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.

Doctor Who?

It may surprise you all to learn, with me being the shy, retiring type who never EVER complains about anything, that I have a new pet peeve. At first I thought that it was people who insisted on referring to themselves as “Doctor.” As in, “Hi, I’m the Dean, Dr. Dean and that’s my assistant Dr. Blahblahblah.” But deep down, I get it. We’re not all jaded enough with our degrees to roll our eyes and instantly think “Hurray! You have a PhD! Who doesn’t these days? I don’t know about you, but the only thing mine does is disqualify me from any legitimate employment, forcing me to be stuck working for minimum wage at this super awesome community college.” Some people are proud of their accomplishments--and want others to acknowledge them too...on a daily basis. What really bothers me is people who insist on being called Doctor by everyone they work with who fail to address me that way. For example, all official correspondence from Dr. Dean that’s addressed to Ms. LastName, even though the whole organization knows I have a PhD because I put it on my application, and I’m fairly certain it’s one of the primary reasons they hired me. For reals, it came up more than once during my interview. My point: the super-pretentious titles cut both ways, and Dr. Dean may be earning roughly 750% of my salary, but at the end of the day, we both have more or less the same degree, which entitles us to exactly the same title. So I’ll call her Dr. Dean, but goddammit, she better start sending my letters to Dr. LastName!

cookie monster

You know how when you're watching your weight and you encounter a plate of cookies and you really want one and it's this epic Herculean struggle because you really want one but ultimately you decide to walk away and then you realize that not eating that one cookie doesn't make any difference in the grand scheme of things because the cookies are still there and it's not like not eating that specific cookie actually caused your pants to fit any better? I have been having an angry day--an angry day full of metaphorical cookies where my self restraint is my self restraint and the cookies are yelling at people. And I'm getting to the point where I'm willing to wear metaphorical sweatpants for the next few months if it means licking those last crumbs off that stupid plate. This morning I didn't yell at the pharmacist at Walgreens even though she had no particular explanation for why my copay doubled this month--a prescription that actually costs less at full price than what we pay for the prescription coverage each month. I didn't yell at the representative from the insurance company as she explained to me that my copay was only applicable if I bought a 90 day supply and that I was only allowed to buy more than 30 days at CVS. (Ironically enough I had tried to buy a three month supply last month and was told my insurance would only cover one month at a time.) I didn't even yell when she told me that, as a service to me, the insurance company accepted my regular copay at Walgreens for the first two or three months, nor did I tell her that I am not, in fact, a moron, and that their system was clearly designed to get me into a routine I would be too lazy to break and then charge me more for the convenience of not bothering to switch pharmacies. I didn't yell. I may have been terse, but since what I really wanted to say was "If I had another option--any option--for prescription coverage, I would take it no matter how expensive or inconvenient because your company is a lying, cheating, evil bureaucracy that should be burned down" I'm counting this as a win for self-restraint. Now I am not engaging a former elementary school teacher who has been posting increasingly insane right-wing crap on facebook. I wasn't even going to be all that snotty when I responded to her most recent post. I was going to invoke civil discourse and ask for a genuine, thoughtful expression of her perspective. But Steve kept saying "you don't want to get in fights with old ladies on facebook" which is true, except that today I so did. But I didn't. No cookies. No sweatpants. No sweet rush of guilt and satisfaction. Just good advice from Steve: hide her and move on. There might also be some slightly less metaphorical baked goods in my future.

internet yoga

Have I mentioned lately how much I am over getting old? I mean in some respects it's nice to have an excuse to want to go to bed at 10:00 and wear sensible shoes and deliberately seek out a high fiber diet and do all the other things I've been doing for the better part of a decade while my friends mocked me while eating white bread at midnight wearing stilettos. But for the most part, I'm over it. I'm tired of having to subsist on a mean and meager 2000 calories a day to keep from exploding like the Hindenburg. I'm tired of hoisting increasingly sagging boobs into increasingly strained undergarments. And I'm tired of the constant stream of minor injuries that have been interfering with my two favorite activities: running and sleeping. Last month it was my knee, likely the result of old shoes. That said, it still took me three solid weeks to recover from that one--three weeks after I replaced my running shoes. This week it's been my back/hip, which has really turned me into a cranky old lady. Seriously, the only silver lining would be to end up with a walker that I could shake while I yelled at those damn kids. What I did to my back is beyond me, since I have yet to break a six mile long run building up from the last injury--and very seldom do I do more three or four. But it wakes me up at night and in fact seems extra aggravated by our bed.

To alleviate some of strain on my old and battered body I've been seeking out alternative ways of keeping active (I mean as active as a lazy, slightly agoraphobic old person with few friends, an unreliable car, and no job can truly be). And this is how I've stumbled upon internet yoga. I've never been in love with yoga. I'm neither strong nor flexible enough for it to be truly relaxing (most of what I think when I'm supposed to be concentrating on my breath is fuck, fuck, fuckity ouch!) and I find nothing natural or centering about "downward dog." Running is intuitive and simple--one simply goes until one can go no more; yoga is messy and requires turning oneself into a human curly fry (and to some degree requires a level of smugness about one's wholeness with the universe that I just can't quite pull off.) But I do enjoy this (and only this) video. I find the woman's voice soothing and she makes the whole process nice and repetitive (not unlike running) so that even if I mess up the first time, I'm sure to catch it on the third or fourth. She also breaks all the poses down into individual components so that I don't have to be even twistier to keep one eye on the TV while the teacher goes about her business "flowing" through the poses like I know what the hell she's talking about. In short, it's been nice to stretch a bit. My favorites are the cat and the tree, but I also enjoy the pigeon and the extended child pose. Before you know it, I'll have ditched the internet to join forces with the legions of old ladies who fill up the library parking spaces descending upon the Saturday morning classes. Or maybe I'll just start speed dialing the police to complain about my neighbors. Namaste.

another food post

Today is Steve's birthday (happy birthday Steve!). In some ways I think I enjoy his birthday more than my own. For example, I didn't bother making myself a birthday cake (even though I LOVE cake) because it seemed silly and a little wasteful to make a whole cake for just the two of us. But by his birthday, we realized the folly of this thinking: that his coworkers will eat anything (ANYTHING) that sits in the departmental office long enough. As evidence of this I can personally attest to the truly disgusting, cold, congealed take out that was left over from some departmental function that I, myself have eaten...because it was there. So out with the old plan (the two of us eating with exponentially increasing self loathing equally increasingly stale cake until one of us finally dumps some portion of it in the garbage) and in with the new: birthday cake for everyone! Some of you have eaten my cakes--I decided to abandon mixes once I realized it's nearly as easy to make them from scratch and much, much more delicious--so you know that as often as not, they turn out pretty well. Last year, when we were still on the Old Plan but with the scale-tipping addition of my sister (no love handle pun intended--really) I made this:

It was an orange chocolate cake with a lovely ganache (recipe available here: http://smittenkitchen.com/2006/09/this-cake-has-a-hole-in-it/) Sure her ganache was a little ganachier than the one I ended up making, but pain that this was to make, it tasted amazing. It was also perfect for my Stephen (aka Dr. Poopjoke) since it required the purchase of a bundt pan, which was almost immediately rechristened the butt pan.

This year we know each other even better and Steve finally felt comfortable confiding in me that he doesn't really like frosting in the traditional sense. Ganaches and glazes are fine but butter cream really isn't his thing. In a less perfect union this might have be cause for alarm. Indeed in my younger, singler, more care-free days I largely considered the point of making cake the opportunity to also make large quantities of frosting, sometimes to the exclusion of the actual cake, putting the frosting directly in a tupperware container so that I could eat it on fruit--strawberries, bananas--or sometimes as a meal in itself with a spoon. But Steve and I are meant to be, and I've taken his honesty as a bit of a challenge--to make the most delicious frosting free cake ever! So this year I whipped together this (recipe available at http://www.joyofbaking.com/LemonCranberryPoundCake.html):

Yes, it's a bit like last year's. Indeed, if you substitute the orange for lemon and the chocolate chunks for dried cranberries soaked in brandy, you'd have the general gist of it. But the added bonus of this year's is that it's a pound cake. Yes, this airy, six egg, three cups of sugar, full pound of butter, four and a half lemon confection was so big it nearly spilled out of the butt pan and took a good heave-ho to get out of the oven. (I recently learned--and then promptly forgot--that a pound cake gets its name from the vast magnitude of its ingredients, namely a pound each of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs.) Steve and I had two pieces each and the rest was gone by lunch time. To wit, I must say, good job Steve's coworkers, good job.

Tonight we head to the hibachi to continue Steve's tradition of celebrating his birthday (which also happens to be Pearl Harbor Day) with the consumption of theatrically prepared Japanese food. Some coincidences are too perfect to let pass by.

smells like soup

I'm taking it as a sign of my improving health that all I've been able to think about today is taking an entire extra large pizza with the works and shoving it down my gullet as quickly as possible. Fortunately I've been living with my brain long enough that I know that it seldom has the best interests of my stomach in mind and that doing what it wants would likely send me back to moaning and writhing on the floor (this is also true when it becomes fixated on eating an entire carton of ice cream without breathing). So instead I had a bowl of soup for lunch. I really love soup. And it's really hard to make oneself sick eating soup. My mother can be quite obstinate about acknowledging that it's about the best food ever, but I offer as evidence the following three recipes. They're delicious, easy, and might I say once more, unlikely to induce vomiting.

Hot and Sour Soup

5-7 shiitake mushrooms

5-7 woodear mushrooms (I use fresh but you could probably use dried and re-hydrate them)

1 carton (c. 4 cups) vegetable broth

2 1/4 cups water divided

1 tablespoon minced ginger

1 teaspoon minced garlic

1/4 c. plus 2 tablespoons rice vinegar (or more to taste)

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 cup bamboo shoot slivers

1 package extra firm tofu cut into small cubes

2 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch

2 lightly beaten eggs

1/2 c. chopped green onions

1/4 c. minced cilantro

1 teaspoon dark sesame oil

chili oil (optional)

squirt of sriracha (optional)

Combine broth, 2 c. water, garlic and ginger in pot and bring to a boil. Add mushrooms and simmer 5 minutes. Add vinegar, soy sauce, pepper, bamboo and tofu and simmer 5 more minutes. Whisk cornstarch with 1/4 c. water until dissolved, add to soup. Bring to a full boil and then back to a simmer for about 3 minutes or until soup thickens slightly. Stirring constantly, slowly pour eggs into hot soup egg drop soup style. Remove from heat, add onions, cilantro, and oils. Tastes great with sticky rice and a little seasoned nori.

Coconut Curry Chicken Soup (courtesy of cooking light)

4 cups water
3 cups fresh spinach leaves
1/2 pound snow peas, trimmed and cut in half crosswise
1 (5 3/4-ounce) package pad thai noodles (wide rice stick noodles)
1 tablespoon canola oil
1/4 cup thinly sliced shallots
2 teaspoons red curry paste
1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
2 garlic cloves, minced
6 cups fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth
1 (13.5-ounce) can light coconut milk
2 1/2 cups shredded cooked chicken breast (about 1 pound)
1/2 cup chopped green onions
1/2 tablespoon brown sugar
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
lime wedges

Bring water to boil. Add spinach and peas and blanch about 30 seconds. Remove with a slotted spoon and put aside in a bowl. Add noodles to boiling water for about 3 minutes or until just cooked (and it's better if they're still firm). Drain and add to the bowl with the veg. Heat oil in a pot. Add shallots and next 5 ingredients (through garlic) and saute 1 minute. Add broth and coconut milk and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and add chicken, onions, red pepper, sugar and fish sauce. Cook 2 minutes. Turn off heat. Return cooked veg and rice noodles to soup. Stir in cilantro and serve with lime.

Leftover Chicken (or Turkey) Soup

2 teaspoons olive oil

1 cup chopped onion
1 cup diced carrots
1 cup sliced celery
1 garlic clove, minced
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
1/4 teaspoon poultry seasoning
6 cups low-salt chicken broth
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups diced leftover roasted chicken
1/4 cup heavy cream
4 ounces (2 cups) uncooked wide egg noodles

Heat olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add chopped onion, carrots, celery, and garlic clove; sauté 5 minutes. Sprinkle flour, oregano, thyme, and poultry seasoning over vegetables, and cook 1 minute. Stir in broth and salt. Bring to a boil; reduce heat, and simmer, partially covered, about 10 minutes. Add roasted chicken, cream, and noodles, and cook 10 minutes or until noodles are tender.

•