While I have taken part in many Summerlicious and Winterlicious events, this year was the first time that I attended
Soup-a-licious, held at Wychwood Barns. Twenty-nine different booths were set up with soups provided by restaurants, catering companies, shops and other soup vendors. Advanced tickets cost $15 for 10 soup tasting coupons while tickets at the door cost $22. Apparently, if you brought your own soup bowl or soup spoon, you were awarded an extra coupon, which I did not know until I got there.
There were so many wonderful sounding soups that I actually considered getting more coupons. Lucky I didn't since after 6-7 helpings plus some sips from my husband's tastings, I was so stuffed that I could not consume my last few tastings and had to give my remaining tickets away. Even that was difficult to do since most people had their own excess tickets and looked rather sick when offered the chance of tasting more soup. Towards the end, I was asking if I could just get a half cup instead of full cup of soup per tasting.
Many of the soups came with a variety of toppings including croutons, pretzels, olive oil, fresh herbs, jalapeno buttermilk biscuits, sour cream and more.
Cobbs Bread was giving away free bread to go with the soup, which sounded like a great deal until you realized that the bread was too filling and took away stomach room from the soup.
Pizza Del Arte was also giving away free pizza slices, which were equally filling but so good that we could not resist. They handed out a 50% off coupon which we plan to use in the future to order a full pizza.
I tried some delicious soups including mushroom, clam chowder, Spanish fennel, smokey tomato, cheddar & ale with pretzel croutons, cauliflower/spinach/chickpea/garam masala with a crispy papri ball, corn chowder, cauliflower/garlic/sesame and mulligatawny.
Tasting the soups was quite a fun experience but it would have been much better had it not been an unusually warm, Indian summer day in October. With temperatures in the mid twenties, it was tough drinking all that hot soup and we were all building up quite the sweat. Where was the chilled vichyssoise when we needed it?
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