I make really good soup. The only reason I'm thinking about it now is that we're going from hot, dusty haying to cold and wind-blown leaves. That brings out the need for warm, homey food, and nothing fits the bill like soup.

I make such good soup that complete strangers have asked me for my recipe. That's where the problem arises. I don't have a recipe, and there's no way that this week's soup is going to be anything like next week's soup, no matter how hard I try.

If that statement sounds familiar based on other things I've written, it's because it's my trademark in the kitchen. No darned recipe is going to get in the way of my cooking.

Now, about my soup.

There are five types of ingredients - meat, liquid, vegetables, spices and some kind of starch - and I choose specific items within those categories haphazardly. Maybe it's dumb luck, but I haven't had a bad soup yet.

I start by selecting the meat du jour. The current choices from the freezer are beef, venison, pork, turkey, chicken, bratwurst, goat, ham and that unlabeled-chunk-of-something-in-the-Ziploc-bag. I haven't been brave enough to do a fish soup, although I stewed bear and elk in my young and wild days.

A quick look in my pantry tells me the starch choices include four kinds of rice, six shapes of hard pasta, Kluski noodles, barley, couscous, lentils, a cute polka-dotted bean I grew last year and three varieties of potatoes.

The soup usually gets a single starch, but if I'm short of bowtie pasta, I have been known to add a few veggie spirals for color.

My take on vegetables is a little odd because I grow so much in the garden and don't have room to can or freeze it all. Much of it goes into the dehydrator and comes out looking unappetizing but perfect for soup.

The pantry holds plastic bags of miniature pieces of blanched corn, celery, onions, parsnips, eggplant, beets, green and wax beans, green and red peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, carrots, sugar pea pods and jalape~os. I usually make a selection of three or four.

The cool thing about dried vegetables is that you can start with a dish for two, toss in the vegetables, and by the time they have rehydrated you have enough food for the whole neighborhood.

Spices are in alphabetical order on two rotating racks above the stove. I give them a spin and pick four of something. It's amazing how well ginger goes with chicken.

My secret ingredient comes from a half-gallon plastic ice cream container in the freezer, and I haven't the foggiest idea what's in it.

At least, I didn't have an idea until last week when the thermometer started spinning counter-clockwise and everything in the garden went limp. That was the annual signal to start making soup.

The beef was already browning when I reached for the secret ingredient. I ran a little hot water over the outside of the container and skidded the frozen contents into the stock pot. It looked like a core sample of glacial ice with telltale layers of culinary events.

At the bottom was the frozen milky water from boiled potatoes, followed by a thin stratum of dark brown mud. That was the juice left over from broiling hamburgers several weeks back. Then came a thin green layer - frozen pea juice with a few peas still intact. Atop that was a yellowish layer with translucent wormlike things. I'm guessing that was the beer and onion juice from a Sunday bratwurst cookout.

The next layer was bright red tomato ice from juice that didn't fit in the final canning jar. Above that was another thin mud layer scraped out of the cast-iron skillet with a little water after fried pork chops. The top layer was some more frozen vegetable water.

By the time it all melted and melded with the meat, a couple of handfuls of dried vegetables and a tangle of Kluski noodles, it was just about perfect.

Obviously, my secret is that I empty nothing liquid down the drain. Everything goes in the freezer container. (Almost everything - tuna juice goes to the dog, and pickle water goes on the garden. Fruit syrup gets mixed in with orange juice for breakfast, although that might go well with chicken too. Just a thought.)

I'm not as neurotic as my cousin, who used to collect bones from guest's plates and boil them for the soup pot. But I am not wasteful either. Even a tablespoon of juice left from cooking beans gets dumped in the freezer container.

This isn't intended to be a cooking lesson. There is actually a moral to the story, but I'm not sure how to say it without being heavyhanded with the symbolism.

Where soup is concerned, I could be unimaginative and pour it out of a can, but that would be someone else's soup, not mine. It would be unmemorable, and probably unhealthy.

The reason my soup is always good is that it brings together something special from each day that has passed. It carries forward the spice of an exciting event or the calming comfort of an old favorite.

There is joy and wonder in knowing that the secret ingredient this week will be vastly different from the secret ingredient next week.

If I accidentally get a bitter olive in with the mix, all of the good flavors surround it and make it right.

Even the occasional burned bit of meat or excess salt is eclipsed by a more pleasant flavor. There is always enough to share with others and it's never so bad it's wasted.

A good soup is like a good life. Take a big ladle full.

Sara Bredesen can be reached at 715-360-7253 or stbrede@gmail.com.