I hope you had a souper weekend! [NOT 25/9/22]

overhead image of several bowls of different soups

Hi, friends!

Weekend check-in time. Did you have a good weekend?

I went to the theater last night and it was so much fun! Currently I’m making my first soup of the fall.

And I’m working from home tomorrow so I don’t even have the urgent oh shit gotta do laundry etc happening tonight.

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26 Comments

  1. I made a butternut squash soup. I was pressed for time so when it called for 4 garlic cloves I didn’t bother to halve that amount even though my garlic cloves were massive. Turned out to be a garlic butternut squash soup. No one was a fan. Luckily, my husband eats all our leftovers without complaining.

    • Speaking of which, a good friend of mine at university used to get upset that his housemates would eat his leftover pizza that he ordered an anchovy, hot pepper, sausage and extra garlic pizza just to ward off anyone (and potential dates or vampires.)

      It worked except for one housemate whose stomach resembled a garbage compactor and had a poor sense of smell.

      I have a feeling that this pizza aggravated my then unknown acid reflux condition.  Peppers and garlic are the death of me (and are the lifeblood of Korean cooking…)

  2. I had a souper weekend. I had Better Half pick up some containers of soup from the local-ish Whole Foods. Their soups are very good and superior to what I could make myself. I’m sure the sodium content is through the roof.

    I worked quite a bit, tracked down an errant prescription refill, discovered a podiatrist I will consult tomorrow, and threw some money at the IRS and the rapacious Publicani (that’s what they were called in Ancient Rome) of the decaying Empire State. The Publicani don’t make it easy. With the IRS it’s a breeze. The Publicani website is often down or times out, and you have to jump through all kinds of hoops to crete logins and passwords that seem to expire with the rising of every full moon. And there are only so many ways I can express my absolute contempt through creative logins and passwords for Andrew Cuomo and his mini-me, Kathy “Pay to Play” Hochul.

    • My soy allergy means I have major trust issues with premade soups. Typically the canned ones have hydrolyze soy protein or soy proten concentrate added. Because assholes. And then often homemade ones have soy in the stock used. And when I dodge both those bullets, I have to bluntly ask things like “did you use any of the cream of ____ soups as part of the base?” (as people don’t realize soy crap is added to canned soups) and “did you add any miso or soy sauce to up the savory flavor?”

      I haven’t tried any from Whole Foods in a while, but I know a decent amount of their stuff is no longer soy free here at the hot bar and cold bar. Which is annoying because several years ago I remember being able to basically eat anything that wasn’t tofu or edamame off their premade areas.

      • Soy is in every fucking thing here! With the past two kids, I avoided soy while breastfeeding. The strange thing is that when I visited family in the UK there wasn’t a hint of soy in anything premade (my in-laws thought I was crazy for insisting they check the ingredients in everything…in my defense having a baby with reflux will drive anyone crazy). I guess the soybean lobby is big in America.

  3. I made 12 cups of beef stock last week. I used short ribs and it came out pretty good. It’s in the freezer so I can use it for beef and barley soup in the winter. I love soup and bread for a snowy night meal. I’ll make chicken stock in the next week or do.

    • Oooh that’s awesome!

      I keep thinking about getting a small chest freezer for the basement since my stupid fridge is an upright fridge/freezer which means that freezer space is pretty much worthless for anything bigger than a 2 lb bag of frozen veggies.

      • I should get a chest freezer. I also have a stupid upright andolder fridge in the basement that I use too. Once I make my chicken stock I won’t have much room for anything else.

  4. Well, I’m certainly planning to have a souper Monday! I’m finally due to have my follow-up endoscopy tomorrow, a bit more than three months after a dire episode of esophageal obstruction that sent me to the ER (still paying that one off, too), so I’ll probably be ingesting my fair share of liquid sustenance after it’s over. Wish me luck.

    And I’ll probably be working from home, too — at least my parents’ home anyway: I’m translating a tale of a marriage gone wrong in the form of an annulment petition that’s been handwritten in a notebook in, um, phonetical Spanish and with almost no punctuation of any kind. Ah, well. At least they’ve already paid for me the damn thing!

    • I meant to pass along to you an interesting statistic I just learned: Best guess is that 25% of New York City residents are Spanish speaking. That doesn’t really surprise me, and I bet the number of monolingual Spanish speakers is low because everyone seems to slip in and out of Spanglish. The monolinguals must be very old or very new, as in very recently arrived. However, this came up because the City is finding it almost impossible to find Spanish speakers for its workforce, and that explains why they are unable to provide as many services as they want to (sure they do) in Spanish to the citizenry.

      • Hell, I’d be happy to help — or perhaps not “help” exactly, because I’d expect adequate payment for my services, of course. (And in all likelihood, adequate payment wouldn’t quite be adequate enough to me actually able to live in the City in question.)

        • One thing you could do, and this is a very, very long shot, is go on the various New York City websites and see if you can find HR info. Who knows how responsive they are. Probably not very; the vast majority seem to be time servers whom God himself couldn’t get rid of. I know from experience that the city does translate stuff and I’m almost sure it’s first given to a freelancer or maybe an agency and then reviewed in-house. I know this because for a few years I was the one who (working for a private sector company) reviewed the Spanish translations to make sure they were faithfully reflected in materials my company produced for them, and then I’d see the revisions from another set of eyes.

          What leads me to suspect that Step 1 is an outside vendor and Step 2 is done in-house is because invariably the Sep 1 would be perfectly fine but then the Step 2 had all kinds of revisions that were merely saying the exact same thing in a different and not any better way. So Step 1 does their job; Step 2 is some hack municipal employee in a run-down City-owned office building who has to look busy. For reasons of their own, maybe they get yelled at, but they cannot be gotten rid of. The best estimate (no one really knows and the City is quite upfront about its ignorance of this very basic thing you’d want to know)  is the City now employs 330,000 and probably at least as many more as outside contractors.

        • Interesting! I wonder if they don’t have language-accessible pre-surgery confirmation stuff.

          Like I had an email and text reminders and more than 1 phone call. But if they didn’t make all of that consumable for Spanish-speakers, I can understand people not wanting to show up.

          • I think some places do, but I’ve certainly had to interpret for phone calls from providers to tell patients that kind of information. Of course, sometimes the patients may not answer the phone, in which I leave messages stating that same information — over voice mail systems that the patients may or may not even have set up. (That could be the problem right there, too.)

  5. I took everything, like EVERYTHING out of my en suite bathroom and cleaned it down to the baseboards.

    I was exhausted and then I forgot my zoom workout with my trainer had been moved from Thursday to this evening at 6.

    I’m toast.

  6. I just got a bulk email from my dentist who just got back two days ago from a pro bono hometown charity dentistry trip.

    She’s from Iran.

    Her email is extremely vague on the details. I can’t say that’s an accident, but at my next cleaning I’m dying to hear more.

    • I’m sick over what’s happening there. So many brave young women, and men, being killed. These are true freedom fighters not like the cosplay patriots stamping their feet because an election didn’t go the way they wanted.

  7. My kids both came down with a cold this weekend. My go-to chicken soup recipe is  lemony dill orzo. I’ll check FYCE for other options. Post a recipe link here if you have one handy or for any other comfort revitalizing food recommendations. Much appreciated 💜

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