Complex Numbers

Playing Chicken

It's probably shitty of me to rag on this post, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Cold Fighting Chicken Noodle Soup  
The most soothing, comforting, cozy soup for the flu season! Quick/easy to make, you’ll be feeling better in no time!

It's the bangs, really. Well, mostly. Everything is just so goddamned exciting! I gotta put exclamation points everywhere!

Happy Monday!

You do know that stuff on the internet tends to be up 7 days a week and, in this case, for over four years, right?

We just got back from San Francisco to watch the Dodgers versus Giants, and we ate so many Gilroy garlic fries and clam chowders in a bread bowl!

At this point, I should have just closed the tab. There is nothing I have in common with these authors.

But as amazing as their food was at AT&T park, San Francisco is also super cold (compared to us weenies with our LA weather), which means I’m now home with one of the worst colds ever.

Article is from the Before Time, when people traveled a lot and happily collected viruses like Beanie Babies.

Also, I have sworn to never visit a stadium, arena, or other venue for which some corporation paid for the naming rights.

I’m currently on bedrest right now with a giant bowl of this soup.

Eating soup in bed, especially while sick (or drunk), takes some serious confidence.

It’s the only thing that is making me feel better at this point. And the garlic/lemon/ginger/lemongrass here is doing absolute wonders.

I have to admit, that does sound like a great flavor combination. Won't cure anything except maybe hunger, but I don't doubt it would provide some comfort and relief.

So as the weather cools down, be sure to stay warm and have this soup on standby! It will be a god-send!

Someone from LA telling the rest of us to stay warm can go fuck themselves.

As for the recipe itself, well... on the plus side, the usual PhD dissertation food bloggers feel the need to write before getting to the goddamned point is mercifully short (I copied most of it above). On the minus side, I count 16 ingredients; 17 if you note that salt and pepper are on the same line.

Worse, I see an awful damn lot of dicing and mincing and grating and chopping and shredding. Way, way, way more work than I want to do when I'm feeling good, let alone when I have a cold. No, as delicious as this soup might be (and it does look tasty), when I'm sick, I can barely muster the energy to nuke a can of Campbell's.

Yesterday, in an ongoing effort to try to do new things, I made a batch stuffed grape leaves. Never done that before. Stuffed grape leaves are fairly labor-intensive and time-consuming, but I had a recipe and I figured, what the hell, right? And they turned out just fine. My only point here being that as complicated as stuffed grape leaves are, it was a simpler recipe that required fewer ingredients than this chicken soup from a site whose motto is "Quick and easy meals for the home cook." (It did take longer, though, I admit.)

And finally, "ditalini pasta?" I've been cooking various forms of pasta for at least forty years, and I've never even heard of that shape, let alone seen it in a grocery store. My spell checker doesn't even recognize it. Maybe y'all in LA can find it on every street corner, but I haven't even seen it in New York or New Jersey, and there are at least a dozen people there of Italian ancestry.

Oh, well. At least I learned something new.

Anyway, no, it's not quick, it's not easy, and it's definitely not an antiviral, but hey, despite all that, and despite the exclamation marks splooged all over the page, it really does look good. If you end up making it, invite me over. As long as you're not sick.