Finally! Soup!

Today seems like a fantastic day to talk about soup. It's been raining on and off and it's been grey all day and I can almost smell it, from 15 kilometres and 7 hours away from dinner time, the suspicion of soup for dinner is in the air. So, while I take advantage of nap time here at the dog daycare and wait for my lunch to be delivered (treating myself to something that isn't soup, thanks) I'm going to talk about soup.

I don't like soup.

It is ok in some forms, I suppose. I like chicken soup sometimes, but really only with extra noodles and actual chicken chopped up and put in, and then perhaps if you drain off the broth... oh wait... huh.

Ok, well, how about soup as a side dish? Maybe if it's wonton soup coming with the Chinese Canadian* take-out food, and I get to pick all the wontons out and leave the broth behind...oh... I did it again didn't I?

At this point you're saying, "Monika, you just don't like BROTH" that actually is not entirely true! I like some broth! In fact I like all the broth mentioned above, again, so long as it has been separated from the rest of the soup and is therefore just broth, in a mug preferably, and not intended to be a meal.

The combination of broth, and stuff in broth, veggies, wontons, dumplings, chicken and so on (here on known simply as "inclusions") is actually kind of gross to me. I can usually manage to eat just enough to be polite and then wait for the main course to come, except when we are presented with the all too common problem of there not actually being a main course, just soup. Unsatisfying, brothy, mushy inclusions soup. And sometimes, it smells bad. And sometimes it smells good but tastes bad and is horribly misleading and unfair in that sense.

Soup is not a meal. I need some substance to my food. Some crunch. some variety so I can eat my veggies over here and my meat over here and understand that they are separate parts to a greater whole! Food for the eyes and the tongue just as much as it is for the stomach. Food for the brain, where I get to make decisions of what to mix in my mouth and when. A mouthful of mashed potatoes, a bit of meat, then slide in for the combo of some mashed potatoes ON a bit of meat, mixed on my terms to my ratios and not plopped in a cup of water to soak first. Makes you think about your food, manipulate your food, I bet the strong presence of soup in old people homes (I assume they make them eat soup all the time and that just adds to the horror of the places. We'll discuss my irrational fear of the elderly in the future, today it's about my beef with soup. Get it? Food pun) is a contributing factor to a decline in brain and memory function. You don't have to think about soup. It sits there, in a bowl, all mushed up and boiled together and you have one utensil, and that's it. Serious lack of stimulation there. Maybe it's really pretty soup with a bit of garnish, and that might brighten your day, until you stick a spoon in it drowning the garnish.

I come from a family of soup lover's, unfortunately.

"Black sheep! Black sheep! You non-conformist you!"

I'll have the salad.

* I am suddenly unsure if that should be "Chinese Canadian food" or "Canadian Chinese food" ? The first implies that I am referring to the food of a Chinese Canadian, the other that I am talking about Chinese food made in Canada. The second could be considered more accurate, since I'm sure not all the restaurants have Chinese Canadian cooks but I am not sure which is considered the appropriately politically correct and fair use of the language. Gosh.

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