Turtle Bread's Sweet Potato Soup

Every once in a while you get to discover a new comfort food. With the innocence of a young child you are engaged in conversation when you suddenly taste something and are literally floored with a rush of sensation delivered via the excellence of the taste itself combined with the emotions that it conjures up. Context is a large part of a favorite thing, both who you first eat it with and what it reminds you of from your idealized past.

Take, for example, the Patti Cake I recently gushed about. I first tried it with my parents (who I very rarely get to see) and it reminds me completely of a Hostess cupcake denseness. The Chocolate Cake at 112 Eatery is partially so very good because it is a grown up version of the Ding Dong, playing off of the whimsical goodness of this magical cake in our memories. Although I am sure that if I ate a real Ding Dong right now, it would be utter disappointment knowing full well how over the years the butter comes out and the cheaper hydrogenated oils get added.
I find that the emotions I attach to foods are often found more with desserts than any other course. This must be because I just don't often eat the other foods of my youth - the hot dogs, meatloaf, Grape Kool-Aid and Hamburger Helper - the typical foods of an American Childhood in the early 80s.

This all brings me to the emotional confusion that I had when I had seated myself with a newspaper at Turtle Bread and spooned a mouthful of Sweet Potato Soup into my mouth. The rush hit me head on. But it was an intense dessert emotion and this soup was, well, my lunch not dessert. The soup was a beautiful creamy orange color, flecked with brown spices. When I closed my eyes and just breathed it in, it hit me. I was smelling and tasting a subtle Thanksgiving pumpkin pie in my soup bowl. The spices were the same, the color was the same. It was just the base ingredient that was different. The part of this that I found particularly personally confusing was that I didn't like Pumpkin Pie when I was little (and am still pretty averse to it) but that this soup was absolutely delicious.

I happily sat and ate my dessert soup, loving ripping hunks of french bread off and dipping them into the sweet goodness that is this soup. By the time my bowl was scraped clean, I looked across my tray at the palmier I had bought for dessert and didn't think I really needed it - I had already had plenty of dessert eat. Tucking it into my handbag would have been the reasonable person's response but I instead sat back, took a big bite and happily returned to being 15 in Paris and happily discovering my first palmier.

The Turtle Bread Company Three Locations in Minneapolis www.turtlebread.com