A week of soups, rain, sadness

I am sinking into a depression of soups.  I am writing in bed.  Me, who denies couches, who time and time again has asserted that he only needs wooden chairs, who has no use for reclining, is prone in bed, writing about soup, finding little in life but soup to be cheerful about.  It's been one of those rainy, cold fall days.  I brought an umbrella to school today, but I left it in my car.  Who needs an umbrella when there is no soup around?  Normally, on Thursdays, I spend a couple hours in an Amherst coffee shop, but today I drove home between the class I take and the class I teach to eat another bowl of chili.


You can't really see anything in this picture, and I knew that would happen, and normally I would have selected another bowl, one that would look more full, be more full, so that the soup would photograph well, so that you, the reader, could see the glory of the soup and its chunks, but today I did not care.  I didn't vote either.  I watched youtube in bed and attempted to eat soup in bed, but as soon as I put my body down on the bed, the divot my body created toppled the soup onto my sheets.  That, too, I knew would happen.  I am not bothering these days to take the precautions I know I should.  Next soup:


Another bowl of chili, but this one without meat, a kind of pseudo chili because I added some dark roux to it, dark roux made with beef fat, flour and paprika.  And a broth of beef stock (oxtail) and tomato sauce frozen from the abundance of tomatoes I turned into sauce when my garden was banging them out faster than Mexican sweat laborers bang out crappy chessboards.  Next soup:


This is the butternut, carrot, and potato soup that I spilled on my bed on election night.  When I made this soup, well, I went to so much trouble to get an ultra smooth texture.  I passed everything through the chinois, the ultra fine French sieve, and it was ooh-la-la velvety perfection to which I added some half 'n half.  Then I set the soup to what I thought was a simmer and went back to bed to watch youtube.  Ten minutes later, boiling soup: the boil caused the milk solids to turn into little curdles, ruining the fine texture.  Now it had little cheese balls in it, another thing I knew would happen but which I took no precaution against.  Blah.  Tomorrow is split pea.  I'm not kidding.