Did you ever notice how hard it is to eat healthy when you’re away from home? We’re entering a period of long absences from home for a myriad of reasons and during our first few days, I find I am sorely missing my fridge’s crisper full of vegetables. The older I get, the more I understand how eating lots of veggies (and fruits) in their most natural state makes my whole body feel better. So french fries and onion rings don’t count. And neither does ketchup, which has been touted as a vegetable to make Americans feel better about the poor state of school cafeteria offerings.

I don’t remember my mom badgering us about eating our veggies – the veggies were just…there. All the time. Fresh lettuce salads in the summer, tomatoes all day long as soon as they started ripening on the vine, cucumber sandwiches – so much organic produce before organic produce was cool. And almost every day of the year, there was always Mom’s Vegetable Soup.

Maybe it wasn’t every day. Sometimes there was borscht (the best on the planet) or chicken soup with homemade noodles. But soup was a staple in our house at lunchtime, an appetizer or a meal in itself. I never got tired of Mom’s vegetable soup or of dipping her homemade buns in the broth and slurping it all up. Over the years Mom probably tweaked her recipe to change it up a bit – she started adding chili powder at some point. (We ate a lot of chili, too, so Mom must have liked it, as it is a cook’s prerogative to mostly cook what they themselves want to eat.)

Mom didn’t leave behind recipes, per se, but she left behind tastes, as in: This tastes just like Mom’s. I still haven’t completely figured out her perogies or her cabbage rolls, but I think I’ve come pretty close with her vegetable soup. I used to think soup was too mysterious to make from scratch and mostly stuck to opening cans of Campbell’s tomato or mushroom soup, whisking in some milk and calling it lunch. But eventually that just didn’t cut it anymore. And one day, after falling in love with The Mom 100 Cookbook, I decided to try the vegetable soup recipe, and after making my own Mom-inspired tweaks, I now have my own recipe.

And so I’m looking forward to going home and pulling out those simplest of ingredients – onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, some stock and some salt and pepper – oh, and a can of tomato soup for that tomatoey-goodness – and feeding my body and soul. I think of Mom every time – she was also no-nonsense and down-to-earth just like her soup. And it makes me happy that such comfort and goodness can be found in a simple bowl of homemade soup.