But now all I think about is soup.
So I was cleaning the cupboards and I discovered a large jar of roasted red peppers that I had never used because every time I thought about opening it I said “That’s a shitload of roasted red peppers if I open it they will go bad so I will just wait until I think of something” and today when I saw them I THOUGHT OF SOMETHING.
I am going to make roasted red pepper soup. As I was doing an inventory of the pantry and refrigerator to see what I had in stock, and I remembered the large tin of crabmeat I purchased a month ago that was normally 32 dollars but I got it on sale for 9, and it hit me. I am going to make Curried Crab and Roasted Red Pepper soup.
I still have some decisions to make. Do I want to go with a red thai curry and use coconut milk? Or do I want to do a Madras curry and use heavy cream? Do I want to curry the crab separately and mix some crab in and then serve the soup with a lump on top? Cilantro garnish?
SOOO MANY DECISIONS>
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Omnes Omnibus
You gotta play to your strengths.
Albatrossity
Soup is good. Politics is depressing.
Easy choice!
Suzanne
I like soup, too. I had pasta for dinner and now I hate myself. I should have had soup.
Miss Bianca
I had soup for dinner. But it was out of a can. I need to commit to making more homemade soups.
Kent
This is the book you need John. I picked one up last month at Powell’s here in Portland. Lots of good soup ideas
https://www.amazon.com/Soup-Day-Rev-Recipes-Every/dp/168188139X/
eclare
That soup sounds really good, love roasted peppers.
John Harrold
Madras, mix it all together and top with the cilantro.
Bodacious
OMG! I have a huge Costco jar of Roasted Red Peppers (and a few Hatch green chili’s too). Please, more info……………..as long as it’s NOT curry. I don’t have the crab, but live on the coast. Something that’s underwater will do.
John Cole
@Kent: But I like making up my own soups.
Bodacious
@Kent: Niceeee!
WaterGirl
If your parents are back, you could start posting Mr. Frog again every day.
*Not to be misinterpreted as my suggesting Mr. Frog as a possible garnish for your soup. Though he was tiny enough in some of those photos that he could have been the right size for a little garish.
Urza
Sometimes talking politics gets old. Definitely drives you crazy. Much harder to go crazy or hate people based on what they think of soup.
Martin
Who else is expecting Cole to loop around the other side and turn into the Soup Nazi who only serves his bespoke soup creations to socialists and vets and tells conservatives to fuck clean off.
DougJ really found his calling.
WaterGirl
@Martin: whoa! edgy.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Can we come over for dinner when you make it? 30 or 40 people shouldn’t be any bog deal for you.
satby
I would go for the Thai version with coconut milk because to me seafood and Thai flavors are so suited to each other. On the other hand, I do love Indian food too.
I’d settle it by making smaller batches of both.
ChasM
Go with the coconut curry and clump some crab on top. Never forget the star of the dish. I think a touch of cilantro brightens things up, my wife thinks it tastes like soap. Sometimes a little baby arugula is the bridge. YMMV.
laura
I love breakfast soup! Easy, delish breakfast soups include; leek & potato w/variations from bacon to butter, barley soups- bean, veg or meat based, unctuous cream of mushroom or one of the myriad congees, pho or posole and cousin menudo and in the heat of summer ice cold gazpacho soup is a balm to a sweaty soul.
Soup for breakfast! With Toast!
Lyrebird
@John Cole: And you make up interesting ones indeed! Your last one inspired me to go stock up on Trader Joe’s mock chorizo.
No it’s not the same, but it’s something our family eats and it would work well.
ETA: I hope you will post a follow-up this time as well!
Kent
I never follow the recipes exactly. But they give me starting points and ideas. I figure if I get 3 or 4 decent recipes out of a cookbook it paid for itself.
Albatrossity
If you want the best soup recipes and ideas, get this cookbook. There may be a bad or even mediocre recipe in there, but we haven’t found it yet. They are all delectable!
eclare
@Albatrossity: That is a big cookbook!
Dan B
@Martin: i beg to differ. We didn’t go to our barber in thr winter because he has a tiny shop and he’s got a pacemaker. Now that it’s warmer he’s in Arizona. I have hair suitable for the Munsters.
Speaking of Munsters and mega forehead child diddle Matt…. just sayin.
Cameron
No politics. No soup. Elephants.
https://www.masterworksbroadway.com/music/elephant-steps-a-fearful-radio-show/
wetzel
I’ve spent twenty years trying to make philosophy. I used to read your politics. I’m not even sure what the philosophical problem is. Something about how physics, chemistry and biology bind. How can there be phenomenological understanding with different instrumentations and verifiability criteria for meaningfulness. How is scientific truth constituted existentially. I don’t think we project scientific understanding through analytical rationality.
Now I am talking about Ukraine. It’s hard for my wife. How can I assure her I am not losing my mind? How can I spend time on it at all? If I were not how I am, her life would have been better. A happy family is worth more than any philosophy.
I’m not much of a soup maker. It’s too hot down here. There is a very good soup, I think, in baked cod and sour cream leftovers. There is a cream and potatoes direction, a peppers, onions and curry paste direction, a rosemary direction. I make baked cod and sour cream to try to figure out a new soup afterwards with the leftovers.
Soup is wonderful because you can’t really fail at it. It’s artistic experience.
Ked
Red peppers good! Curry… well, eh. I don’t hate it, but may I suggest a good red pepper bisque? It would even work with the crab.
Brachiator
That’s some Forrest Gump level worry about the curry.
//
But it all sounds delicious. Puts me in mind for some curry chicken from a local Chinese restaurant.
Phylllis
Jacques Pepin makes amazing soups (well, amazing all the things) out leftovers & what he has on hand. Plus, a joy to watch.
Mornington Crescent
I was thinking about making a cold soup, but I didn’t want to get law enforcement involved.
Jager
Had some leftover Prime Rib from a cookout. Took the nice, crusty butt end, cut it into chunks, carrots, celery, garlic, and mushrooms. Beef broth off the shelf, added Pepin’s magic ingredient, V8 Juice, small pasta, and a splash of red wine. Mixed baby green salad and appropriate wine. We ate two big bowls with Ciabatta. Enough leftover for two lunches.
The Up and Up
I understand. Soup is something you have some control over. It’s why people plant gardens too.
NotMax
As if I don’t already have enough recipes hanging about yet untried, a cookbook/bookbook have been jonesing for.
SWMBO
If you are on facebook, there is a site called Glen and Friends Cooking. It really took off during the pandemic. He’s in Canada and during lockdown he was cooking from old cookbooks and having to interpret them (cook in a moderate oven until done). Not necessarily having time, temperature, or ingredients you can find in the supermarket. Folks started sending him their old cookbooks. He’s done everything from King George Coronation cake to Scottish Sea Pie to chicken picatta or chicken marsala. How to make home made potato chips and then his riff on how to use other vegetables to make different chips (crisps). I’ve tried a couple of his recipes and they are easy and quite tasty.
Emma
Bahaha, I’m making soup right now because I have beef stock I need to use up. (Not the actual stuff, sadly, the Swanson’s type.) I’m in a beehoon (rice vermicelli) phase, and I much prefer it in soup versus “dry.” Started off with beef stock, water, half an onion, and a couple carrots (the big, really sweet kind you see at Asian stores). Then added 8 cloves of garlic. Then added veggie and chicken bouillon. Then dashi. Then gochujang. Then marmite. This isn’t even taking into account the bacon I’m going to fry later (tomorrow?) to then fry tofu and beansprouts for the toppings. Oh yah, and some yu-choy. I’ll probably add more marmite and gochujang to balance out the carrots later (or maybe fish sauce), but dang, this soup is gonna be good.
Anyway
I don’t make soup/stews often as it ‘s not easy to make a small batch and am not a fan of endless leftovers – hate eating the same thing over and over again. I do morph leftovers but there’s only so much that can be done with soup.
wetzel
@The Up and Up:
Give yourself positive feedback and you will become an artist. If you can imagine yourself the size of a protein, a relatively balled up globular protein floating around in Wernicke’s or Broca’s area in the cerebrum, you would be maybe 20 nanometers across, a few hundred chemical bonds, and you’re looking around at one forest of dendrites reaching out to another across the extracellular saline. Like the leaves of the trees in endless three dimensional amazon foress of sphingolipid ganglioside sialic acid moieties are reaching out and touching across space like God and Adam, cellular adhesion junctions establishing electrical synapses, a dizzying forest of complexity in three dimensions towards the horizon as the hippocampus is talking to this region about thing we did where we loved, so the metabolome of the nucleus accumbens will express trait signifiers of motivation, the thing we just did, as if we had pulled a big fish out of the pond.
I used to scan a lot of poems and prose. I would put blocks of color for the vowel tones. You could make an essay and get a degree. Shakespeare would just look gobsmacked at himself when he would have Lysander say, I think, ‘Or if there were a sympathy of choice / War death or sickness did lay siege to it’. I picture him with his cowriters down at the Globe theater, like how Nashville songwriters grow up giving each other positive vibes in their living rooms, they think he is some kind of genius, but he had just given himself positive feedback in artistic experience for years.
The art naturally put itself in there so his unconscious. The two lines just came out with perfect assonance. They saw it happen right there. That William’s got some tasty pentameter! He’s bent on how to show that Lysander and Demetrius are the same. It’s in his unconscious. He put an art into yourself with positive feedback. If you can go two weeks with any art it becomes a habit. It will naturally begin to impart understanding of its methods ‘to hand’.
What I am trying to say is that artistic genius is not a personality type. I think it is the result of a particular style of self-conditioning. I will not say it is the result of a particular kind of up-bringing, because I do not believe there are critical periods for artistic development as there are for language development.
How I know all this is because I am an artistic genius. That’s my attitude towards my own country music, even though I’m not going to get on the radio! Just like soup, you can’t fail at a pipedream!!
That’s the key to the reason not to be a singer-songwriter. This is not because an artist is in danger of failing on a stage, as if that were any damn difference. The problem with singer-songwriter is that one of them has to be selling the other short. A songwriter should be made to pitch is all I’m saying. Singer-songwriters Bogart the artistic experience in the utilitarian sense. They hog it all.
Art nourishes the soul. Tin-pan alley song-writing does more of that than singer-songwriter, which is why Nashville country is million times better than Oregon singer-songwriter even though a decent percentage of songs on country radio are guaranteed to be ridiculous to any college educated person. These days I am Cole Swindell’s grasshopper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PYbo2o6Zi8
ant
whelp.
I, for one, welcome our new soup overlord.
Bnut
Let’s go green curry! And serve that crab as God intended, either in a lightly fried patty or just lumped on top.
BigJimSlade
@John Cole: A quick soup pick-me-up: saute/brown some garlic in olive oil in a small pan, maybe add some red pepper flakes, and add it in! (or do that early in the process, in the same pot)
wetzel
Hey, John. My devious plan won’t work. You can’t advance your own interest in teaching materials!! Lol! I’m a dummy! It doesn’t help that I’m not a songwriting teacher. That is a conflict of interest. Forgive me. I’m a Methodist. We don’t get dunked all the way!!!! I’m sorry I used your blog to try to get a pitch for a dog song. I also genuflecting that I applied ‘college educated’ as a synedoche of worldview as if there is a particular window into ridiculous. I am wearing a hair shirt of sympathetic activation, so I know I am guilty!!!
Here is a re-write.
How Anybody Can Become an Artistic Genius
Give yourself positive feedback and you will become an artist. If you can imagine yourself the size of a protein, a relatively balled up globular protein floating around in Wernicke’s or Broca’s area in the cerebrum, you would be maybe 20 nanometers across, a few hundred chemical bonds, and you’re looking around at one forest of dendrites reaching out to another across the extracellular saline. Like the leaves of the trees in endless three dimensional amazon foress of sphingolipid ganglioside sialic acid moieties are reaching out and touching across space like God and Adam, cellular adhesion junctions establishing electrical synapses, a dizzying forest of complexity in three dimensions towards the horizon as the hippocampus is talking to this region about thing we did where we loved, so the metabolome of the nucleus accumbens will express trait signifiers of motivation, the thing we just did, as if we had pulled a big fish out of the pond.
I used to scan a lot of poems and prose. I would put blocks of color for the vowel tones. You could make an essay and get a degree. Shakespeare would just look gobsmacked at himself when he would have Lysander say, I think, ‘Or if there were a sympathy of choice / War death or sickness did lay siege to it’. I picture him with his cowriters down at the Globe theater, like how Nashville songwriters grow up giving each other positive vibes in their living rooms, they think he is some kind of genius, but he had just given himself positive feedback in artistic experience for years.
The art naturally put itself in there so his unconscious. The two lines just came out with perfect assonance. They saw it happen right there. That William’s got some tasty pentameter! He’s bent on how to show that Lysander and Demetrius are the same. It’s in his unconscious. He put an art into yourself with positive feedback. If you can go two weeks with any art it becomes a habit. It will naturally begin to impart understanding of its methods ‘to hand’.
What I am trying to say is that artistic genius is not a personality type. I think it is the result of a particular style of self-conditioning. I will not say it is the result of a particular kind of up-bringing, because I do not believe there are critical periods for artistic development as there are for language development.
How I know all this is because I am an artistic genius. That’s my attitude towards my own country music, even though I’m not going to get on the radio! Just like soup, you can’t fail at a pipedream!!
That’s the key to the reason not to be a singer-songwriter. This is not because an artist is in danger of failing on a stage, as if that were any damn difference. The problem with singer-songwriter is that one of them has to be selling the other short. A songwriter should be made to pitch is all I’m saying. Singer-songwriters Bogart the artistic experience in the utilitarian sense. They hog it all.
Art nourishes the soul. Tin-pan alley co-writer song-writing produces greater soul nourishment per song than other forms of popular music in its production leading to greater average song quality. Friends help you break down a song. The quality of a song is an exponential function of the total artistic experience that went into creating its lyrics, progression, melody, production and performance.
La Nonna
A good recipe for a dip or a pasta sauce using roasted red peppers is to pulse together the drained peppers with an equal amount of walnuts, adding olive oil and spicy chili to taste. Great with crudites or over cooked pasta of your choice. Mangia
NotMax
@La Nonna
Tossing a (drained) can of French style green beans, some fried onion, a hard boiled egg and walnuts into a food processor or blender makes a more than passable mock chopped liver spread/dip.
The oil from the nuts plus residual oil from the onions should be sufficient, but can always drizzle in some more oil if it’s coming out too chunky.
geg6
Why oh why would you ruin a lovely jar of roasted red peppers by putting curry and cilantro in them?
I don’t dislike many foods, but curry and cilantro are both disgusting. Make a lovely soup with the crab and peppers. Leave out the rest.
Anonymous At Work
I’d go with whatever allows you to stretch the soup with rice (basmati, obviously, if you have it) since the base sounds lovely on its own. Cilantro is one of those “do you have the anti-cilantro gene?” questions. I’m just personally too lazy to do more than chop the herbs and too poorly situated to be able to grow my own.
Oh, and against those flavors, lump crab meat on top. Be able to pick out some to eat separately.