Cream of Tomato Soup +

This started as a regular cream of tomato soup. Simple and classic. The recipe calls for onion cooked in butter until clear, then flour is mixed in to make roux. The roux is mixed with tomato juice and then milk. Season to taste.

The soup tasted as reliable as the recipe was, but it was also as boring as the recipe. But the great thing about cream of tomato soup is how adaptable it is to improvisation. So I looked around. I threw in some basil and a can of diced tomatoes. Cool, the soup is a bit chunkier. I threw in garlic as well. I like garlic. But I wanted the soup to have more substance.

Fortunately, I had some meat. It wasn't just any kind of meat. It was sausage. I like sausages: bratwurst, kielbasa, italian, salami, pepperoni, breakfast sausage, korean blood sausages, etc. This was a spicy kind. Publix labeled it "chorizo", and although it wasn't the chorizo I remember eating when I was young, it had flavor. This was what my soup needed. I chopped up the sausages, and threw them in.

Now I'm sure there's many other kinds of foods I could have thrown in, but that doesn't matter now, because at this moment, I'm quite satisfied. What more does one need from life than peace and a full stomach (also a form of peace)?

The recipe I started this madness from:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Cream-of-Tomato-Soup/Detail.aspx

I miss my DS.

I sometimes think my dreams show what my subconscious desires. My DS has been broken for a while, and I never replaced it. This dream might be a hint to me of the desire to play a certain kind of game.

I was on a quest, and a few friends came along. Thinking on it, I should have realized it was a dream pretty quickly, since there were obvious signs. Like how we chose the quest (like in a video game) and it immediately went into a cut-scene in which we enter into a mansion. We were supposed to do something inside and in the garden of the mansion.

We needed to track down a dark wizard, and this mansion was related to him. We wandered through it, but not much happened, until a monstrous man (I'm guessing it was a man, though it might have been a man who was experimented on by the wizard) ran at us. We defeated him, and as he lay there, we moved on into the garden in the back.

As we were leaving to the garden, the building sealed itself closed with solid steel doors. We had no choice but to go on to the garden. We wandered around, but didn't find anything. It was then when we realized that we needed to go back. We didn't know why, but there was something back in the mansion.

Strangely enough, it was open again, and the body was gone. The wizard appeared and we immediately charged. This is when everything froze, and the wizard began to explain why we had to come back. We had not truly defeated the big guy before. Then he projected in our mind an image of what happened as we were leaving into the garden. The monster got up as we were leaving and began to run at us just as the doors sealed, so we never saw that.

The wizard chided us and said we weren't ready to face the monster, let alone the wizard, but since we were here, we could not leave until we defeated the monster. The wizard then transformed the area into an underground cavern, complete with flowing lava (this is when you can notice that my video gaming when I was young still affects my mind). He started to toy with us, creating illusions of mages for us to defeat.

It was about this time that I noticed that we could only move on panels on the floor, much like turn-based strategy games. Interestingly enough, it was turn-based. We were on a magical, transparent, floating platform that the wizard created. The lava was flowing under us. He split the group, so that we would have to wait for our turn, and would give us different scenarios to defeat his illusions. I think this was to train us while we waited for his monster to come back so we could fight it.

Then I got a phone call and woke up.

What's Zopf?

What you see in the picture is zopf.  It's a loaf of swiss bread.

I've been planning to bake a loaf of bread for a while, and I finally got around to baking one today. This was my first time baking bread, so I picked an easy recipe.  The only thing I don't like about it is that I can't smell the yeast. Still good bread, though.

Recipe:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Zopf/Detail.aspx

Smells Delicious? Couldn't Care Less.

My last post was a while ago.  I'm doing much better, but in the meantime, I realized an annoying effect that the head trauma had.  I lost my sense of smell.  Apparently, it can take anywhere from 2 months to never to heal.  This put a damper on my cooking.

Taste had a severe impact, since I was only able to taste sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (or whatever they call it these days).  I can also feel the burn of peppers, but that's not so much of a taste as a feel.  You can test that out by putting it on sensitive skin... you'll feel it if you rub a pepper on your eyelids.  For several weeks, the foods I ate only had the tastes I mentioned, temperature, texture, and presentation.  I lost over 15 pounds during that time, not because I was on a diet, but because neither cooking nor eating was fun.

Fortunately, some smells are coming back.  This does not mean that I smell a weakened version of what everybody else smells, it just means that I can only smell certain compounds.  I can smell white vinegar, but I cannot smell smoke.  I can taste the difference between regular Pepsi and Pepsi Throwback (a limited time Pepsi made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup), but I can't really tell between Coke and Dr. Pepper.  Vanilla tastes different than vanillin (artificial flavoring for vanilla), but sugar cookies and oatmeal cookies taste the same.

Anyways, so I was making london broil today, but the smoke detector kept going off.  Actually, this smoke detector seems to go off everytime I've been cooking these days.  I checked the broil, but no burning.  I'm convinced that the smoke detector is defected.  The meat was rare, which was how it was supposed to be.  I'm thinking that I'll just cut costs for food and not spend too much on herbs and spices for the upcoming few weeks/months.  What do you think?