Blustery cold weather keeps hitting the Bay Area like a boom-a-rang, cold, warm and cold again. Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend when a BBQ dinner was the norm, seemed weird. Who has a BBQ in the rain?

Our go to rainy-day dinner is soup. We’ve had so many rainy days we cycled through our soup menus at least five times. Hubby wanted a hearty soup.

“How about stone soup?” I suggested.

“Ha!  That’s it!” he chuckled.

When our oldest was about seven-years-old, he was taken in by the classic story of Stone Soup. The premise of the story is how a stranger to the community tricked the town into bringing a little something to add to a pot with a big stone. Promises of the most delicious soup convinced villagers to give up a carrot or potato or a bit of beef. The moral of the story was how wonderful a meal can be with everyone contributing a little bit.

Missing magic ingrediant.

My older son wanted to make the soup in our kitchen. I had him write out the recipe so we could shop. After the grocery store, we hit the local landscaping business that sold stone slabs, mulch, bark, bricks.

I stood at the counter, flanked by my seven and five-year-old boys and asked for a single rock so we could make stone soup.

The two men behind the counter smiled, the younger starting to laugh and ruin the fantasy that you don’t make soup with a stone until a jab from the older man shut him up.

“We have the perfect stones for stone soup,” he said with authority. He showed us a few smooth stones, about the size of a softball. We picked a creamy white stone; it seemed cleaner to me.

“How much?” I asked.

“it’s free.” He said with a wink.

At home, I decided to boil the stone for a good hour to make sure nothing was alive in that “flavor” enhancer.  Afterward, we added the carrots, celery, garlic, broth and a bit of beef to the pot. As we got more comfortable with the recipe, we added barley too. Yum!

Fourteen years later, we no longer have the stone or my sons to share in the magic, “Stone Soup” is still delicious.