Soup blog

This weekend I am visiting Marta and Sergiu in Lille, in the short French Easter break.
We spent today visiting the city, through the rain, so that our visit degenerated into shopping at one point: sweets, iPod (yeeey, I got a Shuffle), music, films...

One of the planned things for this weekend was to cook a 'ciorbă rădăuţeană' (Rădăuţi soup) with Sergiu and maybe, Marta, but with some restrictions: use french ingredients, don't use meat, use fish instead (not that bad though) so we came up with a new one (we ALL contributed to it), which I share with you – remember that it's derivated from the great "ciorbă rădăuţeană":

XWiki Geek Soup Lilloise

Ingredients (for 4 portions):
- 2 medium carrots
- 1 medium to large parsnip
- 1 medium celery root
- 1 medium onion
- 1 kg salmon
- 2 eggs
- 0.25 l sour cream
- vinegar
- salt, chervil, dill, garlic
- 3 hungry geeks

Preparation:

Husk the carrots, parsnip, celery and onion, cut them in large pieces, and boil them in a pot in approx 2.5 litres of water. DO NOT put salt at this point ("Patientia est mater sapientia"). When the veggies are half boiled, add the skinless salmon cut in large pieces (you should have the 1 kg in 3-4 pieces).
When all these are boiled, remove from heat, take the salmon out, remove the bones and cut it into smaller pieces (about the size of a nut). In the mean time, blend (or mash through any other method) the veggies in the hot water. You can choose the quantity of veggies to use for this operation dependent of the final aimed consistency of the soup. Put the minced salmon back in the pot and place it back over low heat.
Add salt as you consider suited. Add between 4 and 8 table spoons of vinegar, depending on the desired sourness and stir them well into the soup. You can also add some garlic too, preferably pieces (3) but if you don't have, powder is good as well, or you can leave it to the choice of the user.
Personal advice for the brave adventurers who will attempt to reproduce the Easter Lille miracle: TASTE the soup all through this spicing process, don't just follow my instructions, use your own better judgement and taste (remember Ratatouille? Anyone can cook!)
Stop heat and let it cool for the time you execute the next and final step: whisk eggs with a little bit of salt together with the cream and then stir it into the soup. Scatter chervil and / or dill on top of it, and let it cool to eatable temperature.

Your masterpiece is now done, bon appétit!

This recipe is available under Creative Commons.

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On my way...

Yeey, I sent it!


The almost-final version of the BSc paper is now on its way to being reviewed, after a couple of days in hell, trying to write my best...
I never thought it would be that hard to write things (not necessarily a scientific paper – though it's reaaaaly hard to name my creation a 'scientific' paper): I always thought that writing about things you produced should be easy; explaining how you created an application, an idea, a formula or anything must be a piece of cake, after all, you KNOW what you're talking about, don't you? Well, it's NOT! (and now my BSc supervisor would say: "I told you!" :) )


Because you just know too much on the matter, you 'miss' stuff: everything seems obvious or natural to assume, to you, everything's connected, class diagrams are clear as daylight, you have no clue about what references to quote because you 'just know' the stuff and, most of all, the purpose of the paper is like "d-ooh!"... Well, I'm pretty sure I screwed it in all matters and, what's worse, I don't know what to do about it! I guess that if I asked my mother to read it and tell me what she understood of it, I would get a clearer picture... But, until my mother learns English, I can only rely on my own (fuzzy, these days) judgement and on my supervisor's constructive critique...