RSS
Home
The day peanut butter soup made me cry
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
I have never met a teenager that puberty was easy for. It is one of the great equalizers - puberty and death. I bring it up because it was particularly difficult for me. It wasn't just the usual acne, body awkwardness, and self loathing that most teenagers experience. I suffered, or rather my family and friends suffered, violent mood swings and hysteria because of a disorder called PCOS. I'm all groovy now, but at the time... well I'm just thankful my parents didn't put me in a burlap sack and try to drown me in the river.
The real tragedy is that this was when I started experimenting with cooking. From the ages of 13 - 18, I was for all intents and purposes the devil with a spatula. The older I got, the better the food tasted, but the early days were a little frightening. I would look at a recipe, much the same way I do now, and I would tear it apart and substitute ingredients for others, and change a casserole into an omelette, and other bizarre things like that. Most of the time it went alright but one night after we had gone out to eat at a not so great Chinese buffet, I came home with what is most definitely the worst idea I have ever had. I had eaten Thai Chicken Strips for dinner and basically what that was, was Tyson fried chicken strips, cooked with peanut butter, onion and cayenne pepper. I didn't eat real Thai food until I was twenty so I didn't know that chicken nuggets and peanut butter was disgusting, I just thought it was ethnic.
I came up with an idea for soup shortly after the "Thai Chicken Strips" incident. And as a side note to my mother, father and brother - I'm really really sorry.
Yes, I made peanut butter soup. It - was - revolting. I started with a big pot of chicken stock like I would any normal soup. I diced up potatoes, tomatoes and beautiful chunks of chicken, onion and celery, and then I added a jar of peanut butter, heavy cream and cayenne pepper (because hey, why not?). Then, to top it all off, I toasted pine nuts and walnuts, ground them up in the food processor, and added those too. I figured since we were going with a "nut" theme, a few more wouldn't hurt. The ground up pine and walnuts didn't mix well so they ended up sort of floating on the top of the soup like scum. What's worse, the peanut butter kept setting to the bottom so you had to stir the soup a few times before you could serve it.
My mother, father and brother all stared at me with fixed expressions of their lips pulled back over thier teeth in nervous smiles.
"What is that on top?" My mom asked gently as I ladeled a scoop into her bowl.
"Pine nuts and walnuts. I toasted them and them ground them up. You have to stir your soup really fast to get them to mix in." I stared at them, never breaking eye contact, waiting for their reaction. There was a bead of sweat rolling down the side of my fathers head as he leaned forward to taste the soup.
They all took a bite and started making yummy noises.
"Mmmmm. This is so good." My father said with a mouth full of soup afraid to swallow. "Really special."
"I'm glad you like it! I was worried you guys would hate it. I have a whole big pot." I turned away to get myself a bowl and sat down with the rest of them. This time, they were all watching me.
Peanut butter is a versatile thing, but it should never EVER be soup. I spit out the mouthful of soup into the bowl and started crying hysterically. I knew they were lying, and I knew the soup was disgusting. The situation had moved beyond the realm of my family lying to me further and pretending the soup was actually good. My mom, dad and brother spit their mouthfuls of soup out also, and I officially became inconsoleable. I ran out of the room as dramatically as I could and locked myself in my bedroom. When I emerged several hours later, all traces of the soup had been erased as though it had never existed in the first place. Mom's and dad's are good for that sort of thing. I wasn't able to eat peanut butter for three years afterwards. But, like all things, time healed that wound too.
So here are some good lessons to live by:
1) Don’t ever use peanut butter in chicken soup.
2) Cayenne pepper is good in small doses. SMALL DOSES.
3) Families should love you no matter what (the good ones do anyways...) - even if you force them to eat peanut butter soup.
4) Emotionally unstable people should stay out of the kitchen.
Simple Yummy Chicken Soup
You can start with the store bought chicken stock. It's just as good as making your own, and it's less time consuming and less expensive. We use College Inn mostly as it has the best flavor.
2 large cans of College Inn soup stock
2 large carrots shredded into the soup pot.
3 ribs of celery diced fine
3 whole raw chicken breasts
1 can of sweet yellow corn (do not drain juice)
3 whole peeled rinsed potatoes roughly chopped
1 large Vidalia onion minced fine
1 cup of ditilini (optional)
Salt
Pepper
For this soup, you combine all of the ingredients except for the noodles, and cook them together for an hour or two, or until the chicken and potatoes are cooked all the way through. Take the whole chicken breasts out of the pot and dice them once they are cool enough and then return them back to the pot, throwing away the grissel and fat. When the soup is in the last 10 or 15 minutes of cooking, then add the noodles if you like. Salt and Pepper to taste and serve with crusty bread or saltines.
Related Articles:
Comments
.jpg)
Thanksgiving! Oh my yes! To a person like me whose whole day essentially revolves around what she going to eat, Thanksgiving is the holiday in which …
.jpg)
This is actually a recipe that I made for Christmas one year and it went over so well, that it's become a staple in our Feast of the Seven Fishes. …
