aminal.

My cousin Jewy (short for Juliana) made this drawing for me b/c I wasn't at dinner the other night in Atlanta. It's Animal, or Aminal, but you knew that. It's an appropriate reference for her, her demeanor is generally slightly less restrained than Animal's.

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I said I wouldn't be making anything noteworthy over the next couple of days, and that's true, and because that's true I'm making something noteworthy tonight: soto ayam. I'm still trying to find stimulating ways to inject more turmeric into my life, and it's hard to imagine one better suited for me than this.

As much of an Indonesian soup as this is, it's also been completely adopted by the Surinamese kitchen, though their version leaves out several critical things, among them the turmeric. So I'm doing kind of a hybrid of a hybrid. Recipe eventually.

UPDATE: It's a very unusual soup. You make a chicken broth that smells totally kick-ass (yes I said that, it's 1987) via kaffir lime leaves and turmeric and chicken (I added 400gr carrots and an onion), and when it's finished you make a strangely ground-spice-centric (cumin, coriander, black pepper) spice paste (+ ginger, garlic, galangal, turmeric) which you fry and then add to the soup and cook for 10 more minutes to blend flavors.

So you're putting this potentially grainy paste into a cooked soup...I can't think of another soup recipe that does that. By the end, it tastes pretty great, but the texture is a bit....yeah, unexpected. It's a bit like mulligatawny soup, which I've never made, I wonder if the prep is similar. I think I like it. We'll see how it is tomorrow. It sure is yellow.

FURTHER UPDATE: It just needed some time to sit, it's great now.

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