Rebooting for 2025 in Five Soups

Recipes for starting the year on a healthy and nourishing note

I’m currently in France on respite from recent holiday indulgences, including a great New Year’s Eve (which also happens to be my anniversary). We made a meal from Petrossian caviar, starting with Beluga, Royal Osetra and smoked trout eggs served with potato chips and crème fraîche and plenty of Champagne. Our main course was inspired by the Parisian restaurant Caviar Kaspia, and consisted of a baked potato drizzled with butter and topped by an ice cream scoop’s worth of caviar. This was washed down with gin martinis and we were fast asleep by 10:00pm. Happy New Year!

So after all that decadence, on January 2nd, we started a reboot detox adapted from the playbook of Buchinger-Wilhelmi, the fasting clinic we visit annually. For the next seven days I would make only soups—low calorie, nutrient-rich and flavorful—for lunch and dinner. We’d drink lots of mineral water, and sip tea and black coffee for breakfast. And no booze, of course!

I wanted to keep the meals as exciting and flavorful as possible, so I made sure the kitchen was stocked with great ingredients to choose from. I started by making a base of vegetable stock, about 5-6 quarts, using market finds that looked good: leeks, carrots, turnips, onions, shallots, garlic, bay leaf, etc…