tomato soup with grilled cheese

big bowl o' soup

I can't believe how quickly this year is just flying by! Thanksgiving has come and gone, this is my 27th consecutive day of blog posting, and I've been at this since January! I am surprised at how long I've stuck with this, to be perfectly honest. A hundred and fifty three entries! I think it's about time I make up a logo and dress this baby up a bit. Some actual site design is long overdue.

Today's entry is actually a bit of a throwback. The blog's third entry was for tomato soup with grilled cheese, and so again we have this classic combo. A nice creamy soup with a gooey sandwich is always a winner, but there are about a million ways to put such a meal together. Last time we used a Cook's Illustrated recipe, but this time I pulled up a recipe from the Food Network's Tyler Florence.


cheddar monterey jack grilled cheese

And believe it or not, oven roasted tomatoes with homemade chicken stock, bay leaves, onions, butter, basil and a splash of cream makes for a pretty damn good tomato soup. Who'd've thuk, huh? And a buttered grilled cheese sandwich pressed on a griddle? Divine. There's a reason it's called comfort food, my friends.

The Tyler Florence recipe calls for fresh tomatoes, but our first go around of tomato soup came from Cook's Illustrated or America's Test Kitchen, (I can't remember which), and that only used canned tomatoes, so you don't have to wait until good tomatoes roll around to make a soup like this.


pot o' soup

There's not much else to say, except that I am watching Julie and Julia while writing this post, and I am starting to feel bad for poor Nathan. I'm not nearly as awful as Amy Adams was to her husband, but I know that he's getting a bit impatient with me writing these entries every night. I plan to continue to with writing regular entries come December, (and it can't come soon enough), but without the daily deadlines I hopefully won't be accused to ignoring him any longer.

So, in summary: tomato soup = yum, grilled cheese = it's perfect mate, and blogging every day = good for the three people who actually read this, but bad for the boyfriend. It's all about balance, and come December, I hope to find a better one.

epic BLT

What do you think this might be for?



Oh that's right, it's a big, greasy BLT, loaded with so many toppings that you have to eat it with a knife and fork.



I wanted to make a BLT with my food co-op tomatoes, and I also wanted to use some avocado. California must have had quite a bumper crop this summer, because even here in New York they were unusually cheap and delicious this year.

I don't know why I even bothered to google making a BLT, but I am glad that I did, because Thomas Keller's recipe gave me the brilliant idea of adding melted cheese and a fried egg. Leave it to a world class chef to come up with a bacon egg and cheese/BLT/grilled cheese combo. An unholy alliance of all things fatty and delicious, this was one epic sandwich.



I may not be a world class chef, but I have to say that I think I did Keller one better with the addition of avocado. And in a further stroke of genius, I also tossed on some caramelized onions. If I had had time, I would have even made the mayonnaise from scratch, but Hellman's did just fine.



I think it's safe to say that there's not much you could do to make this sandwich more delicious, and making this during the day allowed me to get actual good photos with natural light! Imagine that!



Yeah, that's the money shot.

mozzarella en carrozza with sundried tomato jam

No pictures today, I'm afraid, but I'd like to tell you about the first real meal Nathan and I made after they snipped my wires and replaced them with rubber bands. It took me about twice as long as usual to smash up everything and carefully swallow it, but for what was essentially a grilled cheese sandwich, this mozzarella in carrozza was pretty soft and easy on my wounded jaw.

It was also a really nice night in general. Nathan's roommate, Pete, moved out in September, but we all ate this meal together before he moved downtown. It was also a special night because Pete recently started dating our very good friend Jess. This was a long overdue development. It's too bad that Jess and I can't hang out while visiting our respective boyfriends, but I'm of course very happy for them regardless of where Pete is living.

I've had mozzarella in carrozza before, but it wasn't quite like this. Here, the fresh mozzarella was sandwiched between two slices of bread and dipped in a mix of egg and milk, and then fried in butter. Basically, it was a hybrid grilled cheese french toast. When I had this on Arthur Ave at Marios, the bread must have been much much thinner, because I really thought it was just breaded and fried. This was also delicious, but much more sandwichy. I think the key was that the bread soaked up so much of the egg and milk that it kind of melded together with the cheese. If our bread had been thinner, it would have been an even more cohesive dish, and more like what I remembered.

The accompanying jam was what really excited me about this dish. Sundried tomatoes, roasted red peppers with strawberry jam, a little sugar, red wine vinegar and salt, it seemed easy enough. I liked it well enough, but we probably could have drained less of the olive oil off the peppers and tomatoes. It was definitely too dry, and not nearly jammy enough. Maybe my solid food cooking skills were still rusty? I'd consider making this again, but I wouldn't exactly jump at the chance. It was definitely tasty and hit the spot after a month of slurping purees through my teeth, but it didn't quite come together.

tomato soup

creamy tomato soup with a cheerful sprig of parsley

Generally, I am not that crazy about tomato soup. I don't dislike it, but it isn't something that I really get all that excited about most of the time. However, even though I didn't really grow up eating a lot of tomato soup, it still has those homey comforting connotations that are particularly attractive in wintertime. So, when I stumbled upon this America's Test Kitchen recipe for grilled cheese and tomato soup on the Smitten Kitchen blog, which I've been all about this week, it suddenly became the perfect thing to make for dinner.

I would definitely recommend this recipe. It had a really deep smokey flavor, a product of de-seeding and oven roasting the canned canned tomatoes with a little salt, pepper and olive oil until all the liquid evaporates. The recipe called for sprinkling them with brown sugar, but I decided not to because I've always been kind of grossed out by adding sugar to tomato sauce, and I'm not the only one.

Other than that, I pretty much followed the recipe as it was written: chopped up shallots or onions, an cooked them for a bit in butter with tomato paste. Added a spoonful or two of flour, cooked that off, and then gradually added ice cubes of my frozen stock, and then the tomatoes and the extra juices, which I strained to remove the seeds. After that cooked for awhile, Nathan blended it all up with the immersion blender, and then I added the cream, the brandy, some salt, cayenne and cracked black pepper. This could easily be gluten free if you just used the right flour!

While this was going on I made up the buttered grilled cheese sandwiches in the cast iron skillet. Normally, I "grill" my cheese sandwiches in the toaster oven, without butter, but if I was doing the classic soup and sandwich combo, I was going to do it right. Also, Nathan would have pitched a fit. As it was he was skeptical of my choice of Italian bread, and kept asking charming lovely little questions like, "have you ever MADE grilled cheese before?" Shut up Nathan.

Despite his hating, I fried up those babies just fine, and let me tell you, they were delicious dipped in that tomato soup. We served them with some vinegary tomato pasty cabbage, but Nathan took the lead on that one so I'll let him write that one up later.

Here's a shot of our soup on my kitchen table to close with.

kitchen table in the bronx