Another Soup Day

I got up with the alarm at 5:30 AM on Wednesday and this time I stayed up! I shaved showered, got dressed and got to work just after 7:00 AM.

After work (at 11:00 AM) I went to Westborn to pick up a few items I needed. I made an impulse buy of liver sausage (or Braunschweiger or liverwurst or whatever you call it in your house). The rest of my purchases were half a pound of cooked shrimp, scallions, an onion, some bean sprouts and sugar snap peas, garlic and oriental cellophane noodles. Yes, you probably guessed it; I am making a Vietnamese dish for dinner on Thursday. I also picked up more bread and a hunk of sharp, aged Pinconning cheese (cut from a round).

Back home, I took care of the little things I'd ignored on Tuesday: I emptied the dishwasher and then cut up the moldy loaf of rustic Italian bread into cubes. Then I went out and spread the cubes under the birdfeeder and also filled said birdfeeder with seed.

Since I had my boots, hat and coat on, I put a Happy Birthday card addressed to my sister-in-law Jean in the mail box. Then I heavily salted the garage apron (between my car and Lu's Explorer, we'd packed the snow down and it had froze into ice). Since it was almost 29 degrees F. today, I wanted to get it clear before the big snowstorm predicted for Thursday night into Friday.

Since i was already dressed warm, I fired up the air compressor and filled up the tires on the car (anywhere from 5 to 10 pounds under-inflated), the tires on the trailer Jake and Carla gave me and the tires on the riding mower (the cold seems to suck the air out of tires here in Michigan).

Back inside, I made a liverwurst sandwich for my lunch. Now, I admit, they have never tasted the same since I can no longer find Plochmann's Hot Mustard (missing from my grocery shelves for at least 10 years - I grew up on that stuff!) But, I used coarse-grain Deli mustard with horseradish and it was damn good!

It was after 1:00 PM when I decided to take a break. We had talked about Clint Eastwood movies at work on Monday. I mentioned "Unforgiven" and Don, a fellow Program Manager, said he'd never seen it. He said the last Eastwood movie he's seen was "Gran Torino" and I said I'd never seen that one. So, today, he brought in a DVD of it he'd bought, for me to watch.

So, I put it in the DVD player and watched it this afternoon. Eastwood was a crusty, bigoted, retired Ford auto worker and recent widower who slowly becomes involved with the Hmong people who've moved in next door. It was excellent, BTW.

When that finished, I started on tonight's dinner: Homemade tomato soup. I'd really rather make my Vietnamese dinner, but the quart of whole milk I'd bought has an expiration date of today, so soup it is... This is one of meals I'd planned for Lu and Sadie, but they weren't here for dinner all that much...

So, I poured a quart of whole milk in my Dutch oven and slowly heated it up (be careful not to scald the milk). Now, the recipe calls for putting the following items in the food processor and pureeing it but I hate cleaning that damn thing. I use it when I must, but decided this could be done in a big bowl with the immersion blender.

So, in the big bowl, I put three (14 ounce) cans of diced tomatoes (drained), two rounded tablespoons of tomato paste, one medium onion (fine-diced), salt, pepper, one teaspoon of sugar, four tablespoons all-purpose flour, two tablespoons of butter (cut up into pieces), one stalk of celery (fine diced) and a clove of garlic, also fine-diced. Note: If you were using a food processor, all of the fine-diced above could have been rough-chopped, instead. I pureed that as best I could with the immersion blender.

I added that to the hot milk and, again, hit it with the immersion blender. I brought the mixture up to a boil, and then cut the heat to simmer it for 15 minutes.

While that was working, I make the grilled cheese sandwich that I planned on going with it. I buttered two slices of bread and stuffed it with the Havarti cheese. Note: I think the most important point of a good grilled cheese sandwich is the "gooey-ness" factor. That's why most people use American cheese (because it melts so well). But, so does, say, provolone or Havarti. So, I'm going upscale here.

When the outside was a perfect golden brown and the inside a gooey mess, I pulled it from the skillet. I set it on the cutting board and cut an "X" into it, making four triangle shapes. I took that and a big bowl of soup into the bedroom to watch TV.

I alternated between eating spoonfuls of soup alone or dunking the grilled cheese triangles into the soup and then eating them. The sandwich bites were excellent and the soup taste was perfect. However, having grown up on Campbell's tomato soup, the texture seemed odd. Maybe I should have used the food processor or maybe that's just something you deal with in homemade soup...

I watched TV until 11:00 PM and then went to bed (after setting the alarm).