spend lots of money on ingredients and about two hours chopping, chopping, chopping to make the vegetable stock, then more chopping to make the actual soup. I nearly lost my mind (and about 35 minutes) grinding a pound of salted peanuts into a paste with a blender, only to realize: Couldn't I have achieved this by buying natural, unsugared peanut butter? Couldn't I have purchased that vegetable stock from Imagine Foods? (Maybe not. After the aforementioned hours of chopping, you might not want to risk [messing] up the whole dish with a substitution. And when you need 12 cups of stock, buying it makes it even more expensive).

Anyway, I would recommend this book to a friend. Especially a rich, single friend.

54 of 60 found the following review helpful:

I can eat soup morning, noon, and night!  Nov 02, 1999
By Connie Fabian (toyjersey@toynetwork.com)
I don't know about you, but I can eat soup morning, noon, and night -- in the summer, spring, fall and winter!

To me, soup makes me feel better, warms us my house and my soul. Maybe it reminds me of being a kid or of my grandmother -- either way I think it has the same effect on everyone!

(PS: Did you know that "lentil soup dates back to 8,000 BC"?)

Anyway, In the How to Use this Book section, you will learn Good Cooking Requirements, Ingredient Familiarization, Organization, Taste, Time, and most importantly -- Love!

(PS: Did you know that "Hands are for whenever tools don't work; Fingers are for whenever hands don't work; and as far as your Tongue is concerned -- if the soup doesn't touch your tongue often enough, it's unloved!")

The Daily Soup Cookbook starts off with recipes containing veggies, tomatoes, and rice, then goes on to grains, pasta, bread, corn, potatos, the very thoughtful -- music recommendations while cooking your soup, beans, chili, another thoughtful entry -- movies to rent while eating your soup, lentils and peas, nuts, coconuts, cheese, a periodic table of soups (a must see, I could never explain it), fruit, the very clever -- Soup Personals (another must see), roux (pronounced roo), and finally, Really Delicious Soups that Didn't Fit into Any Chapter!

My favorite parts of the book include: Things to do with Leftover Soup (very helpful for families), Baby Names for the New Milliennium (i.e., Girls: Saffron, Pumpkin; Boys: Stew, Penne, and the best -- Art E. Choke); and of course, the fact that this all started in a small East Village, NY kitchen.

For an East Coast chick like myself -- this book is like a warm, aromatic bowl of soup!

35 of 41 found the following review helpful:

Not thrilled with first few recipes we tried.  Feb 07, 2005
By Suzi "modsuzi"
Based on the previous 5 star reviews, we bought this book because we love soup. I believe that a cookbook is only as good as the first few recipes you try. First one we tried last week was Pablano Corn Chowder. It was good, but not nearly as good as the corn chowder served around the corner at our neighborhood coffee shop. The recipe calls for adding in the fresh corn sliced off the cob. Basically you end up with crisp corn floating in a heavy cream and cheese broth, which is OK. I prefer pureeing half the corn to give it more of a corn cream base instead to make the soup smoother. 2nd recipe we tried for a party last weekend was Thai Chicken with Ginger and Coconut. This recipe was a weird fusion mix that didn't have the flavor of Thai at all. It called for a whole can of tomatoes (28oz), that turned the entire broth into a tomato base and that was all we could taste after the other ingredients were added. A few tablespoons of tomato paste should have been the most added or a fresh tomato, since the can of tomatos overpowered the soup. Also, it called for a whole chicken which was way too much for the amount of broth in the soup. The worst part of the recipe, however, was the direction given to puree the following items together: garlic, ginger, lemongrass, sugar, curry paste & salt in a blender or food processor. Anyone who has cooked Thai should know that lemongrass prepared in a food processor is not a good idea. It's not a chewable item, so you end up with many hundreds of chards of lemongrass. We saved the dish by getting out our strainer & straining the lemongrass chards out of the soup base. We also ended up having to add more curry paste, a stalk of lemongrass to the broth, remove the tomatoes, add in additional lime juice, etc to save the dish for the party. It would have been a disaster the way the recipe was written. Also there was so much vagueness in the ingredient list such as the mention of Thai Curry Paste (did they mean yellow, red or green)? I ended up using red. Not too thrilled with this new cookbook, other than the book being a good size and easy to handle. There were no variations mentioned nor ingredient substitutions suggested. I would not recommend this cookbook.

15 of 16 found the following review helpful:

Excellent instructions for extraordinary soups  Dec 31, 2001
By Brad MacDonald
Last night I cooked the "Cream of Lentil" soup. Although initially afraid that this wouldn't be the meal that some of the other soups are (e.g., Senegalese Peanut), I was pleasantly surprised at how good this dish also turned out to be.

I rated this cookbook "5 stars" due to the following:
1. excellent recipes for tremendous meals;
2. easy-to-follow instructions (a must for "cooks" like me);
3. just enough background on the dish "genre" (e.g., vegetarian, cheese, etc.) to make you comfortable to prepare a soup you've never made before;
4. hints/suggestions about storage of basic stocks;
5. easy-to-read format (i.e., layout of book is clear and uncluttered).

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