Carrot-ginger soup

When we moved into 118 a couple weeks ago, the gruesome grime of previous tenants fervently faced us. In the spring, my grandparents remarked, "Well, it'll be great after you give it a good hosing-down." I discovered spoiled foods and strange foods, some of which the previous tenants inherited a year earlier from their predecessors. Some interesting finds:

1. Two bottles of colored syrup: one of grenadine and one of a disgusting blue synthetic fruit.
2. A two-pound block of jaggery, falling out of its wrapping and oozing sticky brownish sap into the surrounding Safeway shopping bag. I was not sure whether it had fermented or if it was supposed to smell that way.
3. Unidentifiable beige substances of various types in jam jars. Some seemed to be coconut oil, others sourdough starters.
   
4. A raw egg that the tenants had left in white vinegar the week previous and entirely forgotten about.

As you may know, I have an obsession with salvaging orphaned food, so decided to make a soup with fruits and vegetables that were "on the edge." The soup base consisted of:

• a bag of carrots that had probably seen better days (some were a little dry, so I cut off the parts that would bend without breaking),
• a wrinkly red bell pepper,
• an entire head of shrivelly garlic,
• a whole jar of chipotle mustard,
• an inch-long piece of ginger,
• 80% of an onion,
• an apple with a bruise on one side,
• some TVP (textured vegetable protein), and
• about 1/3 of a cucumber.

I simmered it all until the veggies could be easily pierced by a fork (~1 hr) and afterward liquefied the solids with some broth.

It wasn't bad. It was thick and strong, and strongly spiced from the gourmet mustard, ginger and garlic. Terribly nutritious, too, of course.

Blended soups are my hamburger and hot dog. You take all the odd bits from your pantry, cook them well and blend them so that no one really knows exactly what went in. Soups are easy and forgiving. The next step was getting others to nosh. It would take a long time to eat 14 carrots' worth of soup alone.

Moral of the story:
One should not introduce a potpourri soup with, "You know, I made this soup with all the food in our refrigerator that didn't really look like food anymore," even if that is true. When a friend usually staunchly opposed to carrots came over for dinner, I introduced the concoction as "Carrot-ginger soup" (these are the predominant flavors) and offered her half a shot to try. "There are very few ways that I will eat carrots," she said, "but I have discovered a new one." I was tickled.