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      • Blueberry Lemonade
      • Cosmopolitan
    • Breakfast >
      • Apple Pancake
      • Homemade Granola
      • Peanut Butter Cup Smoothie
      • Stick-to-your-ribs smoothie
      • Veggie Omelet
      • Yeasted Waffles
    • Main Dishes >
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      • Chicken Fajitas
      • Choley
      • Grilled Chicken
      • Low and Slow Chicken Breasts
      • Roast Turkey
      • Rub for Pulled Pork (and other meats too!)
      • Salmon Burgers
      • Simple Homemade Mac & Cheese
      • Simple Red Sauce
      • Steak and Potato Salad
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      • Creamy Polenta
      • Homemade Potato Chips
      • "Magic" Salad Recipe
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      • Apple Cheddar Soup
      • Butternut Squash Soup
      • Chicken Noodle Soup
      • Creamy Tomato Basil Soup
      • Smokey Beef Chili
    • Sweets and Treats >
      • Almond Cake
      • Apple Crisp
      • Bruna Kakor
      • Butterscotch Pecan Sandies
      • Chocolate Fudge Brownies
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you can cook

Snow Day Soup!

1/27/2015

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"It's not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change." -- quote inaccurately attributed to Charles Darwin.

Given the 28 inches of snow outside, it seemed a good day for some tomato soup, and I had a delicious new recipe to try. The basics - diced tomatoes, carrots, celery, onion, basil, chicken broth and a bit of cream - looked promising.  However, the devil is in the details.

My initial concern was loading the vegetables into a crockpot without browning them first. Time saving, yes, but what about the flavor created when fat and my vegetables meet at high heat? I browned the veggies in my stockpot, ditching the crockpot (which takes waay too long anyway).

The next red flag was the recipe's 2 tablespoons of dried basil. Maybe your dried basil is fresher than mine, but two tablespoons of almost any dried basil would leave a dish bitter and stale. Since I didn't happen to have any fresh basil on hand in the middle of a blizzard, I grabbed the next best thing: four small frozen cubes of basil, sold for a pittance at Trader Joes. Each little cube is sealed in plastic to avoid freezer burn. Genius!

But then came the worst crime against good soup; a roux made with a stick of butter and 1/2 cup of flour. Look at the photo below left and tell me that soup needs to be thickened!  I left the roux out, saving both my time and 2 tablespoons of butter per serving.

A quick blend with my stick blender (a necessary cool tool if you like to make soup), some fresh Parmesan (below middle) and a bit of cream later, it was lunch!

My daugher is 14, but I still have her toy IKEA tea set. The cups and saucers make great little dishes for condiments, and in this case, for photographing food. The soup looks so pretty with one tiny oyster cracker on top! Of course we ate from much larger bowls, but we did have oyster crackers just like the picture.

If you'd like to make your own creamy tomato soup, here is a link to the recipe.

With Pintrest and all the recipes on the internet, you will run across some duds (see my Pintrest "Wall of Shame" board here). Don't be afraid to use your cooking skills and good common sense to make the necessary adjustments!

Finally, if you live in New England, I hope that you are enjoying your blizzard as much as I am. Stay warm and enjoy your soup.

Chris

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    Chris, cooking instructor, disability advocate and mom. Food geek and passionate believer in fresh, simple and homemade.

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    The typeface at the top of this page is Goudy Old Style, the same typeface used in my first copy of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook. My copy is a successor of The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, first published by Fanny Farmer in 1896. It was one of the first cookbooks to use the standard measures that are common today.