Creative writing course - Week 2 - Cabbage soup delights

This exercise was about: "defamiliarize". The idea of distancing yourself from common ideas in such a way that they lose familiarity and become strange and foreign. We had to write a short piece on a word, there ware several options like "taste", "smell", and such... I chose smell. I don't think I got the exercise right, though. Haha! And I don't think my classmates liked it. It's hard... to be creative. It was supposed to be funny, but only Carmel got the jokes when I read it to her at home.

Cabbage soup 

Last night my wife and I made a vegetable soup. We usually get a box of locally sourced vegetables every week. British winter vegetables are kind of sad. Mostly cabbage and turnips or other varieties of these two with fancy names… cavalo nero, celeriac, kholrabi. We made 10 liters of cabbage soup just for the two of us. After an hour of cooking, the powerful cabbage smell, a fragrance possibly enriched with an unusually high concentration of volatile sulphur-containing compounds, reminded me of punishment. When I was a kid back home, in a remote little city in the tropics, punishment meant drinking carrot juice: I suppose I was a peculiar kid, although I’m not sure of the proportion of kids who dislike carrot juice, maybe after all that is not so peculiar. Perhaps a Colombian person loving cabbage soup is the true definition of peculiar. I wondered in secret, “why use turnips, or parsnips, not sure which one is which, when I can actually use potatoes?” Potatoes, queen of the root vegetables. Tonight, I must come home and drink my cabbage soup, perhaps if I add 2 full tablespoons of pesto it will quench some of the powerful aromas. I shall serve myself only two full ladles. That is as much as I can tolerate, of course, pesto included. At least, the idea that my carbon footprint is dramatically lower than if I had a steak should enhance my comfort levels by a perceptible amount. I suppose with catastrophic climate change on the horizon, it is a good thing that potatoes grow in England.

During winter our weekly veg-box is made entirely of giant cabbages