Autumn in Columbia is an ending — of long days, warm weather, the peak gardening season, and summer break — but it’s also a season full of “firsts.” I look forward to making the season’s first batch of chili or pumpkin bread, watching the first MU home football game, and wearing jeans for the first time in a while.
At the end of summer, I’m excited to see the store filled with students buying supplies, preparing for the first day of school. Though, of course, I learn new things year-round, I’ll always think of autumn as the beginning of an official learning season. I read more often. I buy new pencils and notebooks. My brain is especially receptive. Some years I even write myself a small syllabus. In autumn, my hobbies are freshly interesting. Newly released music thrills me more than at any other time of year, and I look forward to reflecting on the first time I heard it.
Since I feel especially awake in autumn, I’m also particularly inspired to cook. Summer is a rewarding cooking season due to the abundant fresh vegetables and long days. But making meals in autumn feels earnest. Dinner time seems more intentional and necessary, a little more structured.
This autumn, I’ve used a summer memory to create a new culinary first. Lyle and I recently traveled to Chicago for five days to attend two concerts. In between those shows, we walked, enjoyed the city’s Midwestern grit-and-grace hospitality, and ate some seriously great food. One joy of travel is appreciating fine meals, but another is bringing memories of those meals home to recreate. A particular dish from our trip was so tasty and memorable that we knew we’d try to replicate it.
That dish was tortilla soup at Rick Bayless’s Frontera Grill. Waiters brought us each a bowl of sliced avocado, artisan Jack cheese, crema, and tortilla strips. Then they poured a dark pasilla pepper broth with smoked chicken into our bowls and offered lime wedges to squeeze into the soup. On its own, the tableside offering felt special. Then we took a spoonful.
Lyle gave a stunned, almost surly look as he tasted the marvelous concoction, and I felt a similar expression cross my face. Then we shook our heads, smiling. The broth was soulful and deep. The chicken tasted like someone had arrived at the restaurant at 3:00 a.m. to put it on the smoker. Each spoonful offered a newly blended flavor and texture combination of silky avocado and cheese, intense broth, smoked chicken, crema, crisp tortilla strips, and a nudge of lime.
Our visit to Frontera was a lunchtime affair, so we didn’t order margaritas as we normally would at a Mexican restaurant. We were due to see the band Pavement at the Salt Shed that evening, and we wanted to save our energy. Instead, we ordered unsweetened iced tea with lime, which turned out to be a Mexican food-friendly match. Our enjoyment of the tortilla soup was powerful, even without tequila’s assistance.
In his cookbook Mexican Everyday, Bayless includes a recipe for a tortilla soup like the one we loved at his restaurant. I’ve made several versions of tortilla soup over the years, but not Bayless’s. The other night, I read the recipe and decided to give it a try.
Since the recipe was geared toward the home cook, I knew it would likely include shortcuts not used at his restaurant. But I also noticed an intriguing technique for dry roasting a stemmed and seeded dried pasilla pepper, and because the pasilla broth was one of the most memorable aspects of Frontera’s soup, that part of the recipe excited me.
The recipe also, however, included cooking chopped chicken directly in the broth. As the smoked chicken in Frontera’s tortilla soup was another memorable component, I was uneasy about simmering the chicken. I thought the meat might pick up a little smokiness and oomph from the broth’s pasilla pepper, fire-roasted canned tomatoes, caramelized onion, and garlic, but I wasn’t sure the flavor or the texture would meet my restaurant memory.
Bayless is an acclaimed chef. I figured that if I followed his “everyday” recipe, the tortilla soup would likely be great. But I wanted more than a successful outcome. I craved a specific flavor and texture. Still, I decided to try the recipe as written.
I learned that while a recipe certainly teaches new ingredients and techniques, instinct is also important. The broth had a rich flavor developed from dry roasting, caramelizing, pureeing, reducing, and simmering. The broth and garnishes also blended beautifully — but the chicken was not what I hoped for. Determined to recreate the Chicago memory, I had a brainwave.
Lyle and I had plenty of soup left for a second dinner, so I removed the chicken with a slotted spoon and suggested that we try the tortilla soup broth the next night fortified with shredded, smoked chicken from one of Columbia’s barbecue restaurants. He liked the idea.
The next night, we picked up a smoked chicken from D. Rowe’s, removed the skin and bones, and shredded the meat. We then placed a helping of smoked chicken in our bowls alongside the original garnishes of sliced avocado, Monterey Jack cheese, sour cream, and crushed tortilla chips. After ladling hot broth over the garnishes, we topped the bowls with some chopped fresh cilantro and queso fresco and served our bowls with a lime wedge. The soup was transformed. We shook our heads, smiling.
From now on, when I make this dish, I’ll omit cooking chicken in the broth. I’ll make the tortilla soup with smoked chicken from a COMO restaurant, recreating a travel memory with local expertise. That one change turned an almost-amazing soup into a fully amazing one.
As it turns out, failing the initial tortilla soup attempt taught me how to succeed. The misstep offered me the smoked chicken epiphany, combining a vacation destination and my hometown into a new recipe — another beloved first I look forward to repeating.
