I whipped up a steaming cauldron of vegetable beef soup today, in honor of the cold snap putting us twenty degrees below normal. Such a simple task. It usually takes twenty minutes. Not today.
When I did the shopping on Thursday, I paused momentarily on the soup aisle. I normally use a pouch of vegetable beef soup starter. Most people just add water and call it soup, I suppose. But I doctor it within an inch of its pouchy life. I knew I had a packet of soup mix on the next-to-top shelf of my pantry. So I walked on by. I was actually looking for a can of diced tomatoes. Would you believe they were not on the soup aisle? Not on the canned meat and chili aisle. Nor were they on the spaghetti and sauce aisle. Nor the green bean and carrot and potato and other canned vegetable aisle. Where can The Devil possibly be hiding them? Those were the most logical places to look, I think.
I ran in Save A Lot yesterday for some milk, diced tomatoes, and hamburger. They don't carry packets of vegetable beef soup mix. But that was of no concern to me. Because I had a pouch of it on the next-to-top shelf of my pantry.
This morning I got right to work. I put the hamburger on to fry. Tossed some stale bread in there along the edge to soak up the grease as it oozed out. Dogs love that stuff, you know. Sorry chickens. No stale bread for you today. You'll have crackers and chocolate Teddy Grahams. I went to the next-to-top shelf of my pantry to grab the packet of vegetable beef soup mix. It had turned into a packet of Lipton Pasta Sides Alfredo! Don't that just beat all? Such a clever masquerade.
Lucky for the Hillbilly family that I had a can of Save A Lot Vegetable Beef Soup, and a can of Campbell's Chunky Sirloin Burger Soup. See what I did here? I used SOUP to make SOUP! I'm a freakin' genius! To those two cans, I added two cans of canned carrots, a can of canned green beans, a can of canned diced tomatoes, two cans of canned tomato sauce, and...NO CANS OF CANNED POTATOES! I was out of canned potatoes! Such a shopping faux pas has been a long time coming in the Mansion. I had a bag of red potatoes, so I tossed some into a pan to boil. I continued adding to my umpteen-ingredient vegetable beef soup. Two handfuls of elbow macaroni. Some Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, hickory barbecue sauce, steak sauce, Heinz 57 Sauce, a squirt of minced garlic from a convenient squirt bottle, some fresh-ground black pepper, some water, and I forgot the Splenda!
Too late now. We've already eaten some soup. I usually add a couple packets of Splenda to take the twang out of those tomatoes and sauce. Too bad, so sad, nobody noticed the change in my recipe.
I guess that's what happens when you used two cans of soup to make soup.
2 comments:
The aggravating thing--when I make dishes like soup or chili that have no "recipe"--is when it ends up extra delicious (because, of course, every culinary creation I make is delicious)--there is no way to replicate it. I never have any idea how much of this or that I added into the pot.
Perhaps at your work, to keep morale at a nose-bleeding high, you could have a soup-off. You and your colleagues make pots of soup, the rest of the gang samples and judges.
Just a thought...
Sioux,
That will not work. The one who brought a bag of frozen corn to the Thanksgiving pot-luck, and tossed it insouciantly into the freezer, never to be warmed for consumption, would bring a can of beef broth.
The one who always brings a loaf of white bread from the Day-Old Bread Store would bring plastic container half full of last week's hot and sour soup.
The one who brings the turkey would have trouble hauling her giant hollowed-out pumpkin tureen of Martha Stewart's Famous Butternut Squash Soup.
The morale would be at nose-bleed level, indeed. From taking a screaming nose-dive and slamming into the industrial tile floor.
Post a Comment