Soup, shoop ba-doop Shoop ba-soup, Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-soup

not my picture, copied from the recipe.

Good morning, reader(s)! I'm running on not enough sleep. Yet again, I made the wonderful decision to stay up reading til 3 am. What could possibly go wrong? I have this feeling that something usually does go wrong on 5 hours sleep, but I can't remember any of these times specifically, probably because I was too tired for my memory to work properly on those days, so I just go on thinking 'nothing goes wrong, stay up in the sweet silence Beth! No one is around! No one is asking for a tissue or a drink!' Anyway, FOOD. Here is a recipe that I tried last week and I am happy to report it is a new favorite! (click) It's called Tomato Cocounut Soup with Spiced Chick Peas, and is influenced by Indian cuisine. I would have bet all my money that the 7 yr old who does NOT like tomato soup (or who thinks she does not like tomato soup) would have turned her nose up at this dish, but it's a good thing we're not gamblin' folk, cause I'da been broke. She ate it without so much as the beginnings of a frown playing on the corners of her mouth. So, one must infer that either her "dislike" of other tomato soups I've made is imaginary (yes, she is absolutely delusional when it comes to food sometimes. She'll angrily insist she does NOT like a food, after eating it most happily the week prior, stating that she never said she liked it, I'm remembering wrong.) OR that she likes THIS recipe for tomato soup, and it was pretty pretty tasty.



So get out your salt and ... well actually, it calls for no Peppa... nor any Spinderella. OK so get out your salt and garam masala!

This recipe is EASY and doesn't take too much time, which bumps it up even further than it's taste alone could do for it on the ratings scale. There really isn't any prep work, besides peeling garlic and ginger.

I should mention, I tried grating the ginger on a microplane grater with little success. I think the ginger was too fibrous so it took forever and produced a fine sludge. Next time I will just use the box grater perhaps, or just mince it finely.

Also, this recipe though not even vegetarian, is ridiculously easy to veganize when you have some homemade "chicken" broth powder (click) which is uncannily convincing. The only other substitution to make after that is easy and optional: sub yogurt for plain coconut milk yogurt or plain soy milk yogurt. And voila! you're a vegan, as simple as that.

I will also say a word on the spiced chick peas. This is what sold me on trying this recipe. However, because of several different factors I think, the chick peas didn't turn out as awesome as I had expected. First, I don't think the recipe called for nearly enough curry, even when accounting for the taste buds of a child which catch fire faster than ... I can't think of a good example. Let's say a match. I told you I'm TIRED, leave me alone. So to remedy this I sprinkled curry on them after they came out of the pan, and still, not enough. But this could be that I ran out of my big jar of real-ish curry, and was using a small jar of Frontier brand curry. Their spices tend to disappoint on occasion. Second, I probably should have raised the stove from medium to medium high, as they took a long time to brown, thus losing a good amount of their coating. Next time I will look into baking them, as I've heard this produces crispy crunchy chick peas. They still were very good in the soup though, and I was satisfied.

So all in all, I give this recipe a 'very satisfied carrot man' rating, because the awesomeness of the soup made up for the slight unhappiness that was caused by the chick peas, and then some. But I don't have the desire to make this again immediately, so it falls short of the "extremely satisfied" rating.

I wanted to serve this along with some Naan, but apparently all the Naan available to me at the Giant has milk and eggs. So instead, I bought frozen samosas, and omitted the mint chutney it came with since it had milk in it.