Tomato Soup Resolutions

 Nobody wants to hear about New Years Resolutions. A resolution is a personal thing and if you made one, it is something personal to you and not anyone else.   I have a few attainable resolutions that I have made this year.  They aren’t anything major, but if asked I’ll share all of them.  Today I have one that I want to talk about and it is going to be quite a journey.  I want to write about the journey and to do so, I need to share the goal. 

I want to make the best tomato soup.  

I know.  It isn’t what anyone was expecting. I don’t even know if it what I was expecting when I was thinking about resolutions, but then outside influences happened.  My husband is a unique outside influence, because he doesn’t even try to influence anything other than my music choices. We were watching a food documentary and talking about favorite foods and comfort foods and the goal came to me out of the wild blue yonder. 

When I was a wee young lass (think around age 8), my mother and I would eat tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches together. It was our thing when I was a kid, because no one else in the house liked tomato soup.  At the time I didn’t like tomato soup. I just wanted to hang out with my mom and I loved grilled cheese sandwiches.  I learned swiftly that cheese and tomato are secret best friends.

I am an adult now, and I love tomato soup.  It is the go to soup that my husband and I can agree on and is a nostalgic sort of comfort food. If I am making soup, it is in the top the requested.  Until recently, I have never made tomato soup from scratch. It has always been a name brand canned soup.  Recently I have made my first attempts into learning the art of tomato soup and for a soup that some think of as a side step away from ketchup, it is not an easy soup to make. 

The first step in the journey was to do research.  I have a plethora of cookbooks, but the one I used as the basis of my first attempt was Ski Town Soup.  (If you recall I may have blogged about a chili I made when I was going through a cookbook challenge. The chili was magnificent.) This cookbook held half a dozen variations of tomato soup from notable ski resorts.  I was able to flip through and compare the different ingredients and preparations with ease and come up with a game plan for my first attempt.

 

First attempt consisted of roasting tomatoes in the oven and then peeling them. While the tomatoes were roasting with rosemary and thyme, diced carrots and onion were sweating it out together in a sauce pan.   After the tomatoes were done being roasted they were peeled, chopped and cooked with the carrots and onion. After simmering together, chicken broth and basil was was added and all of it spent quality time in a blender until it was an odd tomato smoothie.  After blender time, cream was added to the soup to make it a creamy tomato.  Salt and pepper were added through out the process.  Everything was heated through and served with grilled cheeses sandwiches.  The end result wasn’t terrible, but certainly not the best. 

The ratio of carrots used in comparison to tomatoes, made it seem more like a carrot soup. (Who knew carrots were that mighty?) I like the roasted tomatoes. I think they brought out a nice flavor, even if peeling skins off hot tomatoes is an act of madness. I was a nice soup, but not the best tomato soup.  Additional  experiments will commence.  If you have any suggestions on processes/ ingredients to tweak let me know.  There is no wrong path to take to get to the best tomato soup.

Grandma’s Porcelain Doll Sanctuary

My husband often jokes that I am spooky. Not in a way that make an X Files episode, but  more like a Marilyn Munster. I have a list of favorite cemeteries. Spooky might just run in my family.

If you don’t believe me, let me share of an excerpt from an interview I had with my grandmother. 

Q: How many porcelain dolls do you have?

A: .......

Q: Would you say that you have more than 30 porcelain dolls?

A: Yes. Definitely.

Q: Would you say that you have more than 50 porcelain dolls?

A: Right around there. 

Let me pause right here. I think I might have entered into my sister-in-laws nightmare land. More than 30 but possibly less than 50 porcelain dolls are hidden or on display around the house.  If anyone had a fear of dolls, I can attest that my grandmothers living room would drive someone into the mouth of madness. 

Q: What was your first porcelain doll?

A: I had two dolls from when I was child.  They weren’t porcelains, they were bisque dolls. They crack easily in a hot attic. 

I looked up bisque dolls or biscuit porcelain dolls. And as per Wikipedia “Bisque dolls are characterized by their realistic, skin-like matte finish.”  Now I am trying not to think about dolls with realistic skin and cracked faces. My grandmother has a way of letting your form your own images in your mind. 

Q: What was your first real porcelain doll?

A: The first real porcelain doll was of Trish (my aunt) when she was a child. 

I am not sure if this is where I admit that my first porcelain doll came from my grandmother when I was 8. The doll looked a little like me at the time and lives in my attic.  I am sure my aunt is thrilled about being immortalized in a child form in porcelain. There is zero chance our souls will end up in these dolls. 

Q: Why do you like them?

A: I always like dolls when I was a young girl. I wasn’t able to have them as a child. The first dolls I had were rubber dolls. They melted in the attic. I always wanted a doll with teeth. 

I decided to look up rubber doll on the internet to find out exactly what my grandmother meant by rubber doll.  Do not search for rubber dolls!! Search for Vintage Rubber Dolls.  There is a big results in the search results. 

Also try not to think too hard about a doll with teeth. Every mental image of dolls with teeth confirms that creepy runs in the family.

Home for a Wayward Woman

 Wayward Woman

If a woman walked up to you on the street, asking for help, would you take her home and try and help her? 

The way I see it there are two answers.

A: Take her home and try to find help.

B: Pat her on the head and wish her luck. 

Jon and I took option A  and have discovered that numerous neighbors took option B.  I can’t tell if my neighbors are monsters or if Jon and I are suckers. 

Meet Nami. Short for Nonami.

She walked up to as we were on a stroll around the block.  Literally walked right up to me. She was super friendly and looked similar to a missing cat posters we saw around the neighborhood.  Jon and I could not leave her on the street, so we took her home and tried to find her owners.  I know that if one of my boys went missing I would be frantic with worry and furious if someone some them on the street and didn’t try to bring them home.

Despite the number of missing cat posters in the neighborhood, she was not the cat in question. No one wanted to claim this wayward kitty. Posting on social media and several pet finding site, we were able to discover the sad truth of her story. It seems that someone moved into an apartment that didn’t allow for cats, so they let her free. 

It wasn’t my plan to get a third cat. In fact anything over two cats can seem like the beginning of a crazy cat lady; however if video games have taught me anything is that if a cat walks up to you and gives you a quest, you take the quest. 

This quest involves giving Nami a happy life. Welcome to the to the family.

Butt in the Mail

 Butt in the Mail 

I received butt in the mail.

....

It wasn’t just a butt, it was cat butt. I don’t know if a friend mailed it to me or if I kickstarted it and forgot about it.  I do know that this might be the strangest unexpected item I have ever received in the mail.  I feel like if a friend did send it, I need to bump of my mail game. 

Of course my brain goes not overdrive with this mystery. Is this cat butt a coded message?  Is really saying “my  dear, you’re a rear” or  “enjoy this piece of tail in the mail?” I can name at least half a dozen people that could be the culprit.  Some of them being family and coworkers. For all I know this could be an invite to bake cookies.

 I don’t know the cat butt origin and maybe it is best that way. No culprits for the kitty cutter have been forthcoming, but I know that if I was to send one in the future I would be cackling to myself the entire time it was in the mail. So, if you are the person that is responsible, I salute you.  You have literally made my day and confused my husband.  Thank you! 

Cat Hobby

 It is nice when you can share a hobby with someone. It gives you something to bond over and a feeling of companionship.  Dib and I share the same hobby of sewing. He is might not get all the technical aspects down, but he is excellent at holding the fabric down and inspecting the work.  (And if you want me to be completely honest, he can be a complete menace.)

Here are a couple of sewing projects that have the special Dib touch to them. 

Ice Cream Failure

 

This is a little bit of a convoluted story about ice cream and failure.

This story starts with my mother in law giving me a recipe. She had acquired this recipe from a friend and is raved as a no fail bread recipe with only two ingredients. I thought it would be a great recipe to try and a wonderful excuse to buy a half gallon of ice cream. My thought process would be that I would make the ice cream bread and tell my dad about the wonderful uses for ice cream other than just eating it.  That was my plan.  Eat ice cream, try a new recipe for bread and pick on my father and report back to my mother in law on my success.

I really want to say that I executed the plan flawlessly. If I bragged on this as a success and smirked over my kitchen prowess, then know that I was utterly lying. I totally bombed on this.  I think  the fault lie with the ice cream. I thought it would sounded wonderful to have chocolate peanut butter bread. That it would be great to make into French Toast.  There is one thing that I failed to consider with Chocolate Peanut Butter Ripple, is that there is literally ribbons of peanut butter in the ice cream.  Cold peanut butter is stubborn. It does not like to mix and will not unclench its might grip in even melted ice cream.  Trying to get the chilled peanut butter to relax and mix with flour is a  nightmare that I would not wish on my worse enemy.  Once I had everything incorporated I popped it in the oven in a loaf like shape.

In all honesty it looked like I giant brown turd.  It did not look appealing and sadly it did not change into any sort of shape while it baked. It wen tin the oven looking like a turd, and it came out of the oven looking like turd. This was not the easy kitchen victory that I had anticipated. It was the anthesis of that.  My husband, the supportive champ that he is, shave me is best Paul Hollywood impression and let me know it was under proved. 

I had thoughts that perhaps I could salvage this experiment and then write I heart warming tale about over coming adversity and try to tie it into a moral or child hood lesson I learned from my father.

My glorious idea to salvage it, was to first slice it up, so it no longer looked like a turd. The second part was to bake/toast it to be like a biscotti and maybe put a little bit of fudge icing on it. Everything is better with fudge icing on it. Except it isn’t. It still tasted like stale ice cream, except now it was dry and the fudge icing made it really obvious that the bread was lackluster.  It was not what I was trying to accomplish and was a rather embarrassing kitchen failure. 

Sometimes things just suck. There is no way to make it not suck. Sometimes you just have to accept that and keep moving. On the bright side, I had still had ice cream. 

Random Thoughts

 It has been a while since I last wrote anything.  Most of the time the words won’t come out of my head or I am distracted by random thoughts.  

One of the most soothing things that I do is sew. My fabric addiction is becoming well known and my Pinterest board of inspiration is a little out of control. Sewing lets me think and not think at the same time. 

Here are some of the random thoughts that have come to pass:

• The Room of Requirement in Harry Potter is the wizard equivalent of the Holodeck in Star Trek.
• There should be a pizza donut for people that want something savory as an option in the donut box. 
• My cats stripper name would be Eviscerator
• Why don’t more people use the metric system
• In zombie movies they use wooden planks and plywood boards to block the windows and doors. Is part of being and adult mean keeping extra wood and plywood in the event of a zombie outbreak?

What are some of the random thoughts that you have?