Skip to main content

I MADE SOME SOUP & DIDN'T SAVE YOU ANY

I'm a lazy cook. I tend to get obsessed with one simple dish and make it until I get tired of it & move to the next one: spicy Indian green beans, pasta with ham & tomatoes, scrambled eggs with fried potatoes.

So, when I read in Lifehacker about a guy who had an idea for homemade "instant ramen" with fresh ingredients, I was excited because I love soup, but it seems hard to make. Plus, I had some soup containers already (plastic ones, those glass ones in the article are very cute, but wouldn't survive a trip with me on the bus).

Getting the noodles half-cooked seemed like a challenge, so I bought rice noodles, which.the author said would cook in the boiling water straight from the package (actually, after trial & error I found it worked best to completely immerse them in cold water for an hour first). Rice noodles made me want to try pho, one of my favorites. I added snap peas because I had some frozen ones, which I rinsed in cold water first.

Meat is tricky, because it has to be fully cooked before you start, or you're in trouble. I like the author's suggestion of jerky, but for pho the taste is too strong. Again, I had some prosciutto, which is not exactly traditional, but the taste is delicate enough.

For the soup base, I mixed chicken Better Than Bullion, soy sauce, frozen crushed garlic, and lime juice. Then the noodles, ham & peas. After adding the boiling water & letting it sit for 2 minutes, I put in basil, pickled garlic & cilantro. Scallions & bean sprouts would also have been good, but I didn't have any.

All the ingredients were either already in my fridge, or from Target, except for the rice noodles, Better than Bullion, & pickled garlic, which came from Amazon (Prime means why not get it if you can wait 2 days, don't need to check for freshness, & would get it from a big chain anyway).

The result? Actually very good. There was some graininess at the very bottom, but I might not have mixed it well enough.

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

TOP TEN LIPSYNCH FOR YOUR LIFE SONGS FOR A DRAG KING EQUIVALENT OF RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE

 The Advocate has suggested that the greatest (i.e. only good) reality show ever, Rupaul's Drag Race , have a drag king contestant.  That's fine, but it would be much more entertaining to have a whole drag king competition. One of the best parts of Drag Race is seeing all the different types of queens compete: beauty queens, funny queens, conceptual queens, androgynous queens, scary queens, singing and dancing queens.  I want to see punk kings, gangsta rap kings, cock-rocking metal kings, panty-dropping R & B kings, country kings, baggy-pants burlesque comic kings, and of course, Elvis. I picked out some songs that make me think of different aspects of masculinity:  swaggering men, heartbroken men, lustful men, romantic men, philosophical men, and suicidally depressed men (interesting fact: I can think of dozens of songs by men about suicide, but only one female one: "Gloomy Sunday". What's up with that?) "That's Life" - Frank Sinatra

STILL HATING ON MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTIONS

Jason had an insightful post on newspapers in the Internet Age on his blog wherein he suggested we donate to keep the watchdogs of the press going. In an aside, he mentioned subscriptions for music: To be honest, it's the same thing with music downloads. I've been screaming for monthly subscriptions for years now, and they're still not here. (At least not on the scale of an iTunes or Amazon.) Of course, I had to respond. Jason: I'm sorry to hear you've been screaming for years--you must be very hoarse. I believe the service you're looking for is called Rhapsody . I don't know what counts as "the same scale", but they have ads on TV. I don't know why anyone would pay $12.99/month to rent music, though. I want to own my music, I don't want some company to be able to take my access away or jack up the price at a whim. Rhapsody's main market must be people who don't own much music, have a lot of electronic devices but no interest in l

TOP MUSIC GENRES FOR YOUR CYBERPUNK GAME

So I guess cyberpunk is hot again. I don't play those newfangled video games, but all this fanfare made me remember my old Cyberpunk 2020 days, when I was Jael Furoshiki, Japanese/Jewish survivor of of a destroyed South China Sea pirate pack trying to make a living in the Minneapolis Red Zone as a bodyguard/food delivery technician (yes, both a pirate and an ninja).  Later she got ported to Interface Zero , which got rid of some of the anachronisms and C2020's crazy-high fatality rate (there used to be a page dedicated to players' favorite deceased characters, sadly now lost to even the Wayback Machine). Anyway, one time I made up musical genres my character would listen to--can't find my old character sheets, but this gives you the idea... TOP MUSIC GENRES FOR YOUR CYBERPUNK GAME: Cambo-Punk Robo-Funk Post-post-post-post-post Punk Really New Wave Black Klezmetal Danish RaiZulu Techno-Jive Country & Western & Gabber Lo-NRG Goan Garage Garage