13 March 2011

Smashing Tomato Soup

Nate has been in love with a tomato soup at a local restaurant for some time. It was love at first bite for him. The soup is really good. I never thought we'd be able to make it - mostly because I'm not good at discerning flavors and putting them back together in my kitchen.

Enter my friend Amanda. She is an amazing cook. And she totally demystified this soup for us. Check out her blog post about it here. (The photo is courtesy of Amanda's blog - The Rhythm of Cooking.) We drank some yummy Spanish wine and listened to Toots and the Maytals. It was the perfect Saturday night at our house. We also made some killer garlic bread to go with the soup and it was perfect (sorry to rub it in, Amanda).

The soup was amazing - almost as good as the real thing. We are going to tweak a few things for next time. We did notice that our soup didn't have quite as much kick as the restaurant version, so Nate pulled out some cayenne pepper and we threw a little in our respective bowls of soup.

Unfortunately Benny wasn't as excited about the soup as we were. He wouldn't take a bite. We even bribed him with a leftover cupcake. No dice. After 45 minutes of trying to coerce him into eating the soup, I left the table to feed Lila and Nate started cleaning the kitchen. Benny remained at the table and started to talk about cinnamon. Cinnamon? What cinnamon? I didn't think much of it ... until he yelled, "This cinnamon is spicy!" He then ran over to me and stuck his tongue out, tears streaming from his eyes.

I looked at the table, and there was some cayenne spilled in little piles. He had licked some off of his finger. Poor guy. I pushed milk on him and had him eat some bread. He cried and drank milk for about five minutes. I felt awful for him. And then, in between his tears, he said, "I need to watch some Dora to calm down." Little pooper. He knows just how to work the system. Suddenly the tears stopped and all was well. He'll probably never eat tomato soup again. He's missing out!

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