Beef stock, I ought to fire you!

Actually, it's Bienstock, I ought to fire you, a line by Sweet Sue in Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot. Nothing more than a silly association to hide that this is a month in which cooking is desperately vying for my prime concern.

Bouillon soup: the beef broth with vegetables all-in-one and eaten mostly on weekends, with different vegetables, and a lean piece of beef cooked along, nick-named bouilli (cooked): beef from a shine bone, but used boneless. The type of meat that even after having cooked so long looks somewhat grey, but is amazingly tasty and tender. Great to eat cold with mustard. Here's one from memory (a rarity in these pages). A lot of hassle to prepare, having to cut so many veggies, but the first spoonful of Taste makes this worth your while.

Vegetable Beef Soup ("Bouillon")

Serves many

1 piece of soup meat (beef), "bouilli"
1 entire green celery
2-3 leek
2 small turnips
1 kohlrabi
1 onion
1-2 garlic cloves
(optional and no item in my youth: 1 sweet potato)
2 bay leaves
a few cloves
1 tablespoon thyme
pepper, salt

Brown the pieces of beef briefly in the oven or fry them briefly in a pan, or skip this step.

Put the beef in a big cooking pot filled with water, and let this come to a boil. Remove white foam.

Cut all the veggies in desires shapes, and add them with the herbs to the soup.

Let this soup simmer for 1,5-2 hrs.

Remove the bay leaf.

Now here was my trick the next day: I had this soup with slices of avocado and a dollop of home-made tomato sauce, and a bit of celery leaf on top. Yummy!