Week 3: Tomato Soup- It?s a good thing I didn?t have Guinea Pigs this week?

If I could be any kind of fruit or vegetable, I’d be a tomato.  I’d be a big, red, juicy tomato.    I used to eat them like apples when I was a kid.  I’d take a big bite in the center and suck the juice between my teeth.   I love anything and everything with tomatoes in it.  Tomato juice, tomato butter, roasted tomatoes, gazpacho, Bloody Mary’s… you name it.   I attempted to make the Smoky Spanish Tomato Soup from the March 2009 issue.  It didn’t really turn out the way it was supposed to.

First,  I don’t have a blender so I couldn’t puree it.  I wouldn’t say it was bad because I still ate it. I just know that I can do better.  I bought a very very large onion that I cut into all different shapes and sizes. It drives me nuts knowing that I can’t cut an onion very well. The onion was too big for my hands and my crap cutting board kept moving, so I was bound to have some rectangles and triangles.  Finally, once I finished, they all went into the pot with the peppers and got soft in fifteen minutes.  I know the recipe said to blanch tomatoes and dice them but I just didn’t have the time or the patience and I had canned tomatoes.  So, in went the canned tomatoes and juice, and I realized that I didn’t have enough juice to make the soup, so I added some chicken broth I had in the fridge along with the salt and the paprika which didn’t do anything to the flavor because the chicken broth and the tomato juice were too overbearing to even taste the paprika. I will say that the grapes added a nice sweetness to the acidity of the tomato.

All in all, I’d say this was my first disaster…