I am going to make some fucking SOUP!

So I was lying on the unmade bed reading a magazine this afternoon (this is what kept women do with their time, right?) when it occurred to me that I should go make some badass soup. It’s 75 degrees out, which I gather is not good weather for soup, but that didn’t deter me. Neither did the fact that I have never really made soup before.

(I was reading an article about the Donner party when this particular bee entered my bonnet, but I discount the notion that that had any bearing on my desire to cook.)

My mom gave me a gorgeous soup cookbook, and I have leafed through it admiring the pictures many times. But most of the recipes start with something like, “boil a brown cow’s foot for twelve hours,” and I wanted to do something simple. Something that was mostly already done for me, but that I could claim to have cooked because I got out a cutting board.

You know what this means, don’t you? It means that I am going to have to MAKE UP MY OWN RECIPE.

I opened the cupboard and found a carton of organic creamy sweet potato soup and, get this, an actual sweet potato. Brilliant! I will cook the sweet potato, put it in the ready-made soup, and it will be tasty. It has to be. Sweet potatoes always go with sweet potatoes.

Except the vegetable I had might have actually been a yam. I don’t really know. And it had little purple fellows sprouting from it.



But onward! I started peeling it, and it seemed to be leeching some sort of weird milky-white liquid.



I was on the phone with my wonderful friend Kelly at the time, and she said that it was fine. She’s had a baby in her tummy, so I assume that all divine secrets of the domestic realm must have been imparted to her through some sort of uterine transmogrification. Also, she makes great salads.

So then I diced up the vegetable and the insides had all kinds of weird little holes inside. Kelly’s remark was, “I’ve never seen that when I make sweet potatoes.”


Oh well. I decided to boil the sweet potato, so I dumped it in a pan of boiling water and splattered insanely hot water all over myself.

Shirt changed and with a renewed sense of caution, I decided to fancy-up the soup. Who wants sweet potato soup with just sweet potatoes in it? The answer to all cooking questions is invariably corn and garlic, so I dumped in some of that, along with some black beans and garbanzo beans, because I had cans of them and they seem innocuous enough.

The soup looked really disgusting.



When my darling LP came home, I had him taste one of the sweet potatoes, as I am terrified of tasting food while it is still in the process of becoming edible. He deemed it “okay.”

I’m given to understand that flavors “mingle” in the pot if you leave them alone. Much like Christian singles at a picnic, I imagine. So I ignored the food for a while and added more things to my Williams Sonoma gift registry, things that will certainly guarantee that my next soup-making adventure is a success.

After a while I got bored waiting, so I decided it was time to eat my creation. I didn’t have any bread, so I served it with crackers made out of seeds. Also, I was out of napkins, so we used dishtowels. One of the dishtowels was kind of damp, as I’d just used it to dry some dishes, and there was only one clean one left.



The verdict: Here’s a rough transcript of our dinner conversation:

--Hm, it’s good.
--Yeah?
--This tastes like food your mom makes.
--Oh really?
--Yeah. It’s nourishing. I like it.
--You don’t think it’s a little bland?
--It only tastes bland because we’re accustomed to eating food that’s less bland.
--
--
--Mm, this really is good.
--Oh, good.
--I’m getting excited thinking about eating this food.
--You’re eating it right now.
--I’m excited about eating some more of it.
--
--
--Hey, this garbanzo bean looks like a butt.

And so on. So, I guess it came out all right. I still don’t know why the sweet potato was full of holes and white stuff, but if we die of some mysterious sweet potato disease, I’ll let you know.