Rainy Sunday Soup

I find cooking soup to be rather cathartic. During the cold, rainy months of winter I spend many Sunday evenings making soup. Today's soup was a red lentil Thai soup. Delicious. The only bummer was it wasn't nearly as pretty as the picture in the cookbook. Now, I wait for my olive oil couscous cake to finish. I know, sounds weird, but I wanted to try it. Bon Appetit recipe. It was an evening of substitutions, however. I could not find bird's eye (the red one) chilis at the store, substitute serrano. I had spices with no labels in my cabinet - hmm, smells like coriander (could be cardamon, who knows?) and paprika (also might be cayenne...) No lime, substitute lemon. The soup substitutions were easy and it turned out quite yummy. Then for the cake, no muscat, boiled some red with sugar until it got a little syrupy. Did not have an orange so I used the lemon peel. It called for date syrup, but I decided to make a wine reduction instead. It is all a bit of an adventure and could taste terrible. That's what cooking is all about. Just don't venture with expensive ingredients, that's when it kind of stinks. This cake, apart from the olive oil and eight eggs, was fairly cheap to make. Especially since I didn't buy the right wine. I'll let you know how it tastes. Smells good in my oven.