Tonight marks the first expression of distaste about having to cook for myself.
Due to both Isobelle (my housemate) and I being away for the weekend, our pantry has welcomed it’s usual hosts with open arms but really rather empty arms.
If I get home and I’ve had a long day, good or bad, I want decent food relatively quickly. Sometimes baked beans or scrambled eggs doesn’t cut it for ‘good’ and pasta is truly uninspiring unless it has something real in it – carrots for example. Carrots require cutting. Cutting is not fast.
So the bare pantry yielded the option of nachos which meant opening a whole packet of corn chips for just me, a can of mushroom soup (not nice on it’s own), a few other odds and ends and a packet of tomato soup.
I gave it some thought and remembered that sometimes I really quite like tomato soup and cheese on toast.
Tomato soup is not the most interesting of foods, least of all from a packet. Yet it does do a very curious thing in the microwave. If you mix it up with water and milk (As inspired by the directions on the back) it goes this watery disgusting liquid white with pinkish flecks. As you continue to heat it it gets a red skin on the surface, which when you mix disappears into more of the initial. Eventually the soup turns the colour it should. It doesn’t taste as good as from a can and that to start with has never been the most substantial or inspiring of foods.
I got the distinct impression of feeding my stomach with salty red water and cheese that had melted somewhat strangely.
Needless to say, where tomato soup sometimes distinctly hits the spot, sometimes it really doesn’t.
I’m trying getting over it by recalling the glorious lunchtime Eggs Benedict that I ate and eying off chocolate about an arms length away.
I’m willing to bet that the timeframe between “eyeing off chocolate” and consuming said chocolate was not that long. 🙂
Lol, that description would set me thinking when I get to eat tomato soup the next time. Anyway, my mum doesn’t make it in the microwave. She makes it the old fashioned way using tomatoes and all the stuff and in the end, it’s quite happening but does take a lot of time and energy. She’s gotten into the habit of putting noodles into the soup nowadays because bread crumbs are more expensive 😛
yeah… that chocolate didn’t last too long.
I’ve never made tomato soup from scratch Ish, I kind of doubt I ever will as my kitchen prowess isn’t all that great, however I do appreciate people who do as it by far the nicest soup going.
I’m a hungry-when-I-get-home little monster as well.
Here’s my solution:
Make a casserole type of thing. Anything. Lasagna. Vegetable Pie. Whatever. Then separate it into portions in containers (you might have to eat a bit of chinese takeaway first) and whack them in the freezer.
Get home. Microwave. Eat. I call it: Man cooking.
I am also a huge fan of the ‘cook it – freeze it’ method, however when you’ve been away for a few days and insanely busy beforehand this doesn’t work so well.
The other option to cooking and freezing, especially if you don’t like pasta without some form of chunkage, is buy the fresh pastas – get a nice ravioli or agnolotti, and a nice fresh sauce that also has chunks, and freeze them. And leave them there purely for the ’emergency’ nights of returning home to an empty fridge and pantry.
Works wonders.