The Simplicty of Soup…
And people’s compulsivity to add too many ingredients
This is a post for all subscribers. Everyone’s support is so appreciated, and I hope you enjoy.
If you’re a paid subscriber, please leave your Instagram handle in the comments so that I can add you to my “close friends” section of Instagram. I post content on my stories that is only available to paid subscribers.
If you can’t swing a paid subscription, no worries! Here are some other ways to show support: Buy Mami a burger, send her a Starbucks gift card (grande hot mocha with whip) or nail polish at the Dollar Tree:
Mami Maisonet
5960 S Land Park #222
Sacramento, CA 95822
POLLO GUISADO AND ARROZ BLANCO COOKING CLASS
Today is the last day to purchase your tickets for this weekend’s Puerto Rican Cooking Class. The scholarship tickets are sold out. But, there are still some general tickets available. No, I don’t know if there’ll be another class. I just take things day by day. And by the way, these are helping me to fund portions of my book tour.
Sometimes the classes are quiet, which means people are hyper-focused on cooking. Sometimes some participants need extra attention, which has been totally fine. And sometimes there are people cutting up and wreaking havoc, which is always fun.
Its Fogust here in San Francisco. It’s extra foggy and beautiful and cold. I love it. It’s making me crave my Nina DeeDee’s albondigas soup (seen in the photo above). Even though a few weeks ago Mami offered me some wonton soup and I turned it down. In my defense, it was at her house and it was 100°F outside. I am not built like my ancestral predecessors who love to consume soup, no matter what temperature the weather. Why do Latinos eat soup in fucking hot weather?! I cannot. Nope.
I don’t like a lot of ingredients in my soup. This is something I realized when I lived in the San Francisco Victorian managed by the coked up property manager from hell that would eventually find himself in court.
How I came to write “adult services” ads on Craigslist for one of our roommate’s (and eventually some of her colleagues) is a blur. Adult Services is where sex workers used to post their services in the gig section of Craigslist. I feel like large cities will often offer these types of untraditional gigs that wouldn’t exist anywhere else. Especially during this time when San Francisco still had some of its residual 90s artistic grit. Which is a lot different than just regular ass, depressing, homeless grit. Anyway, let’s call my roomie the “AS Roommate.” It turned out that my writing helped my roommate stand out amongst the competition, as her Johns liked to convince themselves they wanted someone who could hold a conversation. Basically, I made her look smart and she could charge more. And give me a cut. I’d like to say this is the closest I got to the adult services gig section of Craigslist, but it wasn’t. I suppose I’ll have to leave that story for my memoirs.
One day the AS roommate decided to make soup. God knows why! No doubt she was high AF on whatever substances her girlfriend had finagled from the projects across the street and decided to make a wacky soup before falling into a K-hole. I had never seen AS roommate cook. None of the roommates really cooked. I frequently cooked; enchiladas, meatloaf, hamburger gravy over rice. Attempting to barter my cooking skills for roommate’s ingredients. And all of us going in on a 20 pound bag of rice purchased at the Grocery Outlet in Oakland. Which was the only Grocery Outlet around at the time.
An otherworldly odor emitted its way down the long hall and bled into the cracks of our doors. All of the roommates lurked to the kitchen like cautious and curious felines. Our contorted faces and confused brains. What the fuck was that smell? We stood shoulder to shoulder as we stared down into the pot that one of us was brave enough to lift the lid. We were met with a motley concoction of assorted chunky vegetal viands. Carrots, onions, garlic and celery. Broccoli, Brussel sprouts and okra.
Out of all the drugs the AS Roommate devoured on a daily basis, this bitch had the audacity to be a vegan?
None of us ate her soup. We low-key anticipated it would end our days. The next day I made soup for the house.
Who knows where the pots and pans in our kitchen came from. More than likely the endless revolving door of wayward souls that never stayed longer than a year. Picking up from their hometowns and moving into SF, purchasing home goods during their nesting period, only to find themselves exhausted and defeated by the continuous challenges of any megalopolis. Then picking up from SF and moving back to their hometown and leaving behind absolutely all of their city-acquired belongings to the delight of many of us scavenging off the carcass of capitalism. TL:DR we had a lot of kitchen shit.
I seared the chicken drums in the olive oil that came from our community jumbo plastic container. The first layer of flavor an introduction to the second layer of typical mirepoix now coated in that rendered chicken fat and fond. An unmeasurable amount of tap water went in next, until all the chicken and mirepox rose to the top. The floating shiny blobs of olive oil gyrated in slow motion throughout the pot. Salt and pepper. While the chicken simmers with the base vegetables, I made the rice from the 20 pound bag.
Personally, I don’t like the texture of mushy rice when it’s been sitting in a pot of liquid. I don’t know. There’s something sinister about all of that puffed and swollen rice sitting in the pot, like it’s hiding something down in the deeps of its murkiness. When I’m hard up, which is most of the time, I do like to offer the addition of rice or fideos or glass noodles or dumplings to help whoever is consuming my soup feel full. But, I offer the rice on the side. If you want to add it, add it.
After 45 minutes to an hour, I add more chunky carrots, celery and potatoes and let it cook until fork tender. And it’s done.
I shouted for the roomies and my voice carried down the hall. The roomies served themselves heaping bowls of soup. Some of them put their rice directly in the bowl. Some put the rice on the side. Some added more carrots. Some added more potatoes.
There’s this sort of standard routine that comes along when someone cooks (from scratch) in the kitchen and people sit down together to eat. The vegetables need to go through the tactility procedure of being thoroughly washed. The auditory staccato of vegetables and ingredients being chopped and prepped that bounce off the walls. A lull sets in when the prepped ingredients are set to cook. After the lull, the olfactory of cooking starts to take its turn. When the food is ready, eaters will fill the kitchen and take visual inventory of the offerings before they make their plates. The din of the kitchen; flatware clinking, plates scraping and glass knocking around mingling with excited voices. If the food is good…quiet will set in as eaters devour the gustatory contents in assorted degrees of speed.
We spoke to each other and ate our soup in a natural rotation; one person would talk and ask a question while one person ate, then the person eating would talk and respond to that question while the question asker would eat.
Mami has always asked me how I get my broth so clear. No idea. My broth is rich and it’s xanthous, but it’s not hazy. This is the one and only way I’ve ever made chicken soup. I never felt the need to experiment with it and having experienced AS roommate’s soup jumble probably has a lot to do with it.
My chicken soup recipe is in my book Diasporican: A Puerto Rican Cookbook. Don’t forget to pre-order
"I’ll have to leave that story for my memoirs."
I'll wait.
Beautifully written....as always!