(no subject)

Long ago I was a huge Depeche Mode fan. Enough of a fan to go see them at the Forum in LA -- a terrible concert venue, especially for a band that's really not so great in concert -- and enjoy it anyway.

Then I found a whole bunch of other music, and Depeche Mode stopped doing much new work, and they fell out of my rotation, and then into the bin of music I mostly avoided, or was embarrassed about having been a fan of. They pretty much stayed in that bin for most of the last 25 years, even when I was listening to other 80s emo music.

And then Johnny Cash covered Personal Jesus.

There's pretty much no better way to give emo some gravitas than that. Some time has also winnowed out the chaff, as it does for anything really. The illusion of things improving with age -- antiques, art, architecture, maybe even wine -- is just us discarding or using up the worse examples and preserving the better ones. It gets easier and easier to appreciate what's left.

And so I'm back to a bit of pride, when it came up in a random mix, to be able to recognize Strangelove at 0:01 when the first actual note is not until 0:08.

broccoli and cheddar soup

One of the first things I got from Baldor, back in April, was a 6 pound 1/8-wheel of the most delightful cheddar cheese. So of course I had to come up with recipes to use it.

Meanwhile, I'd been missing the broccoli and cheddar soup that I used to be able to eat at Au Bon Pain. So I looked up a recipe which wasn't really what I wanted, and another that was wrong in a different direction, and after three or four of these decided to just write my own.

Wash and finely chop a mess of broccoli, see how much it is, and increase this recipe accordingly. Don't forget to increase the size of the saucepan as well. Usually I wind up making 2 or 3 batches.

In a 2 quart saucepan, saute 1 cup diced onion (1 medium onion, probably) in 2T butter for 2 minutes or until it is clear. Set aside, letting most of the butter stay in the pan.

Add another 2T of butter and 1-2T chopped garlic. Bring up to temp and add 1/4 cup flour in 2-3 parts, stirring until it makes a paste. Cook the paste for another 2 minutes, which will seem like an impossibly long time and probably result in a thick ball of material. Salt and pepper liberally at this point, 1 tsp of each is not too much.

Slowly add in 2 cups of herbed turkey broth and 1 cup of milk, 1 oz at a time at first, bringing up to temperature between each pour. Really it is OK to use any proportion of any poultry broth and any dairy here as long as the total amount is 3 cups, but I like to have at least one of these ingredients be more hearty than plain chicken broth or plain milk. Be careful that the roux doesn't stick to the bottom of your saucepan or you'll wind up with thin soup.

Add the onions, 2 cups of finely chopped broccoli (about 5 oz by weight) and 1 cup of coarsely grated carrot (about 3 oz by weight). Cover and simmer for 25 minutes. Add 1 cup of chopped or grated sharp cheddar cheese (or manchego or fontinella or really any mix of sharp-ish hard white cheeses), stir briefly, and serve. Makes 5 cups of soup.