I'm feeling a little sulky today. After getting myself to bed at a decent hour in a sober state after my work party on Friday night, I woke early on Saturday, feeling less than well. My throat apparently didn't get the memo that I refuse to get sick, like, ever.
I chose to pretend that my throat was just taking a while to wake up and went out to run an errand and meet my friend for a hangout. I headed out to Burnaby to get my 360 degree camera from its holding cell at FedEx. I restrained myself from tearing open the box instantly and letting everything fall all over the train. (When I later tackled the packaging in the evening, I was excited thinking about all the expired film I have to use up in it when the weather or my location improves.) I headed downtown to meet Jill at the library, and we decided to wander down to Denman to try a newish restaurant. I should have been dubious, since every "new restaurant on Denman" seems to serve dinner, not lunch. True to form, the place was closed. Thankfully, Denman has a few ramen shops, and we love us some ramen.
Since Kintaro had a line (as always) and we didn't care to stand in line, we went to a place a few doors down that I've not been to, but Jill had. She had the vegetable ramen and I had a spicy miso ramen. One thing I love about most ramen shops is the menu includes relatively accurate pictures of what each type of ramen should look like. I look for two things: 1) mabo dofu ramen (which very few places have) and, failing that, 2) corn. I love corn in soup. When I see recipes with corn I get all excited and giddy for no apparent reason. My mother never put corn in soup, I have no special connotations with corn soup, yet I will almost always buy soup if it has corn in it. (Case in point, I think I was the only foreigner who bought the corn chowder at McDonald's when I lived in Japan. I loved that shit.) Two of the pictures included corn, so I thought the spicy one would numb my increasingly pained throat.
We had a nice chat and hid out over tea (me) and beer (her) for a couple of hours. By the time I got near the bottom of my bowl, I was nodding off. Jill, too, seemed overwhelmed by the sleeping pills they must have slipped into her broth because she agreed that a nap would be needed soon. I just headed home, not even stopping at the shop to buy the cold-related necessities I would need if this throat thing stuck around. As soon as I laid out on the couch, I was out.
Yesterday, though, I was angry at myself for not getting provisions. My milk had turned a few days ago and I don't like plain tea at all. I need milk. NEED, do you hear me? I tried to choke down pots of tea with lemon and honey, but it's just not my taste. It was a struggle. So at some point I decided that soup might be the better hot liquid. At some point a week or two ago I thought I might go on a soup making spree, but overworked myself and didn't cook a single meal at home all week. (I don't think eating things raw or warming leftovers constitutes as at-home cooking.) So, feeling like crap, the most obvious thing to do was to roast up a squash for soup and start a separate pot of bean & kale soup.
This is my embarrassing admission: I am terrible at making soup. Horrible. If something doesn't have a bunch of meat to flavour it, I can't make soup taste good at all. And, seeing how I like to season, this is confusing to me. I read recipes that sound good and flavourful, but wind up with sub par flavours. So I wasn't hopeful about the squash soup. It looked like it was going to be runny, even with the wand blender (I love you, wand blender, all poison green and awesome. We're going to have to find new, exciting projects for you to work on). But, thankfully, it blended into a nice, smooth consistency with a lot of flecks of pepper. I took a spoonful and immediately ladled a small bowlful because it was so good. Maybe a bit too peppery, but still flavourful and it made my throat stop hurting the instant it hit.
The bean & kale soup, on the other hand, was not that good. Halfway through, after tasting the broth, I cooked up a chorizo and tossed it in. It didn't help enough, unfortunately. I added more salt and still... blah. I realised after the fact that using vegetable broth might be the downfall. Chicken broth is just so good in soup. There's a reason almost all recipes suggest chicken broth first. When I had a bowl for breakfast this morning, I had to give it a couple splats of hot sauce and it still could have used more.
I think of my mom's amazing ability to season everything to such a flavourful level. Her split pea soup (ham soup until I was old enough to not get creeped out about eating a bean soup) is still my favourite soup ever and I've yet to taste any split pea soup that comes close. In my state, thinking about it makes me want to wander to my butcher and buy ham hocks and other assorted meats, and make more soup. It isn't going to happen, though. My freezer is full.
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