Field Notes: Ciorbă de Vară cu Leuștean (Summer Ciorbă with Lovage)

The garden gives. The pot receives. Nothing is wasted.

Okay, so here's what happened. We made arayes — spiced ground meat pressed into flatbread, grilled over fire, absolutely delicious — and there was leftover filling. And if you know anything about this kitchen, you know that leftover seasoned meat is not a problem. It is an opportunity. Specifically, it is a ciorbă opportunity.

Pull up a chair. The soup's already on.

Let's Talk About Meatballs for a Second

Every culture on earth has figured out the meatball. Romanian grandmothers make perișoare — little rice-bound meatballs simmered right in the broth. Romanians also make mici, which is basically a sausage, which is basically a meatball in a casing. Arayes is spiced ground meat pressed into flatbread — a meatball wearing a coat. They're all the same beautiful idea: seasoned meat, shaped with intention, cooked until something wonderful happens.

The arayes filling was already a meatball at heart. We just made it official by adding arborio rice and rolling it small. And honestly? Best decision of the week.

About Our Lovage (She's Five and She's Magnificent)

If you only grow one herb for soup, grow lovage — leuștean in Romanian. She is the soul of ciorbă and there is genuinely no substitute. Celery-adjacent but wilder, deeper, with this incredible green intensity that hits the broth and just... fills the whole kitchen. Traditional Romanian households dry bundles of it in late summer and crumble it into winter soups for months. That's how important she is.

Ours is five years old. The base has gone woody — thick and unhurried, the way a perennial gets when it's decided it belongs somewhere. But the leaves are still extraordinarily generous, and that's where all the good stuff lives. In summer she goes into rainy day soups, herby spreads, anywhere you'd reach for celery leaves or parsley. Use her there instead. She's more interesting than both.

Fair warning, though: she's a strong lady. If you're using her raw — in a pesto with pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, or walnuts, thinned into a salad dressing — add a good handful of parsley to soften her without erasing her. The result is something so green and complex and alive—nothing like anything from a jar.

Compound Butter: The Freezer Is a Kitchen Tool

We make compound butter all year long. This isn't a fall project — it's just how we cook. Whenever the garden is being generous (which in July is basically constantly), we blend, roll, and freeze. Lovage with herbs. Garlic-forward blends. Floral mixes with edible flowers. Savoury combinations built for specific purposes. Bags and bags of them, labelled and stacked, waiting for winter.

We also freeze herbs in olive oil — chopped fine, pressed into ice cube trays, popped out and bagged. One cube into a cold pan and you've already started something good.

Here's the thing people miss about compound butter: it's not a finishing touch. It's a starting point. Melt it before your mirepoix and you've built the first layer of flavour before anything else has even happened. Start a braise with a garlic-herb cube and the whole pot tastes like it's been going for hours. It's one of the most satisfying kitchen moves there is.

We'll share the full how-to — ratios, flavour combinations, the whole freezer workflow — in a future Field Notes. For now, just know that a lovage-parsley-thyme-garlic butter started this ciorbă, and it was absolutely the right call.

The Leftover Version: Arayes Perișoare

This is the whole point. The arayes filling — already carrying allspice, cumin, the memory of the grill — gets mixed with arborio rice and rolled into small, bite-sized meatballs. Into the broth they go. Meanwhile, the mirepoix cooks separately in compound butter, low and slow, getting sweet and deeply flavoured. They meet after 40 minutes, and the result is a pot that tastes like it's been tended all day. Because in a way, it has.

For the arayes perișoare:

• Leftover arayes mixture — spiced meat, allspice and all, it belongs here
• 50 g arborio rice per 400 g meat, mixed in raw — it swells and binds as it cooks
• Roll small — bite-sized, smaller than a walnut, generous enough to find in every spoonful

For the broth:

• Good bone broth, enough to fill the pot generously
• A few stems of fresh lovage
• Salt to taste

For the mirepoix (cooked separately in compound butter):

• 1–2 tablespoons lovage, thyme, garlic & parsley compound butter
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 2 medium zucchini, diced small
• A handful of green beans, snapped
• 2 medium tomatoes, roughly chopped

The sour note (non-negotiable in ciorbă):

• 2–3 tablespoons of lemon juice, or a splash of borș if you have it — or a little shot of Pucker Up, Buttercup for a fire cider kick that is absolutely not traditional and absolutely delicious

To finish:

• A generous spoonful of piima or Greek yogurt, stirred in off the heat
• Fresh dill and torn lovage leaves on top 

On the piima: it's a Scandinavian cultured milk — pourable, lightly sour, alive in the way only slow ferments are. We'll be talking about it properly soon. Consider this your preview.

How to Make It (Leftover Version)

Get your broth simmering. Drop in the lovage stems. Mix the arborio rice into the arayes mixture, roll into bite-sized balls, and lower them gently into the broth. Don't stir — just let them settle. Simmer for 40 minutes.

While that's happening, melt your compound butter in a separate pan. Sweat the onion until it's soft and sweet, then add the zucchini, green beans, and tomatoes. Cook until everything is tender and the tomatoes have collapsed into the base. After 40 minutes, add the mirepoix to the broth. Fish out the lovage stems. Add your sour note. Taste. Adjust. Off the heat, stir in the yogurt. Finish with dill and lovage. Eat with good bread while it's hot.

The Traditional Version: Ciorbă de Perișoare

No leftovers? Starting from scratch? This is the one. Classic rice-bound meatballs, a proper vegetable base, soured with borș. Unfussy, deeply satisfying, and genuinely one of the best soups in the world. We said what we said.

For the meatballs:

• 400 g ground beef, pork, or a mixture
• 50 g rice (long grain or arborio)
• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
• 1 tbsp fresh dill, chopped
• 2 tbsp of the cooked vegetable base, reserved before adding stock — it binds and adds flavour
• Salt and pepper

For the soup:

• 1–2 tbsp lovage, thyme, garlic & parsley compound butter (or vegetable oil)
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 large carrot, grated
• 1 parsnip, grated
• 1 red bell pepper, chopped
• 1 tomato, chopped
• 1 tbsp tomato purée or 100 ml passata
• 2 celery sticks, chopped
• 2 litres vegetable or beef stock
• 500 ml borș (or juice of one lemon)
• 3 tbsp each chopped parsley and lovage
• Salt, pepper, and extra lemon juice to taste

Melt the butter in a heavy pot. Sweat the onion, then add the carrot, parsnip, bell pepper, tomato, celery, and tomato purée. Cook 5–7 minutes until soft and fragrant. Pull out 2 tablespoons of the vegetable mix and set aside for the meatballs. Pour in the stock and bring to a simmer.

Mix your meatball ingredients — including those reserved vegetables — and roll into 1-inch balls. Drop them gently into the simmering broth. Cook 15 minutes. Add the borș or lemon juice. Simmer another 5–10 minutes. Stir in the parsley and lovage off the heat. Taste and adjust.

Serve with piima or Greek yogurt, good bread, fresh polenta — which is the traditional Romanian way and absolutely the right call — or a pickled pepper if you like a little heat. Make a big pot. It's better the next day.

Nothing Wasted. Everything Intentional.

This is what seasonal cooking actually looks like. Not a trend, not an aesthetic — a practice. The arayes were made with good meat and care and fire. The leftovers became meatballs. The meatballs became soup. The garden filled the pot. Nothing got thrown out. Everything got used.

This is the kind of cooking that has fed people through long winters and lean seasons for generations. It doesn't ask for a special occasion or a complicated technique. It just asks you to pay attention — to what the garden is doing, to what the week left behind, to what the pot needs. Waste nothing. Use everything. Repeat with intention until it becomes second nature. That's how a practice becomes a culture.

That's what we're building here, one pot at a time. Welcome to it.

Pull Your Nettle Pasta Out of the Freezer

While the soup is simmering — go. Go to the freezer. Pull out the nettle pasta. You know the bag. The one from when the nettles were absolutely going off and you had more than you could use fresh, and you did the right thing and froze some. It is time to use her up.

Our nettle pasta kit is a limited-edition spring product — small-batch, made with fresh nettles while the season allows — and is currently sold out. But here's the thing: the batches are generous on purpose, because we know how this goes. We always freeze the leftovers. We hope you did too. And if you didn't — or if your stash is gone and you're feeling the loss — send us a message. We may have some spring nettles still available for a bespoke batch, and we are absolutely willing to make that happen for you.

Drop a handful of ribbons into the broth in the last few minutes, or serve them alongside in a separate bowl with a ladle of broth poured over. Nettle and lovage in the same bowl is one of the genuinely great combinations — both wild, both deeply green, both completely at home in a pot that knows what wild tastes like. No nettle pasta? Traditional Romanian polenta (Mamaliga) alongside this soup is also absolutely correct and deeply satisfying.

Dried bouquet garni bundles are coming soon — garden herbs tied and ready to drop into the broth, doing exactly the quiet work a good herb bundle does. Our herb and edible flower combinations are made for this kind of cooking. Not decorative. Functional. Rooted in how people have actually fed each other for a very long time.

The kits exist because the kitchen should feel like an extension of the garden. This meal is proof of that.

We're Drinking Again...

Full disclosure: dry house over here. Has been for a while, and honestly, we wouldn't change it — which means we've put real energy into making sure what's in the glass is just as good as what's in the bowl. Turns out that's not hard when you have a garden, a fermentation corner, and strong opinions about shrubs.

Right now we're drinking our Berry Sun Tea — a limited edition summer blend that is as good steeped in still water as it is in sparkling, and absolutely magnificent as a kombucha second ferment straight from the booch tap. That's exactly what's on the counter right now: tart, lightly fizzy, faintly sweet, very July. Perfect alongside a hot sour soup. (Not sponsored by SodaStream. Though we would absolutely love that. Just putting it out there.)

It's Dry July, and we'd warmly encourage you to give it a go — not as something you're taking away, but as something you're opening up. Because here's what we've found: when you turn toward abundance — really turn toward it, with curiosity and without judgment — you discover how much is already there waiting for you. Shrubs from summer fruit. Fire ciders that wake up your whole body. Kombucha fizzing with the same energy as the garden in July. Herb-steeped waters that taste like somewhere you actually want to be.

And then something quietly remarkable happens. The things that weren't really serving you — the ones that dulled the edges but also dulled the light, for you and for the people you love — they start to fall away on their own. Not because you pushed them out. Because you filled the space with something so much better, there was no room left. That's how it works in the garden too. You don't fight the weeds. You grow something so vital and abundant that there's simply no room left for what doesn't belong.

Body, heart, and soul. Aligned, healing, That's the garden, baby.

We'll be talking about all of it soon — fire ciders as mocktail bases, shrubs for preserving summer's bounty, why the mocktail is one of our favourite things in this house. All of it is coming in Field Notes: The Beverage Bar. Stay close. 🌿