MikePeercy.com

It may seem a surprise to some who know me well, but I have been trying to retrain my appetite for food, to eat more of the things that are good for me and less of the things that are not (or, as I try not to think of it but cannot escape thinking, more stuff I don’t really care for and less that tastes good).

It’s a work in progress.

Anyway, we’ve been on vacation and that effort to reign in the appetite has not fared well. We ended up in an interesting little place up the street from our hotel called, “The Irish Table.” I suppose that’s irrelevant, but true nonetheless.

We wanted to find something relatively light, so we ordered an appetizer and soup. The appetizer was a really nice cheese board. But the soup? That was something to write home about.

Their soup du jour was a cream of wild mushroom soup. I have found very few things with mushrooms in my adult life that I do not really enjoy. But when I think of cream of mushroom soup, seems like someone is making a casserole of some sort for a pot-luck dinner on Sunday.

But the wild card here is the word “wild.” Or so it is in my mind right now. I thought that sounded kind of light… or at least creamy… and not inclined to cause any trouble of the digestive variety.

So they bring this soup and it is so incredibly creamy and smooth and… well… mushroomy. I don’t care if that’s a real word. I used it. If you like mushrooms, you know what it means.

Mushroomy.

So there it is.

Evidently they have puréed the stuff in this soup so there’s not even a chunk of mushroom to chew, but it’s just a hair too thick and creamy to guzzle it. (I’m not saying that because I tried, really.) It was just hot and smooth and mushroomy and delicious.

I happened into the coffee shop that operates in the front of that restaurant a couple of days later (and I’ll write about that soon) and in my conversation with the lady at the coffee counter, she raves about the soup too. Then she said something unexpected:
“Can you believe it’s vegan? There’s no cream or butter in it at all!”

She’s obviously very excited about this. I’m simply puzzled. What wizardry is going on here? How do they do that? What could they possibly have…?

Really, I don’t care. I don’t have any problem at all with vegan perspectives or practices. I don’t share their particular convictions, but I appreciate them and admire their determination to live by them.

But this soup! It was delicious. It was smooth and creamy and delightful.

I loved it.

And I’m not even a vegan.

Oh yeah, by the way, the waiter let it slip that the secret ingredient was brandy. Maybe that had something to do with it.

I suppose there is a point to be made… suffice it to say that things are not always what they seem. God has a way of surprising and delighting us in even the most mundane things of life if we would simply slow down enough to notice.

What have you been surprised by lately?