Im way to obsessed with this fic so i had to make a cover for it. This is from “the oldest recipe for parsnip soup” by @eyra which if you havent read then i think your just depriving yourself of joy at this point, are you ok? The amount of times this fic made me want to cook and gave me comfort even with some of the darker moments.
As usual , all the links to my yt and patreon are on my caard if you want to support me and my delusional work more ->
I've added subtitles to this video of @/cabrafotuda (Instagram, TikTok) and his lovely grandma cooking bollitori, a traditional dish from the Alacant area in the south of the Valencian Country.
This dish is typically eaten during the Holy Week, especially on Holy Thursday, since it's a humble food with no meat.
Mum only prepared this Pork Ribs Soup to go with the steamed rice for dinner. In the bowl are two cuts of pork, fish balls, fish maw (鱼鳔/花胶), carrots and lettuces with the soup flavoured by dried scallops. Fish maw is dried swim bladders of large fishes like croaker or sturgeon. In Asian cuisine, it is considered to be one of the top four delicacies of the sea (abalone, sea cucumber, shark fin and fish maw).
I started volunteering at this farm share program a couple years ago, where I help pass out boxes of veggies in exchange for some veggies for myself, which is great for a broke grad student but it led to me creating truly the most visually ABHORRENT meal I have ever made in my life.
I got some purple carrots, right? And I was excited because they're (A) free carrots and (B) they're purple, which is not something you see often. They taste just like regular carrots, so after devouring one to test the flavor, I decided that I'd use the rest in an upcoming batch of chicken soup.
MISTAKE. THAT WAS A MISTAKE.
You see. The thing about purple carrots is that their purpleness does not stay in the carrot when you leave it in a crockpot for like, six hours. The purpleness goes into the soup. It goes into the soup, where it turns the chicken purple. And the onions purple. And the celery, and the garlic, and the noodles, and any other thing you could possibly have put in that soup, varying shades of Very Purple.
I made a GIGANTIC pot of this soup that turned out toxic purple-brown, with individual components stained various ludicrous colors of purple (the noodles were a bafflingly nice shade of lilac) and it was the most dubious thing I've ever eaten. I took this soup to work. My coworkers were so confused and repulsed and I had explain that no, this is actually just soup, just regular chicken soup, but accidentally tie-dyed by the addition of two (2) purple carrots.
And you wanna know the real kicker as I explained all this? The carrots? The formerly purple carrots?