I Measure Deliciousness in Metric

Tonight I do, anyway.

For the last few days, I've been thinking about soup. It's starting to get chilly here at night, and not all that warm (by my Virginia standards) during the day, and that means soup. But I got burned out on all my standby soups--carrot coriander, vegetable, potato leek--and besides, it's best to keep those in reserve for wintertime comfort food. Of course, this soup will be brilliant later in the season, as well.



This recipe comes from Sophie, and her version was even better--I believe she made it with both monkfish and salmon from the fish shop in the market in Ennis. I had frozen cod on hand, so used that--but it was by far outdone by the sheer wondrousness of the soup itself.

So, without further ado, "Sweet Potato Soup with Fish." This is verbatim from what Sophie wrote down for me a couple of years ago:

Ingredients:
1 medium-sized onion
250 g sweet potato
200 g carrots
1 liter of fish stock (vegetable stock can be substituted)
salt
freshly ground pepper
2 teaspoons of curry powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 deciliter coconut milk
juice of 1 lime
fresh coriander
salmon and/or cod and/or monkfish, etc.
(and just for info: prawns)

* Peel the onion and chop it. Peel and chop the carrots and sweet potatoes. Put into soup pan and pour fish stock onto them. Add salt, pepper, curry powder, and cinnamon.

* Bring to the boil and simmer for about 20 minutes till vegetables are cooked.

* Blitz with whooshie. Add coconut milk and lime juice.

* Add fish and cook for about 7 minutes (if using prawns they only take 1 minute)

* Garnish with fresh coriander

...I did a few things differently, as per usual. I sauteed the onion and then added the spices at the end of the sauteeing. I used vegetable stock, and since it was plenty salty, didn't add any extra salt. And rather than measuring grams, I just fecked in 2 sweet potatoes and about a cup of carrots--it was soup, after all, not baking. I used a little more than a deciliter of coconut milk, since it comes in 150ml cans, and what, I ask you, am I going to do with 50ml of coconut milk? And I only used half a lime, because it was a juicy one, and I thought it tasted divine with just half. No prawns, since anaphylactic shock was not part of my plan for the evening.

Aside from some tough bits on the cod, it was gorgeous!

The Book I'm Not Reading: however shall I choose? The book I'd most like to be reading but don't have time for at the moment is Sara Ahmed's new one, The Promise of Happiness. Trust me, if you don't already know Ahmed's work, it's not what it sounds like.

Even Funnier than Garfield Minus Garfield

The other day, Rob posted what I thought would be the funniest thing of the week: the Garfield comic strip with the cat himself erased. It's brilliant--go have a look.

But then today, Qwags sent me this link to the Acephalous blog. I am still chortling. So, so true....

In other news, I've been cutting my work with rereading those volumes of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series that the Jesus College light reading room offers...or perhaps I should say I have been cutting my novel-reading with a little work! I first discovered these books 22 years ago: at the time, they gave me a different and much-needed world to escape to in the overwhelming family-wide vortex of confusion, grief, and guilt that surrounded the death of my grandmother. Reading them now, I still adore the world of the dragonriders, but am struck at how conventional and limiting it could be for women. I guess the idea that a woman could be a harper or a gold dragon's rider was exciting to me at 12, but now I wonder why no women are Masterharpers or riders of bronzes.... (The easy answer is "Because Anne McCaffrey said so," and that is, of course, the answer I'll have to accept. But still. I do appreciate the way that she--even in the 60s when the first novels were published--wrote in gay men as a very normal part of Pernese life, though there's not a lesbian to be found in the novels so far as I can tell.)

The [academic] Book I'm Not Reading: Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism.

A Need for Bookends--The Non-Metaphorical Kind

Now we know what Art Garfunkel was buying at Scarborough Fair--never mind the parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme: he was buying the old classics. The funny thing is that he and I were reading some of the same books at the same time--I guess he was a late bloomer.

Thanks to "Little Friend" for sending along these links--Garfunkel's favorite books, and his library.

Well, Pullman is Excited...

...about the film adaptation of his book The Golden Compass. Maybe we shouldn't all be so worried--but I am, anyway. Thanks to Sophie, who sent me this link to an interview with him about the film. And if you haven't read his His Dark Materials trilogy, go do that RIGHT NOW.