My soups are developing a bit of a cult following lately, which came as quite the surprise to me, let me just tell you. One of my most popular soups is tomato blue cheese, which (for various reasons) I make only a few times a year, when the stars are all in alignment. It is highly-anticipated and there is much celebration when I finally roll it. But despite all that, it’s startlingly easy to make — so much so that I always feel like I’m cheating. As with all of my soups, I generally make this about two gallons at a time; I’ll do my best to scale it down for home use, but several bits may be left as an exercise for the reader.
It begins, as do so many soups, with onions and garlic. You’re looking for a fine chop on the onion and a mince on the garlic — don’t purée it, fod pity’s sake. A good-sized home batch probably uses about one medium-sized yellow onion (spanish or vidalia) and half a bulb of garlic. Once they’re chopped, melt some butter in the pot you intend to use (it’s a one-pot soup, so this will look a bit foolish at first, with just the onions and garlic), and put the vegetables in to soften. Next you add the tomatoes — the best thing about tomato soups is that canned tomatoes are actually excellent for the purpose, so there’s no need to peel the goddamn things. What you’ll want here is about six cups of "peeled ground" tomatoes; other tomato products can be used if you want your soup chunkier or thinner (I don’t advise going thinner myself, but it will probably work going all the way down to tomato juice if that’s your thing. But your mileage may vary and all that). Once that’s added, let it heat over medium flame until it’s just beginning to steam (don’t boil it), and then add one quart of heavy cream. Pour the cream in slowly and whisk until it’s combined and it shouldn’t break; what to do if it does is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s something I’ll address shortly.
Once your soup is creamed you’re going to want to heat it slowly back up, stirring frequently. Again, make sure it doesn’t boil. As it heats, add salt, pepper, oregano, thyme, and tabasco to taste — the tabasco is mainly for sympathetic flavour with the cream and cheese, and isn’t actually for making the soup spicy; if you’ve seasoned it properly, it shouldn’t have any heat to it at all. Since probably nobody knows what I’m talking about here, let’s just call it a teaspoon of tabasco and get on with it, yes? Yes. Good. Once the soup is hot again, you’ll add the cheese. Cheesey cheese. Yum. You’ll want a crumbled blue cheese of moderate quality for this; don’t get anything foolishly expensive and then melt it in the damn soup, but don’t get the blue-cap Easy Cheese and expect it to be awesome. Use your best judgment here. Regardless, add about a cup and a half of crumbles, stir until they’re melted in (you won’t see white bits floating in it anymore), and taste it. If it doesn’t have enough blue cheese "tang" to it, add a bit more. Once you’re happy with the cheesiness, hey, you’re done! It’s best to let this soup age for a half-hour or so on very low heat before eating it, but, hell, if you don’t want to wait it’ll be fine right out of the pot.
Variations:
The only major variation on this soup I tend to make involves adding mushrooms. For this much soup you’ll want about two quarts of raw, sliced mushrooms (whites or criminis should both work fine; if you want something more outré, hey, it’s your soup) added in with the onions and garlic at the beginning. And of course instead of just softening the vegetables you’ll want to let them sizzle until the mushrooms have stopped releasing liquid.
April 2nd, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Recipes |
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Now I feel like a rapper. Excellent.
I’m using this category to discuss — nay, rap about — my pending game design project. Sure, maybe I’ll never get the damn thing developed and published, but game design is my passion. It’s what I do, and I’m doing it whether or not it’ll ever see the light of day. But game design isn’t something that can be kept to oneself — games, like all art, are to be shared. So if I can’t turn my design into a living, breathing game, I can at least turn it into a series of dull-ass blog posts. And who knows, maybe an anonymous internet billionaire will see this blog, become enthralled with it, and offer to finance the development before heading to his top-secret subterranean crime-fighting lair. Maybe I can even get his autograph!
Oh, note that these are blog posts, and will be written conversationally and probably with both jokes and swear words. I’m under no misconception that this is an actual proper design document, and you shouldn’t be either. Unless you’ll pay me, in which case feel free.
The game I’m working on is a dungeon-crawl-type action game; the closest analogue I’m thinking of is The Legend of Zelda. I’m presently envisioning an isometric style; this is largely because I’m trying to be bounded and realistic and assuming that I shouldn’t go for full 3D in my first-ever effort, especially if I’m hoping to find a handful of interested parties and go forward with this. Ideally, I’m looking for the game to play primarily in two dimensions (XY), but with limited interactivity in the third dimension (Z), such as ledges and staircases and pits and such. There is an overworld, which is a bounded section of a larger world (room for expansion / sequels); the plan at present is to treat the overworld as a "level select" screen rather than having free roaming, thereby reducing backtracking, since the game is structured as a series of "missions" involving going to a remote location, performing a task, and returning to base.
The base of operations for the players is located in a typical video game hub city, complete with shops and NPCs to talk to and whatnot. The players will spend some time in town gathering supplies and information, and then locate "questgiver" NPCs with major quests for them. Once they receive a major quest for a particular dungeon, other NPCs may have minor quests for that dungeon that offer extra rewards. To avoid the problem of having to talk to every NPC over and over again hunting for quests, we’ll implement a system like the "question marks" in World of Warcraft to indicate which NPCs have a quest you can pick up, and which will have a quest to give you once you’ve found the requisite dungeon. Once the players are done in town, they head out to the map, choose the dungeon to head to, and get started spelunking.
Play in the dungeon primarily involves making it past obstacles, traps, and monsters to acheive the goal set out in the quest. On the way there may be placed treasures to find in hard-to-reach places, in addition to treasure drops from mobs and (of course) the rewards for completing quests. I’m thinking of a mob loot system similar to that used in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, where there will be a pool of "common drops" (simple things like health restores or small amounts of money) that can drop from any mob and drop rather frequently, along with more interesting (and less common) drops that are per-mob. It is of course important that the game furnishes sufficient fixed loot and quest rewards that it can be completed without necessitating the "farming" of mobs for certain items, but beyond that, hey, treasure is fun.
That’s the broad overview; I have a lot more designed and ready to talk about, but I don’t want to blow my whole load on one epic 30,000-word blog post. Please, if you’re interested in reading more about this, let me know in the comments. And if you have any questions aboud anything, by all means ask. I’d love to talk about it.
Next time, assuming I don’t get any particular requests that need to be addressed first, I plan to talk a bit about the mechanics and controls. Stay tuned!
April 2nd, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
My secret project |
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