Saturday, June 9, 2007

This has nothing to do with triathlon...

... but it does have to do with being proud of myself. I made hot and sour soup! Me! And it tasted almost right!

What it took to get there:

  1. A trip to the dictionary, wordreference.com, and an email to my friend in LA to figure out how to say "corn starch" in Spanish.
  2. A trip to the kitchen to figure out that after all that we already had corn starch.
  3. A trip to the Chinese supermarket across town to find "tree ears", rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, bamboo shoots and tofu.
  4. So much effort looking at food labels in said supermarket and trying to figure out what everything was with the labels written in Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Catalan.
  5. 17 euros.
  6. A trip to 3 different supermarkets to find vegetable stock.
  7. A trip to onlineconversions.com to figure out how to convert American measurements to metric.
But it turned out and even my Spanish girlfriend liked it! Oh, if you could see how far I've come since the day that I tried to make chocolate chip cookies and replaced every single ingredient. What a disaster!

4 comments:

Renee said...

The dual cornstarch step is absolutely a gem! Congratulations! I'm going to have to give this soup a shot some day, when it's not a billion degrees. Isn't it hot to eat soup in Spain in June?

warriorwoman said...

Tree ears? Are they those grotty brown mushrooms? It's not sounding awfully attractive I'm afraid. I think I'd prefer the choc chip cookies, mind you, I never read that post.

Benson said...

My mouth is watering. I love anything sour and that soup sounds really yummy. I'm with warriorwoman, what are "tree ears"? If trees do have ears, then when a tree falls in the forest, it DOES make a sound.

No Wetsuit Girl said...

Tree ears, learn all about 'em here:

http://www.hormel.com/kitchen/glossary.asp?id=34825

(Good call on the tree falling in the forest, Benson!)