My favorite comfort food!! I love grilled cheese sandwiches. They are super tasty and easy and I always like to make them with vegetable soup or a really good tomato soup, which I usually get from a can.
027. Deluxe Grilled Cheese Sandwiches:
Typically, I go with the extra easy – bread & cheese only. However, these are supposed to be DELUXE grilled cheese, so I figured I had to step it up a little bit.
I still used plain wheat bread, but we did have 2 types of cheese (pepper jack and cheddar) and I added mayo, spinach, and tomato to the sandwiches too.
I would like to add my own tip to their recipe that my mom always used – cover the pan to keep the heat in and melt the cheese faster so you don’t over-toast the bread.
It still tasted like a grilled cheese, so I enjoyed it. I liked the idea of having different fillings and mixing things up, although it is still fancier than I will probably try to do in the future.
076. Fresh Tomato Soup:
I am so disappointed in myself for this one. I messed up all over the place. Tomato soup is a food that I have just recently acquired an appreciation for, so I was really looking forward to learning how to make it. And the pictures in the book made it look so good!!
I would have to say the overall theme of my mistakes was not paying attention. My littlest helper was distracting me and I missed a lot of things. (Additionally, this is why my post is especially short on pictures)
My first mistake was not thinking about how many tomatoes I had. I was told that we are not in peak tomato season, so when I was at the store I looked for the ripest tomatoes I could find and then planned to supplement those with a can of tomatoes.
I ended up with about 3 good looking ones and one large can of tomatoes. Instead of thinking about how close to 2 lbs. of tomatoes I was getting, I charged right on through to my next mistake: putting the whole can of tomatoes and juice into the food processor. Additionally, I didn’t realize this was incorrect until I had already begun blending and was getting confused about why it was SO watery. There was also A LOT of it. I decided that I’d ended up with too many tomatoes somehow.
My plan became to boil off some of the excess liquid to try and salvage the consistency which had turned into salsa. It was around this time that I realized I somehow didn’t have any honey in my house(? How could that even happen? At one time I had 4 different types of honey from 4 different areas of Texas!). So instead I tried to substitute some sugar, but I have no idea what the correct ratio of sugar to honey is. Also, I couldn’t tell if I had doubled the recipe or just had a little bit too much, or if maybe this was how much soup the recipe was supposed to make!
Even with all of my attempts to boil it down, add sugar and cream, and I think at one point I added flour to thicken it for some reason, it still came out with the taste and texture of a really nice meatless marinara sauce.
I thought about putting it back in the blender or straining out some of the juices, but at this point the sandwiches were done and Martin was back. So I just chalked it up as a loss and served it. Martin was very sweet and finished his bowl and my bowl.
I’d like to try the soup again sometime because I think I could learn from my mistakes and make it a little better.
Next Week: March 16, 2019
Next week I will be knocking out 2 recipes that I have not been excited about since the beginning!
001. Baked Root Vegetable Chips & 002. Peppered Kale Chips
For the sandwich I got a loaf of unsliced country bread. Sliced as per recipe, buttered one side of each, and loaded sharp chedder and Swiss. Very filling to the tummy.
I used 9 roma tomatoes, close to 2 pounds the recipe called for, sliced in half, seeded, and roasted in oven. I then took off the skin.
Put red peppers, seeded and cut in half, along with slices of onion, under the broiler until peppers were blackened. I then skinned the peppers. Put all in my blender along with basil, etc, and blended.
The soup had a very fresh taste, almost like a gazpacho, but smoother of course. Not smooth enough according to a visitor. I guess I should have processed it longer. It had bits of texture.
I probably won’t go to so much trouble for tomato soup again. I like those tomato basil boxed soups you can buy now.
We each had a different cheese on the sandwich. Mine was a sharp cheddar from Georgia. JJ had a cheese called Sartori MontAmore. Both good. Did the same thing with covering the sandwiches while cooking. Just used canned tomato soup. I’ve tried making it from scratch before – not very successful.
Good effort Evie!! It sounds like tomato soup is just a hard one to do from scratch. I like the Amy’s brand canned tomato soup! Looking forward to trying the kale and root veg chips this week 🙂
Oooooooo, pepper jack grilled cheese sammiches! Well done, young Jedi.