Have Cold; Need Soup

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

I’ve been in the mood for soup these past few days. And hot tea with lemon and honey.

I caught cold on Thursday and warm liquids seem to suppress my incessant cough. Being sick over the weekend was all the more painful because the weather in San Francisco was simply glorious; bed was the last place I wanted to be.

With soup on my brain, I’m sharing some good recipes from Special Fork’s database. These aren’t stick-to-the-ribs, hearty winter soups. They’re quicker-cooking and especially useful choices when you need a little warmth and sustenance and don’t have time for long simmering, or when you don’t want to heat up the kitchen.

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Rainy Day Soup

Enter to win a collection of food items from France, selected by Sandy, along with Around my French Table cookbook by Dorie Greenspan. To enter the sweepstakes, go to http://bit.ly/YGrDyy. Follow Sandy in France on Twitter to keep updated on new goodies for the prize package.

By Lori Powell
For One or Two Bites, a blog for singles and couples

The spring rains have begun as well as some amazing thunder clappers. This past week delivered not only tons of rain and high winds but lots of buds and flowering bushes and green grass. This is my favorite time of year (fall is a close second).

Today is a day of gardening and digging out of last year's twigs and fall leaves that found there way into my garden to form a protective blanket until spring really arrived. So maybe it's a tad early, as I know that up here in the Hudson Valley, they say, do not plant or uncover until frost is really a distant memory, which locals say is around May 15.

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