I am soup, thanks for asking

First of all, you should play this flash game for about three minutes, because it is beautiful, but only for about three minutes, like the drive from Oakland to Los Angeles on I-5.

Hokay, are you back?



Here is a bowl of soup. Like all of my favorite things that I have made, it was pretty much improvised from junk I had in my refrigerator--and honestly, I'm pretty proud that I've reached a stage in my life where said junk allows me to assemble duck confit tacos in less than five minutes at 1 AM.

Anyway, listen. I sauteed some onions and some of John's dried peppers and some carrots to get them nice and sweet. Then I added some of the chicken broth I had leftover from this blog entry. I let it boil, I tossed in some kaffir lime leaves that I bought on impulse a few weeks ago, I tossed in some green beans (which taste a little like coffee when I eat them raw--does anybody else get this?). I let it boil until the green beans were almost done, then I added in some julienned squash and some sad-looking cilantro that I had finely minced. I love throwing things--really throwing them--into hot pots and pans, the blast of air you get coming back at you carrying the first hint of the aroma of whatever you threw in, your sad cilantro or your questionable shallots now wild and bright.

And that would have been good, but wait! Last week I had made some coconut milk, and I swear that I will never, ever do that again because that is the most difficult cooking process I have ever embarked upon, but it did lead to the discovery that when you make coconut milk and then refrigerate it the fatty part splits off into coconut cream. So I took my leftover coconut cream and I whisked in some hot broth and then right when I was ready to eat I poured the hot coconut broth back into the soup.

This was fantastic. Seriously. The broth: just the right background of chili and lime, spiked with coconut, but still round and full in your mouth like only homemade chicken stock can be. The vegetables: some crunchy, some chewy, some soft, some noodly. The colors, the warmth, the salt, the surface slick with oil. Pretty much everything about this soup was perfect.

But beyond the five senses, what's really beautiful for me is everything that went into this soup that I threw together in half an hour from leftovers in my fridge reminded me of somewhere I had been or someone that I had been eating with or something I had done: some impulse buys, the hot peppers that John always has on hand, the chicken that I roasted for dinner with Dan and Adam and Jeff and Ariel, the page in Ad Hoc At Home that taught me how to cut carrots obliquely, the coconut cream that I will never make again, the windy bike ride home wondering what to do for dinner. This is the last month of my life in a bowl of soup.

It is possible that I will never do better than this.