Dressed-up Tomato Soup

Sometimes I wish I was more like Eleanor and her friends, women who, by all accounts, gave no care as to what anyone else thought.

Pictured: Eleanor (Far left) and Friends , drinking wine and Giving no shits.

Eleanor's best friend, my Aunt Margie, once made a lasagna for a dinner party. It's worth noting here that there was nothing Eleanor feared more than making a lasagna. She talked so much about how difficult it is that my mom STILL has never tried to make one out of fear she'd do it wrong. Anyway, Margie's friends had gathered around the table, everyone was anxiously awaiting the lasagna, and as she pulled it out of the oven, bubbly and steaming...

She flipped over the serving dish and the entire thing landed face-down on the kitchen floor. What did she do, you ask? She scraped it up and served it anyway, with the rationale that what her guests didn't know wouldn't kill 'em.*

Anyway, none of her friends died or got food poisoning, so clearly she was right. But the point is this: Eleanor and Margie didn't care what people thought. They did what they wanted, and maybe part of that is the luxury of age, but I think a lot of it was just their personalities. I, however, did not inherit this trait. 

Pictured: Eleanor (Far Left) and friends at the beach. Not Pictured: Any shits. On an unrelated note, I would give anything to own that bathing suit top.

Note: This is not a recipe for tomato soup. It is, instead, a recipe for how to dress up pre-existing tomato soup. So to start with, procure yourself some soup.

Yesterday I went to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for this meal, which is basically just slightly fancy tomato soup. I was going to make the soup from scratch, but as you will soon see, that was not in the cards. We were out of fabric softener, so I headed to that aisle first and put the cheapest bottle in my basket. It happened to also be the biggest bottle, at nearly a gallon. I continued my shopping in peace until suddenly I heard what can only be described as a gushing sound coming from the vicinity of my elbow. Alarmed, I looked down to see that the fabric softener had tipped over, the lid had come off, and the bottle was gushing all over the tile floor of Tesco.

Now, in case you don't use fabric softener because you have a dryer and don't need the extra softening power, let me tell you something about it: it pretty much has the texture of liquid soap. So, after nearly wiping out in the mess I had just made, I had to go find a Tesco employee to come clean up the mess before someone died. But it happened to be the morning, so Tesco was full of nothing but running children and older people with canes. (Thankfully, Britain is less litigious than the States). Anyway, I made a giant mess, all of my groceries were so covered in goo that I couldn't even purchase any of them, and I was so embarrassed I ended up just grabbing a bottle of rum (for a recipe, I swear!) and a can of tomato soup and getting the heck out of there.

But now I have to find a new grocery store since I can never show my face there ever again, and I didn't want to brave another grocery that same day since my cheeks were still red, so I used canned tomato soup for this recipe and just dressed it up from there. It was still delicious, so no complaints here, but if you have the time, try making this recipe with homemade tomato soup. My favourite (and the one I was going to use) is here. Just leave out the cheese and tortellini and replace it with the ingredients listed here.

*Another reason I wish I was more like Eleanor and her friends is that I wish my kitchen floor was always... sometimes... even occasionally clean enough that I would eat from it, never mind my poor friends.

Send me your good wishes on finding another grocery store with such a great selection of marshmallows and weird 1950s-style ingredients, friends. I'm so humiliated that I don't think I can ever leave my flat again.

The verdict:

3 spoons out of 5, just because it's so easy it really shouldn't count as a recipe to begin with. As stated, I made this recipe with a can of Heinz tomato soup and dressed it up from there. I couldn't find the brand-name noodles the recipe calls for to put on it, so we had it with prawn crackers (which I got from the Asian grocery since I couldn't bear to go back to Tesco). If you have those wonton-type noodles that come with Chinese takeout on hand, I think those would be excellent, but no one is going to tell if you just use Saltines. Made with a can of soup it's literally the easiest thing ever. Made from scratch takes a bit longer, but homemade tomato soup is so good I think it's probably worth it.

The Recipe:

Saucy Tomato Soup

The Ingredients:

Tomato Soup-- from a can or your favourite recipe
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp pepper, black or red
Prawn crackers or fried wontons

THE DIRECTIONS:

Heat tomato soup thoroughly.
Stir in soy sauce, lemon juice, and pepper.
Ladle generously into bowls and top with prawn crackers or fried wontons.

Hong Kong Burgers

I know what you're thinking. SO MUCH red meat for an ex-vegetarian!

Personally, I view burgers as a sort of edible plate for whatever you are going to put on them. More of an excuse to put pimento cheese, jalapenos, and a fried egg on a bun for dinner than anything else. This is why, even after I abandoned vegetarianism at the age of 21, it still took until I was about 23 (and on my first date with Judson!) before I ate a meat burger again. If it's just a vehicle for burger toppings, why not just skip it in favor of the less expensive veggie burger options?

My view of burgers as little more than “the thing you have to serve if you're hosting a cookout” means I've never had to make them before because I'm always over in the corner plotting a dessert that won't melt in the sun. Someone else always views them as the quintessential expression of American cooking, and so I've always been exempted from making them. But not this time, and it turns out burgers are pretty easy-- even these weird ones. The texture of these is great: the patties are equal parts meat and bean sprouts, so there's a lot more going on than in a typical burger. And the fact that the flavour is more unique than just the “dump a packet of onion-soup-mix into a pile of ground beef” style of burger that I grew up with means you get to dress them up in a totally unique way. (Eleanor not guaranteed to approve, but, hey. You gotta do what you gotta do.)

We ate ours with acorn squash and roasted fennel, which I burned to a crisp. Life in our house is très glamorous.

The Verdict:

3 spoons out of five. Judson, a burger connoisseur, loved these. I thought they were good, too, but I got stuck eating the leftovers for lunch two days in a row, so I got bored. If we lived somewhere that wasn't Scotland, where it occasionally got warm enough to cookout, maybe I'd add another spoon, but, alas. Plus, I'm subtracting a spoon because the recipe called for ¾ lb of ground beef and ¼ lb of ground pork. Good luck finding ground pork anywhere, and if you do, good luck convincing someone to sell you only ¼ lb. We used all beef and it was fine. 

Note: If you're vegetarian or just not so into ground beef like I am, I think these would be really good made with black bean veggie burgers with a heap of steamed bean sprouts on top, garnished as noted below.

The Recipe:

Bean Sprout Burgers

The Ingredients:

1 lb ground beef
1 lb bean sprouts
3 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
½ tsp garlic powder
¼ tsp ground ginger
Hamburger buns

Optional garnish: feta cheese, red onion, hot curry ketchup (1 tsp curry powder, 1 tbsp sriracha, 2 tbsp ketchup)

THE DIRECTIONS:

Combine all ingredients and shape into 5 or 6 patties (bean sprouts will stick out).
Chill for 30 minutes to allow flavours to mix.
Broil 2-3 inches from heat to desired doneness, turning once (about 5 minutes).

Yields 5-6 large-ish burgers.

Simple Prime Rib of Beef

You know that scene from the Flintstones where they pull into the drive-thru and the server puts a giant side of dinosaur ribs on the tray attached to the car, and the meat is so big it tips the car over?

Yeah, that's what we had for dinner last week with our chocolate key lime pie.

I found a “recipe” for prime rib in the box a few weeks ago. It's barely a recipe, really: anything with only four ingredients, two of which are salt and pepper, hardly counts as creative kitchen cooking. But that was an added benefit as far as I'm concerned-- I didn't want to ruin a cut of meat that cost more than I usually spend on meat in a month, and with a food this pricey, simple is always better. (Plus, I had just spent about a hundred hours making a key lime pie by the time I started this, so I was stoked to have something a little simpler to make.)

Considering the clipping with this recipe dates from 1989, I'm not sure Eleanor ever had a chance to make it. She might have just saved the clipping because of the advertisement in the bottom corner for personalised Bingo chips with matching earrings (a highly Eleanor thing to have, by all accounts), I don't know. However, with a husband who loves red meat and rarely eats it because we don't often think about buying it, I figured our anniversary was as good a time as any to make something so over-the-top fancy. After all, prime rib, according to the recipe, is a 'traditional dish that celebrates everything bountiful and elegant.'

There's an incredible local butcher shop on our block where I knew I wanted to buy the prime rib, but... well... I get really nervous every time I have to go alone. It's a perfect storm of anxiety-producing stimuli in there: A) meat (which I know nothing about and can't convincingly pretend to understand), B) lots of small talk in thick Scottish accents which I've come to understand pretty well as long as it's not noisy, but C) it's always insanely noisy with a meat grinder going, wind whipping in the open door, and customers yelling jokes about sausages to the butchers.

Last time I went in alone was to buy a piece of pork back in the fall. I ended up stuck in there for twenty minutes trying to explain a crock pot to the poor butcher, who probably was just trying to make small talk. So this time I did my research: found that sometimes prime rib over here is called 'forerib,' and that it is technically a standing rib roast. I forgot to research quantities, though, so when the poor butcher offered me a single rib, I thought he was joking. It turns out, though, that one rib is plenty for two people (in fact, we ate it for two nights in a row, so I think you could pretty easily use a single rib for a dinner for four). It's not a cheap meal, but it is surprisingly easy and if you have something to celebrate but don't want to spend all day in the kitchen, this is a great option.

The Verdict:

5 spoons out of five. (Can I give it six spoons? Just this once?) Our rib was about a kilo (2.2 pounds), and it cooked in under half an hour. Sprinkled generously with pepper and sparingly with salt, studded with a dozen garlic cloves, it was the perfect, easy, celebratory dinner.

The Recipe:

Prime Rib

The Ingredients:

1 prime rib of beef (approximately 1 rib for every 2-4 people)
½ tbsp salt
2 tbsp pepper
12 garlic cloves
1 jar prepared horseradish

THE DIRECTIONS:

At least 3 hours before cooking, place roast in a dish on the counter to come to room temperature.
Sprinkle each side with salt and pepper.
Push the garlic cloves into the fat on each side of roast, as deeply as possible.
Cover tightly and let sit until time to cook.
Once meat is at room temperature, preheat oven to 400F/204C.
Transfer meat to a roasting pan (you can use the rack if you'd like, though I didn't bother) and cook 15 minutes per pound until internal temperature reaches 125F/52C for rare.
After removing from oven, allow to stand for 15 minutes before carving and serving with horseradish sauce.