I did try to create the perfect Spring Chicken Soup for the beginning of this blog. I had all the pretty colored peppers, fresh basil, cilantro, parsley and onions all chopped and ready for immortality via small cute pink digital camera. For God's sake, I even spent 2 hours making REAL chicken stock from a carcass I had thrown in the freezer some months ago.
Yes, I was all set and prepared to showcase this excellent soup--then something went wrong.
Perhaps it was the chicken stock. I like buy the whole friers--they're cheaper and while I like breasts, my sig. other prefers legs. But, what to do with the carcass? Sometime during this last never-ending winter I had the ingenious idea: I will freeze it and use this carcass to make chicken soup next time we're all sick! Well, last week it dawned on me that I'd be moving that carcass to our new home if I didn't make the damn soup. Chicken stock is just boilled bones and such, right? I've never actually made chicken stock before. You can tell me if I did it all wrong. So I threw the whole frozen thing in a pot with water and cooked it. I added some salt and after a while, scraped some of the white meat off the bones, spooned off the icky greyish fat, strained it and put it a pressurer cooker.
I don't think I fucked up the veggies--who can fuck up some simple veggies with fresh herbs? I sauteed an onion along with some green and yellow peppers and fresh herbs. (Cooking herbs, onions and such in oil 'captures the flavor' one young cooking student at Emily Griffith informed me last week.) Rinsing--wait--diligently cleaning off the rubber spatula my little toddler son had stolen from drawer, I scraped the sauce pan of all the oil and veggies into the pot of chicken stock (must preserve every scrap of flavor!) I added this plus some frozen organic veggies (from one of those big bags you get at Costco) as well as a variety of sqash seen above.
So I threw the cap of the pressure cooker on, added some salt n pepper and waited about 30 minutes.
I should note here that I have made soup (sans chicken stock) with the variety of squash above much great success in the past. My sister law made a pot a veggie soup with it last summer. We were on the farm, the maid had taken the night off and as I was busy with the kid, she made this soup. Mmmm-mm. Yummy Scrummy! I should also note I don't actually know the English name of it. I buy it at the foreign market next to the Mosque. The name in Moroccan Arabic is silouee, cause it grows most deliciously near they city of Sale on the coast near the capital, Rabat.
But after cooking 30 or so minutes (one can never be sure) and (!) shockingly enough, it was not as yummy-scrummy as I had expected.
First, the color was all wrong. Instead of pretty colored veggies, the color was brackish. It reminded me of the scene the cartoon Robin Hood when the friar tastes Robin's soup in his hide-away camp in Nottingham forest the chokes and spits it out. This is this little brown cartoon burnt odor coming from the soup. Brackish.
Second the taste. Um. I tried putting more salt. That didn't really work.
I tried blending a bit and feeding to my son. That was the whole point of this little culinary adventure, after all! Having inherited both his sense of taste as well as the flair for the dramatic from his daddy, my 15 month old son prompty spit it out with numerous ghecking noises.
Next I added more salt, little semolina noodles and garbanzo beans.
By the time I had finished with that little debacle, I was too exhausted to actually sit down and eat the soup. So I put it in the fridge, and prepared a little container for the sig.other to eat for lunch the next day.
We call this covert conflict, secretly getting revenge on the sig.other via shitty, brackish chicken soups.
But I didn't realize how bad it was yet. So I called him at work. "Baby, how's the soup?"
"Oh," he says, "the soup." Pause. "Yeah, it's OK. " ok is highest compliments. normally when something is bad i get slpatter-vomit sound effects.
So later in the day i tried the soup. Bleckh!
