Erotic is when you use a feather,
kinky is when you use the whole chicken.
Perverted is chicken soup for dinner guests the next day.
C. Haynes
As a child I hated soup. Then again, I enjoyed biting through the bone of a chicken leg. Ah, simple pleasures as a child. But an ex really liked soup, and she could cook. After the relationship ended, the interest in good soup did not. So I got a book on cooking soup. And yes, it was a long day.
Anyway, going through the entries in that cook book, it wasn’t hard to find a common pattern:
- Main Ingredients: Some larger vegetables, apply heat to them to get them soft (either in the stove or in a cooking pot).
- Main Soup Basis: Some vegetable or chicken stock.
- Spice Basis: Salt and pepper.
- Additional Spices: For taste, e.g., garlic, chilli, or other spices.
- To all of this apply heat and an electric blender.
And that common pattern allows me to show some … uh, variation in making my own soup. I do not depend on having exactly the same ingredients as the cook book requires (rarely the case). And frankly, it’s fun to experiment a little (no in the scientific sense ;-)).
The first attempt was rather tasty, although it produced perhaps double the amount of what I actually wanted to eat (let’s just say my stomach was rather full when I fell asleep). The second attempt … well, I learned that if you use less vegetable stock because you wanted to avoid producing too much soup, you do indeed produce less. But what you produce isn’t soup anymore, it’s baby food. Still, quite tasty, and with the amount of chili in it definitely not something for babies. Yeah, my current attempts are a bit like Dilbert’s cooking.
But anyway, it’s fun to try out recipes this way, never knowing exactly what you get. And it’s a great way to eat more vegetables.
Happy experimenting.
