The soup thing happened 13 or 14 years ago and I didn't start out intending to put all of those things together. Originally, I intended to make fishcakes, because I was listening to that song where they keep saying fishcakes. (I always cooked things based on those kinds of whims and usually had similar results.) The fishcakes quickly became fish soup, which didn't taste quite right to me. So I added coconut milk because I love coconut and I had always wanted to make something with coconut milk. That didn't do much for the flavor, so I added red wine - I had just seen some lady on tv add red wine to some kind of stew and the way she stuck her head over the pot and inhaled seemed very cookish to me. My mom is an AA kind of alcoholic and she never cooked with wine, so I thought cooking with wine was very sophisticated and exotic. I added some other things, but I suppose those ingredients weren't too outlandish because I don't remember what they were. The final ingredient, when everything else failed to produce anything that smelled good enough to make me want to hold my nose over the pot and savor the aroma in a cookish kind of way, was cream of tartar.
Just for the record, I pretty much stopped drinking and everything else after my 19th birthday when, possibly as a result of drinking and everything else, a cat bit me and I spent 3 days in the hospital with cat scratch fever. I was not stoned when I cooked the fish soup, although this sounds like something a stoned person would do. I'm not lying about the drinking/drugs thing. As soon as I finished school and had spare time in the evenings (about 3 years ago), I picked up my more socially acceptable habits. Now I smoke tobacco and drink tequila so that I fit in with everyone else.
