tasty – Garden of Entropy

One day, I was at work waiting for something to install when I got a message from a friend of mine. It said: “What are you having for dinner?”

I said, “Probably soup.”
“You have soup a lot,” he said.
A few minutes later, “Why?”

“Because,” I typed back, “it’s easy. Toss some things in a pot, add water, boil, then there’s dinner. It’s simple.” This was what we call, a “lie.”

Sometimes I follow recipes for soups. Like “Split Pea and Ham.” I follow a recipe because I don’t know dick about split peas. For real. I always thought you just put peas in split pea soup. You do not. You can actually buy dried split peas. How are they different than any other pea? I don’t know, other than they’re split. Could I look it up on Google? Yes. But I won’t. So, when I follow a recipe, everything works out.

But then there are times when I think, “Hmm. I’m in the mood for some soup. I saw a recipe for a chicken and kale soup the other day, but I didn’t really look at it. Should I look it up? Naw. Chicken and kale. It’s right there in the title. What more could one possibly need?”

That’s the moment the train goes flying off the rails straight into La La Land.

You see, when I’m in charge of the recipe, I don’t know that I’m still making a soup, anymore. It’s more like a damp casserole. Here, I’ll walk you through today.

It was a bit chilly this morning. I thought– well, let’s skip that and go the part where I remembered about a chicken and kale soup. That seemed to be a good idea, so I ran with it. Chicken. Kale. Liquid. Done. And it’ll be cheap, and right now I like cheap because I just bought a house and have been paying dual rent/mortgage and dual utilities for a couple of months now. Plus, I can make a lot and live off it for a few days, on account of me only eating one meal a day.

So, off I go to the store. It’s only a few miles down the street. I think about chicken and kale. “You know what might be good in that?” I said to myself. “Navy beans.” Chicken, kale, and navy beans. Canned, because I’m making it today and don’t have time for soakin’ nonsense.

I park the car and walk towards the entrance of the store. “Say, you know what else would be good? Sausage. And not just any sausage, but that jalapeño sausage.” I agree with myself. That would be a fine addition to the soup. Chicken, sausage, kale, and navy beans.

I grab a cart and walk inside. I pick up a bag of low-salt potato chips, because my cockatoo likes them. Then I navigate around some people who are just standing there. I find my way to the canned bean aisle.

Navy beans. The problem with shopping these days, is that you can’t just get something without there being multiple variations of that thing. Like, diced tomatoes. Low salt, Italian style, Mexican style, with garlic, fire roasted, and the list goes on. If you want “diced tomatoes” you have to look really hard for something as simple as plain diced up tomatoes. In my case, navy beans can come with jalapeños.

“You know what would go good with that jalapeño sausage?” I asked myself. “Is it, navy beans with jalapeños?” I answered. “You’re a freakin’ mind reader!” I shouted. Then we both high-fived each other for being so awesomely in tune.

But there were also pinto beans with jalapeños. So I took those, too. Then I saw garbanzo beans. “I haven’t had garbanzo beans in a while. There’s no jalapeño, but let’s take it, anyway.” In the cart a can of garbanzo beans went.

Chicken, kale, sausage, navy beans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans. For Chicken & Kale soup. I passed by the diced tomatoes and grabbed a can of diced tomatoes with chilis. Because, why not?

I also grabbed some other canned vegetables because I was running low. I saw cans of cut up beets. “Beets are good for you,” I thought. “Maybe I should put a can of beets in the soup, too?” Inner me shrugged in a “why not” kind of way. Good old me, always up for something different.

Off I went to the meat section, where I grabbed a pack of chicken tenders. This way, most of the work was already done for me. I grabbed the sausage I wanted. Off to find some kale.

I found the kale. I found the spinach. I looked at the kale, which was pale green, hard, and scruffy. The kind of plant that you’d mistake for a hardy, post-apocolyptic lawn weed. I looked at the spinach, which was bright green and soft and inviting.

It was decided that kale could go jump a ledge, and that we (I mean ‘I’) were having Chicken and Spinach soup. With sausage, navy beans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans, beets, and diced tomatoes with chilis.

But, the spinach was sold in ‘bunches’ and the bunches had more stems than leaves. I meandered over to the bagged salad section, where they had baby spinach in a bag. In the cart they went. I thought I would look for a small bag of kale, just for funsies. They only had, like, 20 pound bags of kale and I knew that would be way too much. So, kale was off the menu for good.

As I was leaving the vegetation section, another bag caught my eye. Shaved Brussel sprouts. “Huh,” I said. It went in the cart. The cart, I should say, was looking kind of full at this point. And this was an HEB Plus shopping cart, which is about twice the width and twice the height of a normal shopping cart. I feel short pushing them around because the push bar thing comes nearly up to my chest. They are the SUVs of shopping carts.

If you’re the type of person who, when sitting in traffic and glancing in the rear view mirror, thinking the car behind you doesn’t have a driver until you notice the top of an elderly head just barely peeking over the dash, gets nervous, then, well, when you see an old lady barreling down a grocery store aisle with her arms above her head grasping the push bar and navigating solely by looking through the leg holes of the child seating area, well, you’ll just die. Possibly literally, if you’re too stunned to get out of the way.

I figured it was time to go. So I grabbed some sliced mushrooms. Because I like mushrooms. I checked out. The cost of my cheap soup turned out to be alarmingly expensive.

So now my Chicken and Kale soup consists of: chicken, sausage, spinach, garbanzo beans, navy beans, pinto beans, shaved Brussel sprouts, diced tomatoes with chilis, beets, and mushrooms.

You might think that would be the end of it, then. Just toss that in a big pot, add some water, and boom, dinner.

But, first, I had to cube my chicken. That’s why I buy tenders for this. I just have to grab a handful of tenders and start slicing to get, roughly, one inch chicken cubes. They get tossed into the pot to start browning. Then I cut up the sausage to create half-discs. Those go in the pot. So, too, do the mushrooms.

While those are cooking, I start grabbing other things out of the bag. Like the beans and tomatoes. I open them. That’s when I noticed a can of corn that I had bought. It was wet. So wet, that the label was coming off and the print stuff on the bottom was smudged. I looked in the bag.

It was dry. I looked at the other cans from the same bag. They were all dry. “What the hey?” I thought. How was that possible? So I did the only logical thing that I could: I opened it and dumped the contents in the pot. Then went the beans. Then the beets. I found left over chicken broth in the fridge. That went in the pot. I added the tomatoes. I looked in the freezer. I had an open bag of frozen broccoli and cauliflower.

“Well…” I thought. “It’s already open,” said me. “I’m sold,” I agreed. That went in the pot. I gave the pot a good, hard, lookin’ at. It was nearly full, and it still only had half a cup of liquid in it. I looked at the bags of spinach and Brussel sprouts.

“Surely, those will take up less space once they start cooking?” I said. I agreed with me, and dumped half the bag of Brussel sprouts in the pot. Then I dumped half the bag of spinach into the pot. I pressed them down a bit. Then I poured water over the top which, thanks to physics and all, caused water to splash all over the place. I managed to fit enough water in the pot so I could kind of see it, just under the spinach leaves. Like a swamp.

Then I figured I should add seasoning. Salt, pepper, oregano, onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, chili powder, thyme. I saw some cilantro leaves. I don’t usually use cilantro. That went in. I gingerly tried to give this pot of miasma a stir so as not to slosh everything out of it. Then I put the cover on it and waited for it to boil over.

So, in the end, my very simple “Chicken and Kale” soup consisted of:

Chicken
Jalapeño Sausage
Garbanzo beans
Navy beans with Jalapeño
Pinto beans with Jalapeño
Diced tomatoes with chilis
Baby spinach leaves
Shaved brussel sprouts
Beets
Mushrooms
A can of corn
Three quarters of a bag of broccoli and cauliflower
Salt
Pepper
Oregano
Onion powder
Garlic powder
Paprika
Chili powder
Thyme
Cilantro leaves

You can make Beef Wellington with about 14 ingredients, if you count the dough as an ingredient.

One of my greatest fears is that someone, someday, will come over, have some of my soup, and ask for the recipe. This is, in fact, in the same category as my fear of an alien space ship landing on my front yard while little green men pop out of it and start asking me to take them to my leader. They both, statistically, have the same chance of happening.

But, let’s borrow from the previous blog post.

It’s raining. There’s a knock at the door. I open the door and there, standing drenched and miserable, is an attractive woman with middling length blonde hair (or maybe jet black with purple tips), looking miserable and drenched.

I invite her inside and she stands there, dripping on my living room floor, in a dress made almost transparent from the rain. Her car died, she explains. Her cell phone is dead, too. Could I call triple A for her? Of course, I could. I offer her the use of my fluffy robe and say that I can dry her clothes while we wait.

She exits the bedroom wearing the robe and hands me a bundle of wet clothes. I sit her down at the table and give her a bowl of soup, if it can still be called that, while I take her clothes to the dryer.

When I get to the dryer I stop. Should I was the clothes first? Will drying rain drenched clothing without washing them make them kind of weird? I don’t know. In the interest of just getting on with the fantasy, I put them in the dryer and go back to the table.

“This soup is very good,” she says, looking up at me through the still wet curls of hair framing her face. “Would you mind very much giving me the recipe for it?”

Now what do I do? Should I write down on a 3×5 card, “Go through your fridge and pantry and toss anything you think is edible in a pot. Cover with water. Add whatever spices you have on hand. Boil.”? She would think that I was being a jerk, trying to keep the super soup recipe a secret.

You see, even when following a recipe, I don’t really follow it. I don’t measure things. If a recipe calls for “1/2 a teaspoon of pepper” I say, “Fuck dat!” Then I take the top off the pepper container and dump half of it in there. For everything else, I just sort of sprinkle liberally until it “seems like enough.” I couldn’t write down a coherent recipe, even if I wanted to.

Assuming she wasn’t angry, the woman would say to me, “Though I came here desperate, willing to do anything for a person kind enough to help me. And, though, I sit here wearing nothing more than this robe, this soup has an alarming amount of fiber and my bowels are crying out in anguish. I am no longer in the mood, and would, instead, avail myself to your restroom. Probably for the rest of the night.”

That should give you great insight into who I am: a man who can’t even fantasize properly.

Addition: I went to the store yesterday and saw a box of ‘instant’ barley. I bought it and added it to the soup. Yes, I have a problem. I know. I know…