Dream Soup!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Those of you who’ve been around for a while probably know a bit about my wild subconscious: I have super-intense and detailed dreams, highly augmented by the Fukitol pills I take. Normally they’re sweeping crazy epic journeys, or prolonged anxiety dreams,* but they do like to step outside the box once in a while.

For instance, I recently dreamed that I was making pumpkin soup with ginger, allspice, and coconut milk. And I woke up and was all, “That doesn’t sound half bad.”**

So today I figured what the hell and tried to make a soup. I embellished a little—added nutmeg, garlic, onion, salt, a tiiiiny bit of sugar, and chicken stock to the mix, since the Great Pumpkin Prophecy lacked some spice.

And y’know what, it actually turned out goddamn delicious. Never let it be said my subconscious doesn’t know its way around a kitchen. Even a nonEuclidean one.

(It tasted particularly good with goat cheese crumbled in it, and yes, I got that idea from the Soup Dungeon in Twilight Princess. Which also raised another question: if I knew anything about the internet, then I could bet my pants that there was already a recipe out there for Yeto’s Superb Soup. So I set out into the wide Googlelands. Guess what? I get to keep my pants.)


*Not so many Ancient Egyptian Algebra tests at the moment; my anxiety at this point seems better represented by the kind of dream where the plane leaves five minutes ago and holy fuck you still have three houses’ worth of stuff to pack and every time you think you’ve got it all done you discover another pile of stuff still waiting.

**When I was a kid I was always completely amazed when a grownup would describe the ingredients in a particular meal and another grownup would say “That sounds delicious!” It was impossible for me to conceptualize how flavors went together until I’d actually tasted the finished foodthing—and then I only understood it as a gestalt particular to that foodthing. Took me years to get a sense of flavor enough to be able to say “Dang, you’re right, that DOES sound good!”

Comments

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Dude. That does sound good.

The nutmeg and sugar might be questionable from the prophetic standpoint, but I'm pretty sure it was just stipulating everything else you added. I mean, what kind of basic soup isn't going to work with some garlic, onion, salt, and stock?

And yes, I totally get your second footnote. I'm 30 and I'm still not very good at it a lot of times. This is all combinations I'm familiar with, so I can actually sort of put it together in my head, but there are a lot of times that people are talking about putting together various ingredients, and I just have no clue what it might end up tasting like.

[beccastareyes]

Now I'm sad that I have used all my pumpkin for the year and I'll be leaving next week for vacation -- I want to try to make Yeta's soup.

OTOH, several of my friends back home are Zelda fans. Perhaps I can make it for them.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

O gods yes I am going to make that soup. You have no idea how many times wilst playing 'Skyward Sword' that I found myself thinking, damn, I want some pumpkin soup.

Also, you must travel a lot if your stress dreams entail impossible packing. The most analogous equivalent I can think of is when I have to drive somewhere but the roads keep moving around and/or I suddenly have to drive from the backseat.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Not all that much, but I do tend to worry that I have a lot of stuff. Although they do spike when I'm going to be traveling, even if it's just a road trip. And I REALLY hate moving. God, I could use hammerspace.

I always crave soup while I'm going through Snowhead, too. Which is what made me suspect someone else actually had a recipe, since I've gotten close to trying it myself--and I HAVE worked out a Deeper'n'Ever pie before.

[full-metal-ox.livejournal.com]

(If you're wondering where I popped up from out of the wild blue, I wandered here from metaquotes.)

If you don't mind an equally out-of-the-wild-blue question: does your synesthesia enter into your cooking, and if so, how? Was that a factor in the gradual education of your palate? (My own tends to run to color->scent, grapheme->color, and music->a number of things, most strongly color [among other oddities--twangy surf guitar chords taste of A-1 steak sauce, and the piercing synthesizer in Todd Rundgren's "Real Man" and Pink Floyd's "Welcome To The Machine" feels like a splash of ice water.])

And--given the mods' permission, of course--may I link this to cooking?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I don't have much in the way of gustatory synesthesia, so I don't think it really counts. I convert sound (especially music), time (that's fun, let me tell you), and graphemes into a number of things, but none are taste or smell. I do have some fun ones--the graphemes are most complex, being colored, textured, gendered, and each with its own personality. And everything has its own location in what I call the "synesthesia dimension."

You're welcome to link to this, too! I'll have to figure out the amounts of everything I used and post the recipe. ;)

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

You synesthise time? How does that work? Do you have a constant synesthetic sense of the time, or do you look at a clock and think, 'it's blue thirty'? And do you get a different sense from analog vs. digital clocks?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It's not clocks themselves; I just have a spatial concept of time and where I am in relation to hours, days, months, years. For me, the year stretches upward and to the right, with a slight hook at January, a steep climb to September, and a smoother grade through December. The months and weekdays are color-coded (depending on the "zoom"--if I'm zoomed in to a week the colors are the days of the week, but when I zoom out to a year the weekday colors don't interfere with the month colors). I also picture history this way, though describing the spatial locations there would take a 3D model.

So when I look at a clock or calendar it's not so much blue-thirty as it is figuring out where the hours are in relation to me. Which is why I've been known to point to my left when I'm talking about the future, come to think of it.

[full-metal-ox.livejournal.com]

Mine has no spatial or temporal component; I can readily tell you that Thursday is forest green and purple, but if you were to ask me where it is, my response would be either, "...Between Wednesday and Friday?" or "...".

[full-metal-ox.livejournal.com]

Done (http://cooking.livejournal.com/9170955.html); I'm figuring that readers can use the details you've already supplied as a springboard.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* That's more or less what I did.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I wish my dream novels were as awesome in reality as your dream soup is.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

I have yet to quite nail down the sweet-savory beef stew with dried fruit that one of my dreams presented, in part because husband-san is picky and rejected the dried apricots that I intended to put in, I'm sure.

Your dream soup sounds delicious. Perhaps I will try it.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Hmm, sounds vaguely Morroccan.

[full-metal-ox.livejournal.com]

Your dream stew sounds Middle Eastern to me, too; my immediate thought was of Persian cuisine, which might provide suitable guidelines.

[redbird]

That does sound good. Canned pumpkin, or did you have a fresh one around?

[piccolo-pirate.livejournal.com]

My anxiety dreams are often packing dreams - the [transport] is leaving and there's more to pack and I keep discovering more, AND I'm moving unusually slowly and appear to not care about being late, even though I'm simultaneously stressed as fuck.

I don't travel that often, so I find this odd. Although I have moved every year for the last too-many years, so that could have something to do with it. And I am fairly stuff-suspicious... how can I have accumulated so much of it despite a notable lack of funds?

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

So, what's the recipe?

EDIT: Metaquoted

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Uh ... I should probably measure the ingredients next time. I'll get back to you on that.