SOUPCAAAAAKES

Holy crap – the inevitable has happened. I start a cooking blog, and immediately I lose all ability to make a cohesive, tasty, SANE meal. I don’t know what happened. I think my brain was all: you have a blog now! Throw things together and it’ll work! Everyone will be so impressed!

Well… no.

The day started well enough with my standard breakfast of oatmeal with salt and butter. Not the instant kind – I like to cook my oatmeal, and I like it savory. I also eat about three times the amount that’s normally in those instant packets, so it fills me up for a long time. Big, salty, buttery breakfast of champions! Booyah!

It wasn’t until 3.30pm that I got hungry again. B comes home from work at 5, so I thought I’d just make something light – a brothy soup! I usually really like my quick brothy soups: just half a bouillon cube in 3 or four cups of water with a few veggies cut into it (usually a combination of kale, cabbage, beans, carrots, celery, etc). So I put some kale and cabbage in some water and stuck that one the stove, only to realize: I’m out of broth cubes.

There are several things I could have done, but for some reason I chose the weirdest possible option. I don’t know what came over me. Well, I do. I recently printed out a recipe for tortilla soup that was mostly made from canned ingredients, and one of the cans was creamed corn. That was apparently all the endorsement I needed.

I put a can of creamed corn in my soup, which at that point was just boiling water with kale and cabbage in it.

Yep.

You just think about that for a sec.

I tried it. It tasted as if I had heated up the water from a can of regular, non-creamed corn. I made a sad face.

But this isn’t the end of it. After a panicked rescue mission, Worcestershire sauce, quinoa, and a bunch of different seasonings, this abomination of a soup actually seemed somewhat edible. I put some grated sharp cheese on top (of the kind that I at some point grated into some Tupperware and then forgot what kind it was), and then I ate it. It was actually decent.

It still looked gross, though:

Well, I managed to eat a bowl and a half. What to do with the leftovers? While I happily eat whatever crappy concoction I made, I felt bad saving this weird corn stuff for B, who would possibly eat half a bowl of it to make me happy. And I didn’t want him to suffer for me. So I thought: How can I make weird leftover soup into something better?

And I came up with: veggie burgers. Yes. I know.

I’m gonna make this as short and painless as possible: I threw in some of my beloved oatmeal and cooked it until all the liquid was soaked up, and all that was left was a more gross, gelatinous mass. To which I then added two eggs. Which I then pureed.

It wasn’t pretty.

I heated up a non-stick pan with some veggie oil, and poured the stuff in like I would pancake batter, because this was way too runny to be made into real patties. The result was weird, floppy, lumpy soupcakes.

I tried one, and it really, really didn’t taste half bad. The texture, however, was abominable. Gruesome. No matter how long I left these in the pan, they would not stop being slimy and weird on the inside. So now they are sitting rejected on my kitchen counter. I don’t think anyone is gonna eat them. This will be the first time in many months that I’ve had to throw out something I cooked. God-freakin-dammit.

To make matters worse (and weirder), B came home and asked me why the house smelled like fish. I don’t even want to know.

FIN