Searching for Tao, 7573 Kilometres from Home

January 20, 2020 19:08 +0000 | Anna Climate Change Environment Grandma Lidia Politics 0

My father once said to me: "Life has a way of getting away from you. One day you blink, and 30 years have passed." I think that I'm finally starting to understand what he meant. 2019 doesn't really feel like a year I lived through so much as a year that was done to me. People I thought integral to my life disappeared suddenly, and a whole new human was added to my immediate family, all this while the world is literally on fire. Everything is changing and for my part, it feels like my role is more that of a passenger than driver.

Personal

2019 was a bumpy year for me personally.

Anna & me on Siros

Anna

My daughter was born in the early days of the year. She's now already a full-year old and what they say really is true: they grow up so fast. When we met, she was roughly the size of a small pumpkin, now she's a walking, talking (well, babbling), screaming, grabby mobile monster.

Parenthood is a crazy process: you're constantly monitoring a tiny creature to make sure that she doesn't kill herself reaching for a pen or eating plastic. I mean, we watched her lick a bar of soap, make a face, then lick it again as if she hadn't learnt her lesson the first time. This process of constant vigilance is... exhausting. There's really no other word for it. It's a good thing she's cute.

There's also not a lot of sleep in my day-to-day anymore.

Grandma Lidia

Grandma

Around when Anna reached the 4-month mark, she lost her great grandmother -- my last remaining grandparent. To be honest, I'm still pretty broken up about it -- still processing. Unlike my other grandparents, I wasn't prepared to lose Grandma Lidia and it still hurts to think about. I miss her every day, and the thought of returning home to visit my family feels eerily wrong without her there.

Professional

I really feel like my Free Software career has taken a big hit this past year. Whereas in 2018 I was releasing Aletheia and speaking at PyCon about it while handing-off Paperless to the broader community, 2019 has seen very little Free stuff from me. There were a couple bits worth mentioning though:

A jumping pizza!

Pizzaplace

It's a very simple server that lets you spin up branch deploys automatically by plugging into GitLab's WebHooks system and linking that to a docker-compose. It made development of some of our stuff at Workfinder a lot simpler, and I'm hoping we can make more use of it in 2020.

Aletheia Server

I realised that Aletheia has a lot of dependencies to get going -- too many perhaps for most to make use of it in any reasonable architecture. So with that in mind, I decided to hack together a dockerised microservice that does the signing & verification for you. This way, you could theoretically deploy Aletheia to a project simply by adding it to your running services rather than trying to integrate a 3rd-party module and all of the dependencies that come with.

The Aletheia logo The project works, but as I built it using FastAPI, getting the tests to play nice is proving problematic for a Django nerd like me. I'm hoping to have the kinks worked out in early 2020.

Workfinder: Last Man Standing

Most of the code I wrote in 2019 was for my full-time employer, but the face of the dev team changed a lot over the year. I started out working in of the Cambridge office with 3 other developers, and one-by-one they all left the company. Now I'm the only one in this town, with most of the rest of the company based out of London. Thankfully, the CEO has promised that she's not going to make me commute to London on a daily basis (honestly that just wouldn't happen), but it does mean that I don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of on a regular basis and that sucks.

On the plus side though, before he left, Richard and I wrote what I think might be some of my Best Code Ever: a system that handles multiple data sources of varying trustworthiness and merges it into a single derived model that performs even with tens of millions of records in the system. Now it's just a matter of getting that code into the main product...

Travel

It turns out that babies seriously cramp your travel plans. For the most part, Christina and I have been Cambridge-bound this past year. I'm hoping that once Anna reaches the age where we can hand her a phone and say: "shut up and watch Peppa Pig", we'll be able to consider then 9-hour flight to Vancouver.

Siros

The one trip we made was to Athens & Siros (Σιρος). Anna was just young enough that she wasn't bothered (too much) by the flight (even though it was RyanAir), and she slept through the majority of the trip. We spent a few days in Athens, and then continued onto Siros where we rented a little house with a pretty remarkable view of both the island and the sea.

We took Anna for her very first swim in the Agean, ate a lot of delicious food, and I came face-to-face with my paralysing fear of crickets & grasshoppers. The trip was lovely... except for that last part.

In-laws In-residence

Not long after the trip to Greece, Christina's parents came out to Cambridge to live with us for 2 months. The plan was that they would help ease Christina's transition back into the workforce, help Anna get used to her day care, and help out around the house as we all get used to having a baby around. Now I'm not going to come out and say that living with my in-laws for 2 months was super-fun and friction-free, but I really appreciated the help. Having someone around to talk to for advice, or to help with putting the kid to sleep when you're at the end of your tether is invaluable to say the least.

Parents visit

Not long after the in-laws left, my parents came for a few weeks, though their stay was interrupted by their own (apparently abysmal: screw you Norwegian Cruiselines) detour through the European North. It's always nice when my parents visit and I get to show them the life I'm helping to build, though this time around my mom was having a really hard time. Still, I think they enjoyed their trip, and they're talking about coming back for a visit before (in their words) they're too old to make the trip.

Politics

I got to vote in two national elections this year, though in both cases first-past-the-post ensured that my vote didn't really mean anything.

Canada

The Liberals squeaked out a minority government, campaigning on the idea that they gave a shit about climate change and a history of actions that prove that they don't. I suppose I could be happy that at least Canada didn't elect outright climate deniers, but like everything else they do, the Liberals are even more infuriating: they play up their green rhetoric, but demonstrably aren't willing to do what's necessary to combat the climate crisis. To my mind, they're just as bad as the Conservatives, just more duplicitous.

UK

The UK had its 3rd election in 5 years in a desperate attempt to get a strong majority that would lend some stability to their position in managing Brexit with the rest of the EU. Thanks to first-past-the-post, even though the majority of the country voted against the Conservatives, we all got a crushing Conservative majority. Jeremy Corbyn, the first political leader that's inspired me in the UK, and only the fourth politician to inspire me in my lifetime, somehow is being blamed for the failings of his own party-unfaithful, that of the Lib-Dems, and of the Greens, whose platform was objectively less-green than Labour's. The country's fourth estate is in shambles, and we're now on-track for a disasterous brexit: upwards of 5-years helmed by a government & prime minister with a record of xenophobia, homophobia, flat-out racism, climate denial, and Trump ass-kissing.

So yeah. This is where I live.

World

On the world stage, 2019 was a year of hope and horrors. Every week, you'd read a story about how the world is literally on fire, but you'd also hear about how lab-grown or plant-based "meat" was getting a foothold in the market, that coal and oil were losing share to renewables, and a little girl was sailing across the Atlantic to lecture our do-nothing leaders.

Greta Thunburg

More than inspiration, Thunburg has been a voice for my (and future) generation's rage:

"The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you."

- Greta Thunburg, address to the UN Climate Action Summit

Personally, I'm impressed with the futility: the people she was speaking to demonstrably have no interest in fixing this mess they and their parents have created. Some of them are even straight-up climate deniers. She's 17. This is the limit of her power and she's shaming them into action. They won't act of course, but at least she's now part of the historical record: the voice of a generation enraged by how the boomers have fucked us all.

The #TeamTrees logo

#TeamTrees

It may seem small, but I'm still elated with the results. The #TeamTrees campaign started by a bunch of YouTubers accomplished its goal of funding the planting of 20,000,000 trees. With the vast majority of donations in the area between $1 and $10, people all over the planet scratched together what they could to show our leaders that we're willing to step up and do what we can to save the world. Every donation streamed onto the site in real-time, but my favourite was from a bunch of 8th-graders who crowdfunded $1,111 from 200 of their classmates -- all to save the world they're going to inherit from a generation that's done everything it can to use everything up before they die.

#AustraliaFires

It's not hyperbole anymore. The world is literally on fire. Australia, home to thousands of unique and fascinating species, has lost approximately one billion animals to the fires. The amount of CO₂ is being measured in the millions of tonnes, and this is just the beginning. When summer comes in the Northern Hemisphere, it's entirely likely that the forests in Canada, Europe, and Russia will see the same. If you think that any of this is going to change the minds of those with the power to fix it, think again. The Prime Minister of Australia is a climate denier. Australians elected a climate denier, even after decades of flooding was laying out the truth in front of them.

We are so. very. fucked.

XR

I did however draw some hope & inspiration from one group though: Extinction Rebellion. They're the next step I've been expecting for a while now. When diplomacy fails, the next step is violence. Now to be clear: to my knowledge, XR hasn't taken any violent action against any people, but their actions against the machine that's destroying the planet are most definitely violent. They obstruct traffic, shut down transit infrastructure, and effectively cripple economies. They're the living embodiment of Mario Savio's words:

“There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

-- Mario Savio

Those destroying the planet don't care about people, animals, or even breatheable air. They do however care a great deal about profits. XR is hitting them where it hurts: they're fucking with capitalism and this is just the beginning. As people get more desperate, I expect XR to play a bigger role.

Leaders that Get It

I've also been inspired by some of the leaders we're seeing gain traction like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. They're both the right people with the principled positions to guide the US through to doing the right thing by the climate and their people. My only concern is that of timing: AOC is too young to run for president, and the Democrats still have it in their head that a milquetoast "moderate" like Biden is their best bet at beating Trump. If Bernie doesn't win the Democratic primary, it's entirely likely that Trump will take the White House again, and if that happens, the US will be entirely lost to us with regard to its impact on the climate. We can't wait another four years for them to get their act together.

There's also The Green New Deal for Europe, which was released in 2019, and appears to have heavily influenced the European Green New Deal -- ramping up to be official EU policy. If the EU can get this right, they can dictate terms to the big polluters like India, China, and the US. They might actually save us all.

Maybe I'm still a little too hopeful.

Conclusion

So that's it for 2019. With the exception of Anna's birth, I don't feel particularly good about this year, but I have hope -- not you know, a lot, but some. Maybe 2020 will be the magical year that Trump is deposed, that all of Johnson's bluster about Brexit turns out to be smoke & mirrors for the softest of Brexits, that the EU finally starts to throw around its weight on the environmental file, that Canada's Liberals are forced to do the Right Thing through alliances with the NDP & Greens.

And maybe Anna will learn enough words to actually tell me why she's screaming at 0400h.

A guy can dream.

May 12, 2019 12:22 +0000 | Family Grandma Lidia

As I write this, it's been a week since she died, and I'm still not clear on what I want to say.

I loved my grandma, so very much. I want to write a beautiful eulogy for her because she deserves it, but I'm just so consumed with loss that I can't seem to find my usual composure for something like this.

Grandma Lidia was love -- in all the forms imaginable. She fed me when I was hungry (and often when I wasn't), she hugged me when I needed it, she even lectured me when I had it coming. She opened her home to me when I started school, and later when I was living alone, would send me home with giant pickle jars of chicken soup because she knew I wasn't eating right.

She brought the family together every Easter with a cacophony of food: salată boeuf, stuffat, turkey, sarmale, and crème brûlée.

Hristos a înviat!
Adevărat a înviat!

Sure, my grandfather sat at the head of the table, but everyone knew who was running the show. Big family gatherings were where she shined and we loved her for it.

My grandmother supported all of us with a deep sense of love and responsibility that's hard to put into words -- especially when I'm still grieving her loss.

It's a sign of the value of a person really: the scars they leave when they die. These wounds are deep, and the scars are part of all of us now. I know that one day I'll be alright with all of this, but right now it's just unbearable.

I'm sorry I couldn't do better Grandma. I'm just so sad you're gone.

May 05, 2019 11:15 +0000 | Family Grandma Lidia

I wasn't ready for this.

I suppose that statement sounds absurd on its face, but the truth is that every death of someone close to me has come with substantial advance warning as their bodies gradually failed them. My paternal grandmother even chose the date and hour of her end so precisely that I could literally put Grandma Dies into my calendar a week before it happened.

This was different. It was sudden, and jarring, and just thinking about it makes me terribly sad.

My grandmother died suddenly on Friday, at home, alone. I don't know what the circumstances were yet, but I'm holding out hope that she was as surprised by her own death as I was when I received the phone call, or as my mother must have been when she dropped by and found her body on the floor. I can't shake the image of her struggling to stay alive, alone in her home with no one to hear her calls for help. No one should have to die like that. No one should have to find a loved one after that.

But she died. Alone. My wonderful, warm, loving, nurturing, grandmother, who spent so much of her life investing herself in the people she loved, died on the floor of her living room.

She was the last of my grandparents, but she was also my favourite. Don't misunderstand, I loved all of them: The Wise Old Man, The Impossible Caretaker, and The Unyielding Activist, but Grandma Lidia was the one I wanted to hug and never let go, the one I called regularly just to check in and make sure she knew she was loved. The world isn't just emptier without her, it feels darker, even faded, and I don't know what I can do about it.

I'm just so terribly sad right now.

April 26, 2019 18:21 +0000 | Family Food Grandma Lidia Recipes 2

I've written about my grandmother's soup before, here and here, but those are both attempts to capture a special Romanian soup called "chorba". That soup is quite complicated and can be a hassle to throw together when all you want is something warm & nutritious to help fight off a coming cold so I wanted to share her typical chicken soup for my dear friend Noreen who's in need of such a thing right now.

Ingredients

Required

1 whole chicken Generally for this sort of thing, bigger is better, but as it forms the base of your soup, you want a proper oily one too. I tend to opt for a free-range one over a larger battery-cage type one as these tend to be a little less... I don't know, sterilised.
Some carrots I usually opt for a minimum of 3, but will happily add as many as 8. Honestly, there's no downside to adding more veggies as it only makes your soup tastier and healthier.
Some parsnips See the above rules for carrots
1 bunch of celery: Again, volume is good here, so don't be stingy as this stuff is pretty cheap and adds a lot of flavour.
1 large white onion
Lots of salt: Don't be stingy.
Pepper
A fist full of fresh parsley: You really can't overdo this, but generally I take a pack from Tesco and dump the whole thing in.

Optional

Garlic (chopped up and tossed in with the veggies)
Olive oil (in case your chicken doesn't have enough oil in it already)

Instructions

Over the years, I've adapted my grandmother's recipe to suit Christina's and my tastes. Where the two methods have diverged, I've noted them below, but honestly, you can mix and match and the results will still be yummy.

1. Stock

It's pretty simple: get a big pot and put your chicken in it. Then, fill that pot with enough water that it totally covers the chicken by about 3cm (~1" for the American savages that haven't yet figured out metric 😜). Put that pot on the stove and crank it up to medium heat.

A note about the heat at this stage: this step has two purposes: cooking the chicken (salmonella is a bitch) and creating your stock. If you crank the heat to maximum, you'll cook the chicken alright, but you won't have enough time to leach the goodness out of the skin and bones. If you're in a hurry, you can crank it up to 75% at most, but a tastier soup comes from a slow, even hours-long boil at a low heat.

Add some salt while it's cooking. How much? Lots. Take what you think a soup should have in it and triple it. I have one of those boxes of idodised salt in the cupboard and I open the mouth wide to pour about 5 turns of salt into the pot myself.

Cover it, and let it slowly come to a boil. Depending on how impatient you are, this can be about 30 minutes or 3 hours. If you've got the time, I highly recommend the patient route. Besides, you have other things to do while you wait.

Note that while it's cooking, some white fluffy goo might float to the surface (it varies by chicken). Just scoop it off with a slotted spoon every once in a while.

2. Vegetables

Now that the stock is doing its thing, lets get to the other tasty bits. But first, a note about divergence.

My grandmother's recipe calls for all of the ingredients above, but notably, she doesn't put the onion & celery in the soup. They're added for flavour, but removed before serving. Christina likes these bits though, so we chop them up with the rest of the veggies and leave everything in.

Given the above, if you're going Grandma's route, you'll wanna chop the onion in half and chop the celery stalks into halves as well. She also tends to cut the other veggies unusually large... that's your call I guess.

If you're going with my adaptation, then you'll want to cut all of the veggies down into bite-sized chunks (and the onion even smaller: diced). Dump them all into a big bowl or two and wait for the chicken to finish.

3. Chicken Out, Veggies In

You've just spent a bunch of time sucking the tastiness out of your chicken and into that salt water. You can tell we're ready because there should be little bubbles of oil floating on the surface of your water and the chicken skin should be showing signs of peeling back from the flesh.

A note about oil bubbles: This is the sign of some good broth: a good oily chicken tends to produce lots of yummy bubbles, so if you feel like your broth doesn't look sufficiently bubbly, even after an hour of cooking, feel free to add a tablespoon of olive oil at this stage.

Remove the whole chicken from the pot and put it aside. As it'll have a lot of water in it, I don't recommend just plopping into a cutting board, but rather I tend to favour putting it in a casserole dish to cool down. Be very careful as (a) the chicken is very hot, and (b) it's likely hiding pockets of boiling water. Use big long metal tongs or something. Be creative, but safe.

Once it's out and cooling down in the open air, take all of those veggies you chopped up and toss them in the water. Regardless of whether you opted for the veggies-all-in option or the flavour-only-subset, everything goes in right now.

Put the lid back on, reduce the heat, and let it simmer on low. The timing after this point isn't all that important. So long as your veggies simmer for at least 20 minutes, you'll be fine. If they simmer for an additional 4 hours, that's cool too.

Chicken Back In

Once your chicken has cooled down, you'll want to cut the meat off and into bite-sized pieces. Go through the whole bird and take as much as you can, making sure that you don't accidentally include any bones or inedibles. Put all of your edible bits right back into the soup.

Garnish

That's basically it. We've combined the two age-old food groups: salt and fat, with some vegetables & domesticated bird meat. It's yummy, but it can still be a little better.

Chop up your parsley as finely as you can and dump it all into the pot. Then, grind some black pepper into the pot for taste. I usually do about 12 turns of my grinder and then add more to individual bowls, but I love me some pepper.

Noodles!

I always forget this part, but it's critical: the noodles are cooked separately. Pick a noodle type (we tend to favour fusilli, but my grandmother prefers angel hair pasta.) toss it into a pot of boiling salted water and cook whatever you want for this sitting.

Put a handful of cooked pasta into each bowl and then ladle your soup from the big pot into each bowl. Do not put the noodles in the soup pot unless you intend to eat all of it today (unlikely, you cooked a whole bird). Generally you cook the noodles you need for each sitting

That's it! Enjoy your foodz, and let me know how it goes! If you like it, I'll let my grandmother know you appreciate it :-)

December 06, 2014 13:30 +0000 | Family Food Grandma Lidia Recipes 2

This is my second attempt at documenting my Grandmother's so-called "sour-soup" or "chorba" as is apparently the appropriate word for it. I've been trying to replicate it for years, but recently, she and I sat down and worked everything out (while i video recorded everything) and I've finally managed to reproduce this amazing dish. I present it now for you in the hopes that it will brighten your day too:

Note: my grandmother isn't big on measuring, so I'm afraid I don't have much to offer in the standardised quantities department. Instead, I'll be listing the ingredients in the very same way she provided them to me: in practical use cases.

Ingredients

Some meat.
- Turkey is good for this, but you can get away with chicken or even beef (big chunks, not ground). Ask yourself how much you want in your soup, and that's how much you'll need.
4 Parsnips
4 Carrots
1 Bunch of celery
1 White onion
1 Red pepper
Olive Oil
A handful or two of some kind of pasta or rice.
- I typically go for orzo or white rice, but you can also use angel hair pasta.
A handful of Lovage
A handful of parsley
Some sour cream
Salt
Pepper (fresh ground black pepper, none of that powdered stuff)
A big spoonful of vinegar (for the garnish step, below)

Directions

This is a two-part system, and it's probably best if you do things one at a time. Pros like my grandmother who have been doing this for 50 years can do things in parallel, but if this is your first or second time trying this out, pace yourself and do one pot at a time.

Preparation

In this two-part system we have vegetables we're going to eat, and vegetables we're using for flavour only, so we're going to break up our veggies into two groups:

A Warning

Throughout this whole process, it's important to note that the pot should always be covered, or you'll lose too much water and you'll end up with a more stew-like soup than you probably want.

Group 1: Flavour Only

In this group you have:

2 Parsnips
2 Carrots
2 or 3 stalks of celery
1 White onion

You chop these into big pieces, no less than 7cm long. For the onion, you just cut it in half. Leave these bits on the cutter board 'cause you'll need them soon.

Group 2: For Eating

In this group you have:

2 Parsnips
2 Carrots
2 stalks of celery (if you're into eating celery in your soup)
½ Red pepper
- I usually just throw out the other half, but you can use the whole thing if you really like red peppers.

These are all chopped into bit-sized chunks. Put the chopped bits into a great big bowl for now.

Cook That Meat

You need to quickly cook the meat to seal in the good stuff, and you also want to clean the ugly bits out of your soup before you actually start making broth so...

Put your big chunks of meat into a proper soup pot. You probably want something capable of about 6L or more of water. Don't worry about the size of the meat pieces yet, we'll make them mouth-friendly later.
Fill up said pot with water until the water just covers the meat.
Add some salt and pepper.
- Don't be stingy with the salt. If you skimp out on salt early, you'll have very exciting-looking water masquerading as soup.
Cover the pot and crank the heat up to 10, stirring occasionally so the meat doesn't cook all on one side. When the water boils, drop the heat down to 5. If any gunk floats to the surface (this is excess fat and other undesirable bits) scoop it off with a strainer or slotted spoon.

Completing the Stock

Now that you've got the beginnings of your stock, add your "flavour only" vegetables. Let them hang out in the water there with the meat for a bit. Drop the heat down to 3 or 4 and let things slow-boil.

Vegetables for Eating

Now with the stock pot simmering on the side, we're going to work on the veggies we intend to eat.

Dump all of your for-eating veggies into a deep pan or pot. Make sure that there's room to stir stuff around because you're going to be doing a lot of that.
Add some olive oil. How much? Enough to sauté the veggies. Typically I start out with a little bit and add until I feel that all of the veggies are getting enough love.
Run the heat up to 5 or 6 and stir frequently to make sure that all of your veggies get cooked properly.

Bite-Sized Meat

Going back to your stock pot, it should have been simmering there for a good 10-20 minutes. It's time to remove everything that doesn't belong.

Open the pot and remove all of the vegetables. You might want to keep them around to eat separately, but they don't belong in your soup anymore.
Now remove the meat and place it on a cutting board.
Put the lid back on if you haven't already.
Chop up that meat (careful, it's hot) into edible bits. Go ahead and sample some if you like, but my experience has been that the meat by itself at this point isn't very tasty. All the good stuff is back in the soup. At this stage, the meat is mostly for texture.
Dump your chopped meat back into the stock pot
Dump all of your newly sautéed vegetables (along with any remaining olive oil) into the stock pot

You're almost done.

Starch

At this point, you've got a pretty functional soup, but it needs something starchy, like pasta or rice, so let's do that.

If you're going the route of orzo or rice, I highly recommend that you rinse it first to get off all the excess starch. Otherwise you risk clouding your soup. It won't taste bad, but it'll be less pretty.

If you're going the noodle route, you'll want to break it into tiny pieces so it's easier to eat.

Either way, dump your chosen carb into your soup, cover it, and let it boil at a low temperature until the pasta/rice is ready.

Garnish

At this point, the soup is edible, but not yet exciting. You need to add all of the lovage and parsley at this stage:

Finely chop or rip the lovage and parsley into the soup
Stir it a bit and let it settle for another 5-10 minutes on a very low heat.
Stir in the vinegar as well

Serving

Finally we're ready to eat. Portion out the soup into bowls, and just before you serve, stir in a spoonful of sour cream. I can't tell you how much better this makes things.

That's it! The portions listed above should serve about 4 bowls, but I usually double things so we have enough soup for a few days.

Posterity

This entire recipe came from a recorded interview with my Grandma after multiple written attempts resulted in failure. I needed to interrogate her, to tease out the information she left out as a given, so I recorded the whole thing with my phone. Below is that interview.

November 04, 2010 03:05 +0000 | Family Food Grandma Lidia Recipes 5

So now that I'm unemployed, I suppose I have time to catch up on stuff here. There are a lot of posts I've been meaning to save here, and there's no time like the present to post them all. I'll start with the recipe for my grandmother's chicken soup.

My grandmother (on my mother's side) is the Chef-as-Matriarch of the family. Since I was a kid, she's had the family over for these massive European-style feasts. 4-7 courses, turkey, pork roast, cabbage rolls, roasted vegetables, soup, green salad, egg salad, pie, cake, and sometimes crème caramel if it was my grandfather's birthday.

All of these are amazing, but what she's known for, practically worshipped for in this family is her soup. Below is the recipe for her sour soup. For the most part, the mechanics are the same. You can swap out the stewed tomatoes for any kind of meat you like. The key is the first line, those vegetables make up the base that's used in all good soup. This incarnation is my favourite though. The sour cream step make everything fabulous:

carrot, parsnip, celery, onion (one of each, she calls this "miroquois")
Sauté in pot with oil until the onions are translucent
Add ½ a can of stewed tomatoes
Add 2 tomato cans worth of water
Add salt and pepper
Simmer until veggies are done (about 15minutes)
Take 1 big tbsp of sour cream and combine with a small amount of broth and mix until smooth and return to pot.
Add parsley for taste
Add some noodles

Now that's the recipe, but I've yet to actually make it work. I suppose now I have some more time to experiment.