Kitchen Calamities - Part 1: Purple Chicken Soup

The life of a food adventurer is fraught with risks and perils. This is the unwritten reality behind many cookbooks, cooking shows, food blogs, and other means of disseminating foodie knowledge and culture. To borrow a cliche: "Shit happens." However, it's a shame that these disasters are typically hidden rather than chronicled. There is as much (or more!) to learn from mistakes as from successes. This is the logic behind what I hope will become a series of Kitchen Calamities entries - an epic journey of shit that happens to me.

My first calamity is purple chicken soup. This soup tasted pretty decent - my husband-person is the resident "stock expert," and he made this stock from a beautiful chicken carcass obtained from Cumbrae's (Church St. between Maitland and Wellesley St. E). He likes to store the stock in the fridge, and then we whip up small batches of chicken soup with fresh celery, carrots, parsley, leftover chicken scraps, and whatever small pasta we have handy. It's great for beating back the cold winter blah's.

On this particular occasion (a few weeks back), I brilliantly decided to use purple heirloom carrots instead of ordinary, colourfast orange ones. I thought it would look pretty. Instead, it looked like something out of an episode of Star Trek:


Take-home lesson: Do NOT use purple heirloom carrots (or beets, red chard, or any other "bleeder") in a clear stock, or in any other food context where red-purple colouring is not welcome - unless you're serving it at a children's birthday party or other "weird/fun" context.