Recipes: Food for the Flued
Celebrity Chef: fuggoff aboud cedebrides. They've all god de flu, too.
Jeebus almighty, everyone has the flu. Or a head cold. Or mono or consumption or whatever. So this month, it's all about the sick food. Nice, hot liquid things, easy to make even with a fogged-up, cough-syruped head. Gents and ladies, the Ginger Hot Toddy and Semi-Homemade Tomato Soup.

The Ginger Hot Toddy is a damn good excuse to sit around at home and drink alcohol, which is both an expectorant and a painkiller. Don't overdo it - the last thing you need is a hangover on top of how awful you already feel. The ginger is great for your sinuses and stomach, and the lemon and honey are sweet and easy on your poor, poor throat.

You don't need to peel the ginger root, just slice up an inch or two into thin rounds and put the slices in a large mug. Squeeze in the juice of half a lemon and drop in the squozed*-out lemon half so you get all the tasty lemon oils that are in the rind. Put in a tablespoon or two of honey, and fill the mug about three quarters of the way up with boiling water. When the resulting ginger-lemon tea is just cool enough to drink, add a good big slosh of whiskey. Limit yourself to about two of these a day.

If you've got a terrible flu or one of those wicked bad head colds, you probably want soup. Of course, you also want to stay in the house wrapped in a blanket. You need a soup that you can make out of stuff you've already got. Don't eat that Campbell's crap - it's all salt. This here's a semi-homemade, semi-canned soup that you can tweak, and add to, and live off till you're able to leave the house again.

Ingredients: oil, an onion, garlic, a can of tomato paste, plain yellow mustard, and whatever else you've got.

Chop up your onion and three or more cloves of garlic and sauté them in oil on medium low heat in your nice big soup pot. When the onion and garlic get soft and transparent, add the tomato paste. Slosh in a little more oil and stir every thing together, then add about six cups of water. Stir everything around some more to combine, add a little salt and pepper and a squirt of mustard, then let the soup simmer, uncovered, for an hour.

That's it.

Seriously, that's all there is to making tasty tomato soup. If you happen to have a few fresh, frozen, or canned vegetables around, you can get all fancy and shit. You can make:

Spicy Pepper Soup, by adding some diced hot peppers at the beginning, and sweet peppers during the simmering. Or Taco Soup, by adding a can of corn and one of black beans. Or Creamy Tomato-Spinach Soup, by adding sliced tomatoes and bout half a bag of frozen spinach, and substituting soymilk for half of the water.

Or what the fuckever. Toss stuff in. Don't think - you're far too sick. Eat soup, drink toddies, and get your roommate to rent you some decent movies or something. I recommend an Evil Dead marathon.

* "Squeeze" is the verb. "Squozed" is the adjective. Dig?