more soup related news

I was mostly kidding when I picked the title of this blog. But as it turns out, my subconscious apparently knows me better than I know myself, because I really, really love soup, and all the things that we do in this town that make me happy seem to have fallen squarely in the soup category. This week it was Vietnamese pho. I love pho. No, I LOVE pho. When we were in the Cornhole and Steve was still trying to woo me, he would humor my regular cravings for what he has retroactively dubbed "garbage pho." This is because while I thought it tasted great, it did, undeniably, smell like garbage. And then, back when we were in State College and there was really no reason to leave the house and even less to leave the sofa, we would go to this little church on the edge of campus that had been converted into a Vietnamese restaurant and eat pho. It was freaking amazing. Even Steve agreed. It was so good that when we returned from Christmas vacation last year and found that it was suddenly out of business, I was depressed for weeks. It was so good that when I heard the rumor that it was shut down for health code violations, I didn't care. I still would have eaten that soup every day of the week. Since then, I've been in more or less a pho-less state. When we first moved to the Big City, we were optimistic that we might find pho, and as a result set off on a quest to try every hole in the wall Vietnamese restaurant in town. This was a rather disappointing venture. There was the pho that was so greasy that even a good scrubbing couldn't get the oily feeling off one's lips. There was the pho where Steve found a long black hair in his (to which he stated "still better than the garbage pho"), and the pho with the mushy overcooked rice noodles, not to mention the several other anemic, disappointing excuses for Vietnamese beef noodle soup. So we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would just have to make do with Taiwanese style beef noodle soup and leave it at that. That was until Thursday when we literally stumbled upon a place called Aseoma (which seems like a dumb name for a restaurant, but it stands for Asian Style Eats On M. Avenue). It was awesome. I would have voted for their pho in the soup off in a second. And as an added bonus, I'm not even sure this place qualifies as a hole in the wall. It was inexpensive, but there were cloth table cloths, art on the walls, menus that looked like they had survived without someone puking on them, and a tree in the corner with little fake mandarin oranges on it that looked so real we had a nice laugh with the waiter/owner? about the hanging of fake fruit on real trees. It was a great week for our little household--and no, clearly it doesn't take much.

soup walk

I don't really know what I've been doing for the last month or two. Mostly writing lectures. They're very bad in an objective sense, and I can tell from the way my students look at me that I'm losing most of them. But I'm trying to finish the whole semester's worth before next week, so there's an inherent necessity to do some corner cutting. Plus, it's becoming painfully obvious that I know bugger all about 19th century American history. And there's always the "they don't pay me enough to worry about this" track I can keep running on. So that's going. But good things are happening here too. I fit into my skinny jeans for the first time since Steve and I moved in together, so that was awesome. I also went to the best event ever known to human kind and possibly in the history of the galaxy: a soup contest. In a bid to get people into a certain part of town, the organizers of this annual soup-off paired local restaurants with local businesses who would serve their soup. Ticket holders got a punch card and a map so they could try all 21! It was like trick or treating if all the treats were soup and all the houses were chiropractors and dentists' offices. There were some great soups too: squash curry, onion bisque, tomato with a tiny croissant grilled cheese sandwich and some lamb stew that was a pun of a movie title that I cannot for the life of me remember. I want to say "Silence of the Lambs" but I know that's not it. I'll have to consult Steve when he comes home. (It was "The Lamb Shank Redemption.") There were also some truly gross soups like a "dessert" soup from an Asian fusion place that was more or less pieces of cantaloupe with tapioca pudding mixed with coconut milk poured over it. That one kind of made me want to yak, but it won in the "most original" category. The winner was a pineapple, tomatillo, habanero soup, that I also didn't love, but since I didn't bother voting, I'm not too fussed. The whole thing was totally awesome, and for the first time (maybe ever) made me really like the Big City I now call home.