November 29, 2024

Soup Waits For No Man aka I Just Can't Help Falling In Soup

I can make soup. Pot, water, bone¹ - done. I have a blender that has a soup setting, where, if I want (and sometimes I do), I can put frozen veg in there and less than ten minutes later, I have soup. Hot. Soup. Right out of the jug.² I don’t even have to boil a kettle.

Sohla has a recipe called “How to Make a Velvety Vegetable Soup out of Anything”, and yes, I knew she meant food-type items. Fool me once!³. Like the cucumber salad and the nut dust/dry dip, there isn’t so much a recipe as a series of choices to be made along the way (just like friends). She goes through the stages: sweat, simmer, blend, adjust, garnish, store (just like friends!), and gives reasonings for why you’re doing each step at that stage (e.g. during Sweat you should pop in any spices: “They need direct contact with fat to bloom”, and yes, I knew that didn’t mean the chili flakes would turn into a beautiful bouquet. Fool me twice!⁴).

Frankly, her ability to encourage independence and facilitate development of my own thoughts and recipe pairings is getting a little disgusting. Like, yeah, I know you’re going to make explicit something I’ve just vibed with and not really planned in, and now I’m learning about myself and my ability to sense time and willingness to take time and put thought into something when I feel said time has gotten away with me.

This is the final recipe in the Taste chapter (not the final one for me - I’ve not really been in the mood for Homemade Maynoisse⁵, or watermelon-heavy salads), and the only one supposed to be served hot. The rest have less of a time pressure (supposedly, but you, know, what if I’m hungry?), so you can experiment more without feeling hemmed in by time.

I felt hemmed in by soup.

It was supposed to be for Wednesday. That was the plan when I made out my recipe map, figuring her “Honeynut & Miso” “souper inspiration” had the fewest ingredients for me to buy.

Then, Wednesday morning came and, well, I just didn’t want to start soup and have to wait for it to be ready to eat it. I had other things to do! Like. Stuff. You know? Things Wednesday things. So, after lunch, I got down to chopping, sweating, and simmering for the morrow’s luncheon repast. And the morrow’s morrow, for it is bizarre to me that soup could only be for one meal. (I have generally made soup that seems to self-replenish, and then I hate soup for a while. This soup lasted two meals, and I did not hate it, but I did have to heat it from cold twice. That’s fridge soup two times straight in a row. So. I don’t hate soup, but it’s taken like a week to get into the mindset to write this.)

And now I am under time pressure, cos I said I’d make dinner, and now it’s six⁷ and I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out who the Witch King is in any scenario. So. Basically, this soup took a really long time and things kept falling in it.