![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
River Soup
Jan. 16th, 2011 07:48 pmAs in, you can't step in the same river twice.
It starts, innocuously enough, with a half-liter of home-made stock and a chicken soup cube, situated on the back burner. An onion chopped up. One or two stems of celery.
(I frequently have "home-made stock" -- store-bought roast chicken is one of our emergency foods, and when it's finished I boil the carcass in a large saucepan of water with this and that. The half-liter is because that's the convenient size of container in which I freeze it, not because there's anything special about the half-liter.)
From there in, it's strictly improv. The remnant bag of baby carrots. (We always have those, too, for snacking.) Maybe a potato. Any leftovers that aren't enough for a meal. A spoonful or two of whatever is cooking on the other burners. It cooks the whole time I'm in the kitchen, and no one gets to eat it the first day. By the second day, the flavors begin to merge and emerge, and anyone is free to sample it and help themselves.
If the soup runs low, more stock goes in, and more stuff. Different spices and flavorings and foods. Yesterday, the River was the Chao Phraya, with boiled pumpkin and a packet of green curry flavoring and a little coconut milk left over from someone's experiment. The day before, it may have been the Thames, with sliced-up remnant roast chicken and green beans.
By the time my River Soup was five days old, my family was beginning to get visions of botulism and ptomaine. "Even the weariest river," someone said, "Winds somewhere safe to sea."
So that River Soup was closed off, the pot washed, and a new River started out. The River Soup is done. Long live the River Soup!
# # #
I think River Soup is going into one of my stories. It has endless possibilities, from comforting to comedic to criminal.
It starts, innocuously enough, with a half-liter of home-made stock and a chicken soup cube, situated on the back burner. An onion chopped up. One or two stems of celery.
(I frequently have "home-made stock" -- store-bought roast chicken is one of our emergency foods, and when it's finished I boil the carcass in a large saucepan of water with this and that. The half-liter is because that's the convenient size of container in which I freeze it, not because there's anything special about the half-liter.)
From there in, it's strictly improv. The remnant bag of baby carrots. (We always have those, too, for snacking.) Maybe a potato. Any leftovers that aren't enough for a meal. A spoonful or two of whatever is cooking on the other burners. It cooks the whole time I'm in the kitchen, and no one gets to eat it the first day. By the second day, the flavors begin to merge and emerge, and anyone is free to sample it and help themselves.
If the soup runs low, more stock goes in, and more stuff. Different spices and flavorings and foods. Yesterday, the River was the Chao Phraya, with boiled pumpkin and a packet of green curry flavoring and a little coconut milk left over from someone's experiment. The day before, it may have been the Thames, with sliced-up remnant roast chicken and green beans.
By the time my River Soup was five days old, my family was beginning to get visions of botulism and ptomaine. "Even the weariest river," someone said, "Winds somewhere safe to sea."
So that River Soup was closed off, the pot washed, and a new River started out. The River Soup is done. Long live the River Soup!
# # #
I think River Soup is going into one of my stories. It has endless possibilities, from comforting to comedic to criminal.
