Sunny's Chicken Soup

I met my friends Bonnie and Sunny when I was 15 and we were all Navy juniors studying in a French boarding school. Sunny was the ringleader and Bonnie and I the avid acolytes learning at her adventurous knee. Our group was broken up by Navy orders to different places but, many years later, we all discovered we live within 50 miles of each other here in the Bay area. We have periodic reunions to swap stories, share pictures of our grandchildren and catch up on each others' lives. We have even roped in Bonnie's daughter to our hen parties.

The latest meeting of the Cours Maintenon Forever club met at Sunny's house over this past weekend. Having just celebrated the start of the Holiday Feasting Season with a killer lasagna dinner the night before, I was delighted that Sunny's lunch for us was a delightfully light green salad with edamame for interest and a cup of doctored chicken soup. Sunny has a wonderful way of buying stuff from the store and then adding her own touches. The soup came from a nearby grocery chain, but she added fresh green Italian parsley, thinly sliced strips of sweet peppers and some other secret ingredients to create a lovely, homey, satisfying but light soup.

These meetings are truly chicken soup for our souls as we share our lives, our woes, our ideas and our joys over a cup of soup and a salad while we reconnect with our history, our heritage and our shared future.