The Scoop on the Soup

The last couple of weeks have been quite busy and so my cooking has slowed down because of it. We've been eating pasta, sandwiches, cereal or salads, none of which have been very blog worthy, thus the lack of entries. However, I finally did get a chance to make the Fregola soup and I've been debating with myself over whether or not to file this entry under disasters...

I should start out by saying that it wasn't the recipe at all, the recipe was fine, very easy to follow, it was me who messed up...again. The first mistake was not having any homemade veggie stock on hand, which in all honesty isn't really a mistake because I never have homemade veggie stock around (ack! please don't tell the food police), I used Better Than Bouillon® Vegetable Base, a product I like very much and use quite often. I messed up when it came to counting how many teaspoons I needed to mix with 8 cups of hot water to make 8 cups of vegetable stock though. I think I may have counted 4, 5 and 6 twice and maybe 8 again, and the teaspoon I added for good luck didn't help...ANYWAY the result was some VERY salty water. I used it regardless of the warning signals going off in my head, I guess I was thinking I could add water to the pot as the soup was cooking to dilute the salty flavor, but I didn't anticipate just how much water the pot could hold or how much water it would take to dilute the saltiness. Let's just say that I added so much water I was beginning to think that the pot had a hole in the bottom of it. I got nervous that I was adding too much water and so to compensate I kept adding more Fregola to counter balance all the extra water, please don't ask me to explain my thought process at the time, all in all, rather than adding a 10 ounce portion of Fregola I ended up using the whole 500 gram package.

After a while, everything seemed fine, and the flavor was good once all the saltiness had been diluted, I had opted to add 3 cloves of garlic to the bean puree and that seemed like a nice touch but, I was beginning to think that maybe the soup was too watery, so, in the spirit of "SHE WHO CANNOT LEAVE THINGS WELL ENOUGH ALONE" I added some cornstarch mixed with water to help thicken up the soup. I stirred a few times, tasted, was satisfied and turned off the flame, leaving the soup on the stove until dinner, which at the time was about 2 hours from the time I turned off the heat.

WELL, all that extra water ended up not being a problem AT ALL, and I probably didn't have to add any cornstarch to thicken the soup either because when I lifted the lid off the stock pot 2 hours later all that extra Fregola I had dumped into the pot had...GROWN 100 TIMES IN SIZE and resembled matzoh balls rather than petite little pearls of couscous. There was no extra liquid to speak of because it was absorbed by all the effing Fregola. Needless to say I was a bit freaked out, and ashamed of myself, I'm a better cook than this and I was careless with the execution of this recipe. I was pretty disgusted with the fabulous mess I created and decided at that point to cut my losses and just dump everything. We had sandwiches for dinner instead, and it took me two days to get over the guilt of throwing out all that food. If I had to pull something good out of the experience I guess it would be that I taught myself a lesson in learning to pay more attention to what I'm doing, and not to cook at all if I'm not willing to give 100 percent to the process. whatever it takes to make myself feel better right…right!

I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "what a lame entry, I shaved my legs for this?" Ah, but the wait is worth it because good things are coming soon to MH5 as the weather continues to cool down… the baking will soon begin!

Written by Deb on September 25, 2003 03:35 PM