Danny ChaiAbby’s tricks. I really shouldn’t be treating her like a trained seal. But she’s just too much fun.
For various circumstantial reasons, I’ve been spending many mornings, afternoons, nights, and whole days alone with Abby. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I could be a Mr. Mom. Indeed, I think I’d really enjoy it. I dunno, I find a day of taking care of Abby and managing the house much more rewarding and fulfilling than my day job, where all everyone ever talks about is monetization. It’s a poisonous state of mind. Versus thinking about how best to care for another human life. Maybe it’s just the novelty of it, but I enjoy my househusband times a lot.
So I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m a piss-poor cook. I just feel lost in the kitchen, always have. The summer Eddie and I lived in Mirrielees (a great summer, by the way), if I got home before Eddie I wouldn’t know where to start with dinner, and I’d have to call him. Absurd.
I tried the Rachael Ray thing and it didn’t work too well, so what I decided to do was just master one thing: soups. Why soups? I dunno, I like soup. Anyway, what I realized was that my cooking style is absurd. What I do is take a recipe, and do it over and over again until I figure out all the influencing factors and master it.
The problem is, there’s so many factors involved. So like, I’ve been repeatedly making this creamy tomato-basil soup. First time, it was OK, but not as great as I’d like. Might have been the ingredients. I got the tomatoes and basil from Pak ‘N Save, which doesn’t exactly have the best produce. Tried it again with ingredients from Trader Joe’s. Still not perfect, tasted a bit too acidic. And I thought I added too much salt. So I tried it again with Trader Joe’s ingredients and a bit of brown sugar added. Except by then the basil wasn’t as fresh, so when it still turned out sub-ideal, I’m not sure if it was the basil that was wrong. On top of that, maybe it’s just the recipe that’s bad. But I can’t figure that out because there’s too many confounding factors.
Basically, I treat cooking like a science experiment, and I want to isolate the effect of every ingredient and process on the final product. And that just takes forever. So yeah, we’ve been eating a lot of creamy tomato-basil soup lately.
I think I’ve figured out a couple things though. One, tomato seeds add bitterness. Two, it’s crazy how much salt you need to add to tomatoes. It’s almost disturbing how much sea salt I need to add to the soup to get it right, and it’s still on the blander side. No wonder V-8 has so much sodium.