The Great Bottomless Soup Vat Experiment of 2017

Cooking healthy food is cool

I’m not a health nut.

Mostly I’m just lazy. I want to stay healthy with the least amount of effort, just like every other regular person. This includes not having to think up new things to eat all the time. Making the same decision over and over is exhausting, and when we’re exhausted, we do dumb things, like take shortcuts. Shortcuts like Hot Pockets. I used to love Hot Pockets.

To that end (the one where I want to avoid Hot Pockets), I’ve been prepping a big vat full of soup every weekend for the following week’s lunches. The same soup. Since August 2017. The vat holds enough for about 8 decent-sized meals. I usually freeze 3 of them. Then after 2 weeks I can take a week off. Bonus laziness.

It’s not the SAME soup. I respect my digestive tract. I start fresh each week!

The soup’s make-up is generally the same, but each week it’s slightly different because of aforementioned laziness. I don’t want to read the instructions every time, so I’ve internalized a few different recipes and techniques, abstracted the major steps and now proceed to wing it each time I make it. The dish morphs into something new each time. Conceptually morphs, not literally morphs. That would be terrifying. This morphing keeps it from getting boring. So I get to be lazy, and not bored. And sometimes I get to eat terrible soup for a week.

An added bonus of not using a recipe is that sometimes I forget to add something, and realize that was the thing making it terrible, or that the thing I missed didn’t contribute to the goodness of the flavor at all. Sun-dried tomatoes is a good example. I know they’re good for me. But they’re slimy and weird-looking after you cook them. And before you cook them. Also, before you cook them is when they taste good. Afterward they’re kind of tough and tasteless. Slimy, tough, and tasteless. But nutrition!

On techniques and internalizing

The base recipe evolved from two different recipes.

The first was this stew I discovered the second time I attempted a ketogenic diet in July of last year. This recipe has very few carbs, all coming from the celery root, squash, and green beans.

The second recipe is a thai chicken curry soup that I can’t find right now. Basically, it uses root vegetables like carrots and sweet potatos. Cook those in curry, puree half of them, mix it all together, add some chicken. Mmm. You have to count the carbs on this one in keto, because too many root veggies can knock you out of it.

(Side note: ketosis)

Basically, the idea with keto is to completely deprive your body of ALL carbohydrates, resulting in no glucose available to burn for energy. This forces your body to convert fats into ketones, which your body uses instead of glucose.

Even the slightest intake of carbohydrates or the slightest imbalance of protein vs fats will knock you out of ketosis and cause all kinds of problems (I had issues with sleeping and exercise). You have to ban all fruits and beans and grains and milk and cereal and chocolate and ice cream and everything worth living for unless you want to spend a ton of money on almost-ice cream (I’m being slightly facetious here, and don’t want to discount the value of keto, because it’s great for a lot of reasons, but the transition is definitely not an easy one).

It’s hard to do right, and I wasn’t able to figure out a good balance between hunger and boredom, and had other issues related to sleep and exercise. (I’ve been on the 16:8 fast instead for 3 months, and it’s great).

Spices

I also wing it on the spices. (I’ve learned that too much cumin is terrible, too many red pepper flakes is terrible, but everything else is generally pretty easy to not have too much of. Except maybe salt/pepper, but it’s pretty hard to screw those up. To taste!)

I’ve used curry, garam masala, my own mixture of random things including chili powder, red pepper flakes, cumin, celery powder, onion powder, ground mustard seed, ground coriander, whatever-I-felt-like. The spice rack spins. You can just spin it, cover your eyes, grab one, and yell ‘HAH!’

I really loved the curry, but couldn’t get over the limited availability. Tiny bottles for multiple dollars. And I used a LOT. Those tiny bottles never stand a chance.

In an effort to not feel completely cheated every time I went shopping for curry, I tried to make my own using turmeric (Costco had a huge tub of this, but not curry. Thanks, Costco.) and other seasonings indicated in a recipe I found online. I always used too much turmeric and not enough of everything else, and would end up just making BRIGHT YELLOW DYE for all of the surfaces in our kitchen and all of the dishes I used. Look, I’m an artist! Accent colors! After I gave up on that I followed a paprika/barbecue flavor/pepper/salt pattern for a while, and that turned out OK.

Today, I actually went to an Indian food store! I was the only customer! And I didn’t puke all over myself with anxiety! I felt obligated to buy multiple things since it was one of those places where you feel guilty for using a card because you know they’d prefer you used cash so they wouldn’t have to pay the transaction fee. So I bought multiple powders: paprika, garam masala, curry (hurray!), coriander. Mmm. Big bags of the stuff, 400 grams or so, for a fraction of the cost of one of those tiny spice jars at the grocery store.

The chicken, for making manly-man muscles

I’ve tried a few strategies for cooking the chicken too.

First, I bought the individually wrapped boneless/skinless chicken breasts from Costco. The good ones. But not the ones that are super fresh and way more expensive. The good-enough frozen ones.

That was fine, but first I had to deal with thawing the packages, then cutting each one open and mucking about with the water/fat goo in the bag and then handling and cutting up the raw chicken breasts, then finally the cooking, which I did on the stove top, and half the time got distracted and ended up with some extra crispy chicken cubes. Too many steps. Also, I felt like I was just buttering every surface up with salmonella. And I’m extra conscious of how I handle the raw meat since my wife is vegetarian, and I get the stares.

All of that was fine. It’s for a good cause (not being dead from eating like crap, and having manly-man muscles from all the plentiful protein).

I’d simmer the mushrooms, onions, garlic, spices, and chicken all together. Then make the stock with all the veggies and mix it all together. It was a great time. It was also a pain, and took almost an hour to deal with just the chicken, before I even started the soup stock.

Eventually, mostly because of the hassle and salmonella buttering, I stopped getting the individually wrapped chicken breasts. I found another brand that was just a bag full of frozen breasts without wrapping. I experimented with cooking them straight from frozen, in the oven. This worked great, and was much more hands-off. Which is good because I’m really lazy (we already covered this).

Two techniques I’ve used with the oven: big glass casserole dishes using water, and cooking sheets using aluminum foil. Foil is the easiest to deal with. Less sloshing. In both cases I mixed the spices-of-the-week in a cup of olive oil and coated the chicken with it. This leads to inconsistent coverage with the glass dish approach (because water + oil), but a better broth, and good coverage with the cooking sheets approach, but less broth (but you can dump the runoff of oil/spices directly into the soup when the chicken is ready).

I’m not a health nut

I’m just lazy.