On Love and Soup

and another year of marriage

We got married on New Year’s Day 2020, an auspicious year if you consider the merits of binding oneself to another just before the world as we knew it ceased to exist. We decided to get hitched in the midst of Free Soup Day, an annual tradition at Free Range Brewing in Charlotte, North Carolina where local chefs prepare giant pots of soup for the community to eat for free and for fun. Everyone is welcome. Soup Day is an invitation that says, “Let’s welcome this new year in community. Let’s eat soup and bread and be together today.”

On January 1, 2020, Jamie made a big pot of vegetarian posole rojo, a soup made of hominy, red chiles and, traditionally, pork. A week before we gave our friends and family short notice of our pending nuptials, uploading a quick and dirty website and digital invitation: “If you’re in town, come to Free Soup Day, we’re gonna have a pop-up wedding.”

I bought a white jumpsuit. Jamie wore a mustache he could twist at the ends. While he served soup, I got my makeup done. Jamie quick-changed inside the brewery van parked in the adjacent parking garage. We met outside for a first look, where I found the man who’s made a life habit of wearing plaid button-down shirts in a light blue jacket, crisp white shirt, jaunty bowtie, and clean sneakers.

We made our way into the crowd, a mix of Soup Day attendees plus friends and family who came to see the wedding. A wooden arch built and decorated by friends stood in the center of the community stage amidst the buzzy crowd. Brewery owner and friend, Jason Alexander, hopped in front of the microphone to clue people into what was about to go down, choking up almost immediately.

I laugh-cried through the whole thing, bursting with love for this man and the sea of beaming faces reflecting love back at us.

In an Instagram post that year, I wrote:

“We did it! On New Year’s, Jamie and I got married in front of friends, family, and total strangers during Free Soup Day, a special place that has nurtured our work and partnership.It was a pop-up wedding, mildly planned, but mostly impromptu. I wore a white jumpsuit. Jamie donned a bowtie. We made a wedding website with a week to spare. Our friends volunteered to help… I was so overwhelmed with joy that all I could say to folks afterward was, ‘I love you so much!’ Total strangers hugged and congratulated us. It made me think, ‘What if that was the goal for the rest of the year?’ To fill a room with so much love that even strangers are touched. To radiate so much joy that it overflows into public spaces, fills people up, and compels them to embrace you. That’s the vision I’m taking into this new year. Love for everyone, with joy to spare.” 

Soon after, Covid came for all of us and we retreated into our homes, cut off from the free flowing joy of being together in a place. We hunkered down and found new ways of being. Life went on for us, but the grief compounded as the death toll climbed (the US still ranks first globally in Covid death rates, a toll that is also the highest of any disaster in US history) spurred by an incompetent government who placed profits before people, as it always does. The blatant disregard for human life, the exploitation of workers, and inadequate response to a worldwide pandemic left so many of us to witness and experience the massive loss of life. Four years later, we are still grappling with the virus, and rates are going up once more.

****

In 2021, Free Soup Day was canceled because of Covid and we spent our first wedding anniversary at home. We made a giant pot of posole, this time with a boneless pork shoulder.

Jamie painstakingly nixtamalized hominy for the soup, a process that takes two days. He heated the hominy on the stovetop in a water solution mixed with pickling lime, or calcium hydroxide, and let it steep overnight before thoroughly rinsing the kernels the next day. This is the same process used for making masa, an ancient process and crucial step that softens the corn kernels and allows for better absorption of nutrients.

Jamie made recado rojo, or achiote paste, to slather on the boneless hunk of meat. His version included a mix of chiles including the small and mighty Chile Tuxtla, a pepper whose seed we gathered February 2020 during our honeymoon in Oaxaca and then grew in our North Carolina garden that Covid year. We had guajillo chiles, a workhorse that lends deep color and smokiness to the paste, given to us by Chris Fletcher, another farmer friend. We added St. Croix, a Caribbean spice pepper grown from seed kept and cared for by Yanna Fishman, a seedkeeper, treasured friend and blessed mentor. There were ancho and pasilla peppers from friend and farmer Kim Shaw of Small City Farm, who also happened to be the person who fashioned my wedding bouquet, a kindness offered even as she underwent chemotherapy.

We toasted the peppers in a dry skillet to gently release the oils from the cell walls, ensuring the flavors of each would shine. The skillet contained a balance of sweet and heat, something worth aspiring to in marriage as well as in a soup.

In a blender, along with achiote, cumin, coriander, Mexican oregano, garlic powder, and green onion powder (dried and powdered from our own harvests), we blended the toasted chiles with citrus juice (a mix of lemon, lime, and orange) until it formed a brick red paste. We rubbed the pork shoulder with the brilliant paste, placed it onto a roasting pan with a little bit of water, and covered it with foil, ready for a low and slow nap in the oven.

Jamie added a few healthy glugs of oil to a large pot, then chopped garlic, onion, and poblano peppers. When I ask how much he says, “A nice amount.” He doesn’t add salt either, something he learned from chef Patricia Quintana whom he met and cooked with as a young chef while traveling through Mexico. He said she told him, “You want to fry, not steam” the vegetables.

The pot sizzles and Jamie keeps a watchful eye. “Take your time to get where you’re going,” he says. “Don’t rush it.” My husband is the patient one in this partnership. He is also the primary cook of the house. He spoons the achiote paste into the mixture and watches everything go amber. For sweetness, he adds tomato paste. It should be said that tomato paste does not traditionally appear in posole, but this is Jamie’s version. Spanglish. The hominy goes into the pan and then water to fill. We simmer. When the pork is done, Jamie shreds the meat and adds it to the bubbling soup. With every stir of the wooden spoon, the flavors meld and marry.

We eat the soup, just the two of us, topped with shredded cabbage and radishes from the garden, cilantro, and a squeeze of lime. We eat cake made by a baker friend in honor of our one year married.

The world outside spins, but home is here. Piping hot. Nourishing.

****

On December 31, 2023, we landed back in North Carolina with less than 24 hours to make soup. Instead of posole, Jamie decided on Three Sisters Soup, a mix of corn, beans and squash using hominy from neighboring Willis Farms, winter squash from our garden, and a mix of black-eyed peas, chickpeas and ayocote beans. No sooner had we set foot in our house after being gone a week were we back in the kitchen. I take my position on the bar stool and watch my husband make the soup. This time, he uses the Instapot to nixtamalize corn in less than an hour. Beans cook well and fast in the Instapot too.

This year, Free Soup Day was the largest gathering to date with over 3000 bowls of soup served. Since getting married four years ago, it’s a day that feels especially ours. Almost like a giant party thrown just for us. Amidst an ocean of people, strangers and friends, happy faces appear with anniversary wishes and hugs. People wear big smiles. Folks look rested. The crowd moves like tides. Everyone is happy at Free Soup Day, unencumbered by the weight of the year, reveling in the newness of it all. 

2023 was hard for us. We dealt with challenges in our businesses, which inevitably spilled over into elements of our partnership. Burnout came for Jamie. Costs were up. Sales were down. We pivoted and pivoted until we were dizzy. Grief compounded again, this time with the ongoing war in Gaza. Meanwhile, a relentless December schedule felt necessary to counteract the woeful months of disappointing sales. So, we worked and worked, and in the moments between, I witnessed, I raged, I grieved and I called my representatives asking for a permanent ceasefire. By the end of the year, the accumulation of horrors on my phone screen broke my heart wide open. Any emotional tug prompted tears whether reading a post on friendship, taking in a poem, or seeing another Palestinian family line extinguished. The pace of the year paired with the insurmountable grief and gaslighting spilled out wherever it could. 

In her book, All About Love, bell hooks says, “To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow…Our mourning is an expression of our commitment, a form of communication and communion.” To view communion in this way is to let the threads of humanity across history, time, and space unspool and envelop us. Joy and grief, inextricably linked. I am inhabited by both. 

As my husband ladles soup to the masses, I take in the life vibrating all around and I let it fill me up. I know this: We all want to feel love from our fellows. We all wish to be safe and warm. We all desire to be fed and nourished. We long to be embraced by the warm hand of love. 

I breathe in this lesson and carry it with me back into the crowd.