Friday, January 22, 2010

Scattered Aproach to cooking soup

One of the more pleasurable aspects of being unemployed is the ability to experiment with cooking during the day. I rather enjoy cooking, but unless I really want to make something specific, I prefer to make it up as a go along. Two nights ago was soup night at the apartment, and I successfully created a dish that is both indescribable and unrepeatable. It started with a simple batch of Strawberry Farms, Spicy Cajun gumbo soup mix. So I mixed it in the pot with the water. The soup was basically a plain gumbo broth so I had to add something to it, I started with
1 can of black beans
1 chicken breast fried in Famous Dave Chicken seasoning

I noticed that the broth itself smelled a little sandy and bland so I added the chicken pasta sauce from the previous night's experiment, that included:

Chicken fried in grape seed oil, with either salt and Pepper or Moroccan seasoning,
onion flakes
oregano
italian seasoning
tomato sauce
2 cans of diced tomatoes
fried and chopped spinach
diced olives
basil leaves
a dash of lemon extract
a small dash of Tabasco sauce

after adding that concoction, the sauce was still lacking in flavor, so I asked my girlfriend to help out, we then added
Chili Powder
salt
pepper
paprika
fennel
liquid smoke
Worcester sauce
Famous Dave's Texas Pit Barbacue sauce

Much Better, but all that salt and spice had off set the flavor a bit so we added

Bush's Baked Beans
Frozen Corn
Ditalini noodles

the soup then became so thick that heat could not penetrate the chicken and veggies at the bottom of the pot. When I went to stir the soup, the light bubbling shifted so swiftly into a heavy, heavy boil that I thought the whole pot was about to explode. Surely your thinking, I didn't add anything else? Yes I did; water. That seemed to thin the mixture out enough to downgrade it from hazardous waste, to edible food. Once the noodle softened up, we poured out to big bowls. But, not willing to stop adding to the experiment, I made the best move of the night by adding shredding cheese and sour cream, and dipping toast into it. Those of you who are not gagging now are probably wondering how it tasted. I'd love to describe it to you, but there are no words. I can only tell you that It. Was. Awesome!!! The closest I can think of is a sweet and spicy chili, but the sour cream and cheese (which turned out to be essential)caused some kind of reaction to make it really creamy and oh so drippy with stringy cheesiness. In fact, the ratio of drippy cheese texture to actually cheese was way out of balance, like the cheese turned everything it touched into cheese as well. I'd recommend it to you, but like I said earlier, this recipe is non repeatable.
Thanks for reading and I'll try to do better next time.

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