How To Make Homemade Soup From A Recipe Off The Internet!

Gals! The other day my friend (ALSO a very talented chef) sent me a picture of some red curry soup that she was just RAVING about for days – and let me tell you, this picture looked as if it were made by Bill Bon Apetit* himself! I just had to try it. The recipe is from Tasty.Co and by the URL name alone, I could tell that this meal was going to be GOOD. I took a look at the ingredients list and realized I only had salt and some old garlic cloves. To test the garlic for freshness, I gave the cloves a lil’ squeeze – you can pick your favorite method for testing for freshness. I chose this garlic freshness test method that has no scientific backing, logic or legend behind it because my chef instincts told me to. “A lil squeeze’ll do ya!” as I now always say! I wrote down the remaining list of ingredients that I’d need – and boy howdy the list was LONG. Here’s what you’ll need:

• 2 tablespoons refined coconut oil (I could only find a giant jar of this stuff and imagined the fate of the remaining 26 tablespoons rotting in said jar in my cupboard for years to come)
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon ginger, minced (mincing ginger is a real bitch so I buy bottled ginge and yes, the remainder will sit rotting in my fridge for at least a decade)
• 2 ½ tablespoons red curry paste
• 15 oz coconut milk, 1 can
• 3 cups vegetable broth
• 1 tablespoon agave (again, only found a massive bottle of agave – I’ll put it next to the coconut oil jar in the cupboard where they can grow old together)
• 8 oz rice noodle
• 7 oz tofu, cubed
• 2 cups broccoli floret
• 1 red bell pepper, thinly sliced
• 1 tablespoon lime juice
• salt, to taste
• fresh cilantro, to serve

Starving and hoping that this recipe was a “quick cook,” I grabbed 4 surgical masks and hopped into my car and sped off toward the store. I parked and went live on Facebook as I slapped on my 4 masks to let friends, family, neighbors, former classmates, and hundreds of people I met once in 2005 know that I was about to enter a public indoor setting and that I was quadruple masking. Pro-tip: never mask and enter a public setting without posting about it publicly unless you’re not interested in being canonized into sainthood.

As I entered the produce section, it appeared as if The Produce Rapture had happened.

I panicked. Did I come all the way to this godforsaken store – starving – just to go home empty-handed!? I glanced to my right and was immediately relieved when I saw shelves and shelves of red and pink trash. Gal-pals let me tell you, what this store lacked in produce, they MORE than made up for in Valentine’s Day candy! Gals you may have not been able to buy bananas, potatoes, onions, apples, lemons, or any other life-giving food but by God, on January 4th, 2022 you could sow the seeds of abundance and type II diabetes with enough candy hearts and Red #40 dyed M&M’s to choke even the largest of sperm whales in the seasonal section of this Target grocery store. I made a mental note for a backup plan – if I couldn’t find the ingredients for my soup, I’d just go home with a red bag of Valentine’s Day-themed Reeses pieces and throw them down my gullet hole till the hunger pains subsided.

But you know what, ladies? When the Lord closes a door, He opens a window, and today that window was open to a plethora of bottled minced ginger, a plastic bottle in the shape of a lime filled with *real* lime juice, and one Left Behind red pepper and bag of broccoli. As they say, “one woman’s unbaptized vegetables is another woman’s treasure.”

Luckily, I had no issues finding the rest of the ingredients so I grabbed what I needed and sped home.

As soon as I got home, I unpacked everything and got to work. Here’s how I did it:

1. Take out the tofu. I got a 14 oz piece even though the recipe called for half so I cut it in half and was about to throw the rest in the trash but my chef’s instincts told me to put the rest in a baggie in the fridge to eventually rot. Spoiler: my instincts were right – I would end up needing this about 5 minutes later.
2. If you’re like me, then you’ve never touched or cooked a piece of tofu in your life. I questioned the tofu to my friend and she assured me that “tofu is great because it takes on the flavor of whatever you’re cooking! Just press it between 2 plates if you don’t have a tofu press to get rid of excess water.” What is a tofu press? Who has a tofu press? Married people needing items to add to their registry?! I didn’t have a tofu press but I DID have 2 small Ikea plates that I took as a parting gift to myself from the office kitchen on my last day of work at a former job from 10 years ago.
3. Grab your wedding gift tofu press from your first marraige or grab 2 small plates, depending on how your divorce worked out, and get to pressin’! As previously mentioned, I went the plate route.
4. Realize you’ve pressed the tofu beyond all possibility of 1-inch-cut cubes but congratulate yourself on the fact that it’s the driest, hardest-pressed tofu you’ve personally seen. Take the win and then throw it in the trash.

5. Grab the other hunk of tofu and repeat the process again but just give it a lil’ tap this time. You saw what happened the first time, best to have soggy cubes than a dry blob, amiright ladies?!

6. If you’re me, then you’ll listen to my friend who said to cook the tofu separately in an air fryer. Yes, gals, ashamedly I have an air fryer, not to cut corners but because I thought it would be a healthy convenient way to replace my microwave. Gals, I thought wrong. An air fryer works well if you don’t hate handwashing dishes and quite frankly, any woman-on-the-go knows that any “hand-washing-only” dish item will sit in the sink for weeks unwashed, becoming a place for fruit flies to gather, breed and colonize. Pro-tip: don’t get an air fryer unless you enjoy handwashing dishes, in which case you might be a serial killer.

7. Cut up the new tofu, throw some olive oil on it (I used a tablespoon because that was the spoon closest to me), and look up how to cook tofu in an air fryer. The recipe I found said to air fry it for 10 minutes but you can use any tofu air fryer Internet recipe you want because this is America.

8. Heat up the refined coconut oil in a big pot and add the minced garlic. The recipe says to add the garlic and ginger until “fragrant” but I started getting hit by hot flying little oil bombs before the fragrance arrived and ladies always remember, safety before fragrance!

9. Realize you’re in the line of fire and now going to battle with this soup. Reach to turn the stove off while getting hit in the neck, face and hands by tiny hot oil rockets. Move the hot pot off that hot range for god’s sake.

10. Continue to get hit with boiling oil droplets. Pro-tip: move completely out of the kitchen until the oil stops popping or the smoke subsides – whichever comes first. Time-saving tip: apply Burn Jel™️ to your fresh wounds while you’re waiting.

11. Check on the tofu and wonder what air-fried tofu is supposed to look like. Trust your chef instincts that it probably needs at least 10 more minutes to fry to get all that excess water out.

12. Follow the rest of the recipe to get that broth a boilin! Get to the part where it says “add salt, to taste.” What the fuck does “to taste” mean? Give me a unit of measurement you smug, coy fuck! Measure out 1 teaspoon of salt, let your hair down and let go and let God!

13. Come back down to earth from your Under The Tuscan Sun moment you just had with the salt. Fuck! You forgot the tofu. Stop the air fryer and pull out and shake the basket – if it sounds like you’re shaking a box of rocks, the tofu is done “to taste” which is my way of saying “just shy of too burnt.” See? “To taste” is just a term likely invented by Midwesterners who “can’t say for sure” a unit of measurement for fear of offending others with an exact instruction.

14. You’re almost done! Just add tofu and noodles to the soup.

15. Watch the soup turn into a thick mass of pale pink spaghetti, without even a whisper of broth to be found. Start to think that this isn’t how your friend’s soup looked at all. Start to realize this is not soup. Look down at the mass that you’ll be eating exclusively for lunch and dinner and likely also breakfast for several days, if not weeks.

16. Slop it all into one of the Ikea bowls that you gave yourself as a parting gift while whispering to yourself “good job,” from your office kitchen on your last day of work 10 years ago**.

17. Take a glance back at your friend’s soup photo for reference.

18. Look at the soup you made from the exact same recipe.

19. Work up the gumption to take a bite and remember that Stirling Mackie, a reviewer on the link for the recipe stated simply 3 years ago, “THIS IS SO GOOD I LITERALLY COULD NOT STOP EATING IT.” Prepare yourself mentally for a potentially weeks-long trip to Flavor Town, population You!

20. Add the *real* lime juice “to taste.” I personally went HAM on the lime juice with the fervor of a woman begging for an actual unit of measurement.

21. The recipe also calls for cilantro “to serve” but if you thought any cilantro was Left Behind at the Midway Target you thought wrong, friend.

22. Grab a spoon and realize that this meal needs at least a spork.

23. Take a bite of the meal you made that was initially supposed to be soup. Realize that the “soup” tastes like noodles and broccoli. Desperately search for a piece of tofu. Tofu “takes on the flavor of whatever you’re cooking,” remember? Maybe it took ALL the flavor, that must be it! Gleefully bite into a piece of tofu so hard it could chip a tooth – ain’t no flavor breathing through that air fried seal. Throw some more lime juice and salt “to taste” at the “soup” and accept that your meal tastes is more akin to a [very warm] Corona than soup.

24. Wonder what my friend and Sterling Maki were raving about and if they might be liars. Surely our soups tasted the same despite mine turning out to be horrifyingly pink noodles, a few soggy vegetables and some tofu stones.

25. Eat this mess for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the remainder of the calendar month while simultaneously going through the stages of grief for the soup that could have been.

26. Reach the acceptance stage to accept the loss of 2 hours of time, and the burn scars that will always be a reminder of the soup that never came to be, and what remained was not good. And that Stirling Mackie is not a real name.

*Fun fact, Bon Apetit magazine was founded by a guy named Bill Bon Apetit!

**Mike McAvoy if you’re reading this, feel free to Venmo request me for $2.99 for the dishes.