If Hannah has you over for tea, don’t eat the soup…
Trails are the onions of mountain biking. You can’t make soup without an onion, just as you can’t mountain bike without a trail. Without trails, it’s road riding, or perhaps hippity-hoppity trials. It’s just floating vegetables.
The stock sets the tone for the soup, just as the surroundings flavour a ride. Vegetable, chicken, fish or beef? Woods, local hills, faraway mountains, or trail centre? Outdoors air, not just air. Indoor parks are fun, but they’re not mountain biking. Sure, skip the chopping, tip a tin into a pan: go Zwifting. The homemade version will always be better.
A trail, and the outdoors. An onion, and stock. It’s not yet soup, or mountain biking… though perhaps it could be gravel riding, or touring? What we need now are vegetables and protein. Tomatoes and lentils, puddles and roots – the basic ingredients of the simplest of trail soups. Bacon, beans, chorizo and peppers. Rocks, drops, log skinnies and berms. Maybe prawns for a more exotic option, like great slabs of Pacific North West granite, or puffed tofu chunks of Moab slick rock.
Sometimes our soup needs padding, the floating bits held together with carbohydrates for a bigger meal. Alphabet pasta, croutons and toast – the inevitable paved and fire road connectors between the flavourful mouthfuls of our ride.
Each element, on their own, a mere nibble. A skills park of ingredients – nutritious to a point, but not tasty. But mixed together in perfect proportions of flavours and textures, each rock and drop, each carrot and bean, they combine to deliver us true nourishment.
Mix it, simmer it, tweak the flavour by adding herbs and friends. Have it chilled or light in summer, hot and hearty in winter, but it’s a simple staple so don’t scrimp on it. Lunchtime soup grabbed from a mug, weekend soup extended with a sandwich.
There’s always another way to make soup. Grab your favourite spoon and dig in.
