Soup rant

[darcydodo]

Cream of wild and tame mushroom soup is very amusing, I grant you. The fact that it is nothing like cream of mushroom soup (let alone the fact that unless it can be revealed by which makes you bite your lip, there's no telling between the wild and tame mushrooms) is slightly less amusing, but I shall actually allow the ridiculousness of the name to make up for the shortcomings of the soup as a soup.

Then, today, there was Oaxacan black bean soup. Now, I generally expect black bean soup to be black, and thick. This was red, with celery (which is another thing, why do all the soups at FSM have celery??? Celery is dangerous, well known to be a lethally limp and clammy tickling weapon!), and according to mciac (who ate it, I already had my lunch), there were about two black beans in it. And some chili powder.

The theoretical gumbo tastes like watery tomato broth and has no okra nor anything else that I know of which makes gumbo gumbo. The split pea soup is a perfect example of why they serve bread with all their soups &emdash; you need to soak up the excess liquid before it remotely resembles actual split pea soup. Most of their soups seem to be the same base (watery tomato-ish broth with celery) plus some random legume-type-things and perhaps some meat for the non-veggie soups thrown in according to the day.

By contrast, the Italian Wedding Soup is really very good. But mciac told me that it's a standard Campbell soup, which could explain the difference; in defense of FSM, though, the green bits floating in the soup (spinach, I think?) look reasonably fresh, and not canned.

The chicken and dumpling soup today also looked like it could conceivably have been good. Maybe I'll try it next time it's offered and I haven't got my lunch.

But then again, do I really want to trust the soup somewhere which offers a carrot and ginger soup which is... white?


(OK, I don't precisely know if this post had a point. But it doesn't need to, and I'm sticking by my rights on that! And it probably made me feel better, in some obscure fashion.)

Comments

[wychwood]

Darcy, you evil child, I cannot *believe* you never told me you had a LiveJournal!!! I only just found out because you're one of Shreena's friends list... (See, Shreena told me, just Darcy didn't. Darcy doesn't love me. I'm going to go and sulk in the corner now.) (Not that anyone will notice :) )

Anyway, I added you.

[shreena.livejournal.com]

Darcy loves the G&S mailist more than the Wychwood one, y'see. She sent it out on the former but not the latter.

Still, _I_ love you!

[darcydodo]

Err. Sort of forgot about sending this to the Wychwood mailing list. Especially since Windy jumped down my throat when I sent that anti-war petition. Now, I agree the two are entirely different, and in fact I'll admit that that really had nothing to do with me forgetting to send the livejournal e-mail to Wychwood. It was more that I forgot there was anyone who wasn't on the G&S-chat list. :)

So, anybody else with an lj I should know about? :)

[wychwood]

Well, Alison (red_tree) and Stephanie (starstuff) have them... I don't know any other WW people who do. Does Emily? I think I saw someone mention her name...

Anyway, I suppose I forgive you :)

[chele74.livejournal.com]

The floating spinach that looks fresh - well, it isn't. I'm a food service veteran. I'm not dissing these Campbell's frozen from concentrate soups - some are quite good (say, tomato florentine, italian wedding) and many things do well frozen, such as cakes (which are always shipped frozen) or avocado - I'm just convinced that Free Speech invents "hybrid" soups when they have to change a soup over. That's all.

The real question is not why is the carrot and ginger soup white, but were they serving cream of potato the day before.

[darcydodo]

Actually, they might've been serving cream of mushroom the day before and swapped the mushrooms for carrots. The broth looks identical.

[dizzyditz.livejournal.com]

The point: Soup is good! I love soup! I must make mushroom soup! Soup! Soup! Soup!