Soup Kitchen

This past weekend I decided to invite some of my girlfriends over - partly to celebrate my birthday and partly to acknowledge those of us in my social circle that are single... which for the most part isn't a BAD thing, until you get to holidays like St. Valentine's Day. Yes, the constant references to love/gifts/flowers/candy/expensive jewelery are a bit nauseating to those of us who are in between "adoring males hovering nearby." So my idea was to invite my single gal pals over, and treat them to a little adoration in my own style: cooking with love, as my son calls it.

The crew working on my remodel worked really hard to get my kitchen put together in time for my party, and so when Saturday rolled around I actually had counters, a sink, and a stove to cook on (although I had a back-up plan already, just in case the day came and I wasn't able to cook anything for lack of kitchen functionality). I planned a menu of five different kinds of soup from one of my new cookbooks, loosely organized around my invitees' preferences with a few recipe experiments thrown in for good measure. I admit, some were a little on the ambitious side; a few were selected specifically because I had bought myself a new food processor for a birthday present (never having owned one before) - I am always a little apprehensive when a piece of cooking equipment comes with it's own instructional DVD! But, as it turned out, operating a food processor is easy and fun, and I am already thinking ahead to the world of food preparation now open to me. Whoever thought up a food processor was surely a genius. I absolutely LOVE food processing.

The day of the party rolls around, and I start early in the morning with my soup preparation. Remember, five different soups takes quite a bit of preparation! The first recipe I tackled was Indian Mulligawtawny, which had the longest cooking time but also gave me my first opportunity to use my food processor (basically you mix up all the ingredients, run it through the food processor, then throw it in the pot and cook it on high for about six hours). When I got the Mulligawtawny set up on the stove, I focused my energies on the next soup on the list.

I believe the next soup was Cream of Sun-dried Tomato, and I seem to remember there was a period of stirring in the recipe steps - so I was staring into the pot of Tomato, stirring, watching - and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, something wet and warm hits me in the face! I look up and over at the Mulligawtawny, happily bubbling on a high flame... then I look around. I see soup everywhere... all over the top of the stove, on my microwave (which sits directly above the stove, attached to the wall), on my cabinets, all down the front of the oven, on the floor.

If you recall, before I started my soup adventure, my kitchen was not only clean, it was NEW. And now, in a mere couple hours, it looked like it had been hit by a soup nuclear bomb. But I was on a schedule, and no time to stop and worry about the mess at that particular moment. So I pushed ahead, and managed to prepare the rest of the soups in time for the girls' arrival. They all thought the soups were delicious.

After a successful party, I devoted the rest of my weekend to restoring my kitchen to its former glory - I'm an unwilling housecleaner, which is kind of funny especially if you know that when I was in my early twenties, I cleaned other people's houses for money. I think I got it all out of my system back then, because now there are about a thousand other things I'd rather do than housework. Ha. I have already decided that once my remodeling is done, I am going to bring in a housekeeper on a regular basis... it's funny because the Bunny would never let me do that before; he thought I should clean my own house. But I guess now that it's just me making the decision, I can do what I want. And I really want a housekeeper.

I took over some leftover soup to one of my neighbors; when my kitchen was gutted a few weeks ago, she was nice enough to bring me dinner one night knowing I didn't have any way to cook anything for myself. I like that; it's nice when people do nice things for you - I don't think those in the position to be recipients of such acts of kindness allow it nearly often enough. So this gal comes over to thank me for the soup (she was out when I went next door, so I left it with her husband), and I tell her the story of the Mulligawtawny. We are standing in my kitchen, and she is listening to me tell the story, and she happens to look up and says, "Oh yeah, you even got soup on your ceiling." Sure enough, I look up and I see soup splatters on the ceiling and on my air conditioning vent. I didn't think to look up there before, but fortunately she pointed it out so I made sure to get everything cleaned up before my crew came back Monday morning - "got rid of the evidence," so to speak.

I'm going to take another whack at the Mulligawtawny, but this time I am going to use a splatter screen (an impulse buy while I was grocery shopping the other day) and see if that cuts down on the resulting mess. Usually splatter screens are used when someone is frying bacon, so the grease doesn't pop up and burn you. I think it might work... it is nice to know my new kitchen can stand up to whatever I can throw at it. Even if what I am throwing is soup.



Postscript: In redoing the Indian Mulligawtawny soup recipe, I discovered I mis-read an important step - reducing the heat to "simmer" the soup for the six hours (instead of cooking it on high heat). That's what happens when you DON'T read the directions slowly and carefully... ha!