Okay, so I’m no gourmet cook. I do cook. I figure during our 28 1/2 years of marriage I have made dinner about 6000 times, or on average, at least four nights a week for 1482 consecutive weeks. My husband, David, has cooked maybe thirty times, or, on average, about once a year. He doesn’t cook, although he loves to repair things, like lawn mowers.
David, on the other hand, will eat just about anything. He usually thanks me effusively over the arrival of dinner as if its’ coming to fruition is some kind of miracle. Which, it usually is. I don’t much like to cook, unless it’s TV dinners in the microwave. Maybe my body language gives it away, with me yakking on the phone or out dead-heading the flower beds while the timer is blasting, the liquid is boiling over and foaming on the stove, and/or the oven has caught fire. “Ooops!”
I usually make one of about ten different dinners. I have likely made each one of them at least 500 times. These include meat loaf, chili, spaghetti, beef tacos, chicken enchiladas, baked or fried chicken, or something grilled. Pork once in a blue moon, and some fish. Well I’m pretty tired of it all.
So the other day I spotted this recipe for Tomato Chicken Bisque. Hey, it looked … refreshing? I was thinking, you know, for a change, something light and appropriate for a warm summer’s evening … How about this tomato chicken bisque soup with bread and sliced cheese? And a glass of milk! Simply Delicious!
Let me say right off the bat that I wasn’t told to start growing the basil in my garden at least six weeks prior to making the soup (nor had I bought fresh basil at the grocery store, but maybe this detail doesn’t matter) … 
(If that is indeed fresh basil they are using as a garnish, an ingredient they list in the recipe, and not water cress or something NOT listed as an ingredient.) Let me also say that I was following the recipe pretty much the way I do most soup recipes: Look at all the ingredients you need, lay them all out, and throw them in the pot to cook! Hey! It’s a friggin’ soup, right? I was a little curious for a half-second at some point as to where the ‘whole’ tomatoes went to in the photo – why weren’t there, like, tomato globs floating around in it? I also really didn’t think about what ‘bisque’ exactly means either, although, I have since looked the word up to freshen my memory and noticed descriptions like ‘thick’, ‘strained’, and ‘creamed’ in the definition.
To be honest, with this tomato chicken bisque I did pretty well with the ‘thick’ part of it but the other two factors were … um… lost in translation, you might say. At some point the recipe says, “Working in small batches puree the soup in a blender and transfer back to pot”… which I realized was the process by which the ‘soup’ became a ‘bisque’. No problem! Oh crap! I’m supposed to add the chicken AFTER I puree the soup into a bisque – except that I’ve already diced and added the chicken! Oh well! I picked out a few chicken pieces and, that proving tedious beyond my ability to cope, I just puree-d the whole thing, chicken and all.
Another thing the recipe should have stated up front is, ‘Be sure to puree the soup before adding the chicken.’ Because the chicken chunks get pulverized into what looks like … an implanted maggot colony. And when I saw all those maggots in my tomato bisque I thought, no, all those little white bits just look like maggots, but I know they are chicken. But then when I spooned a taste of it into my mouth, all I could think about was how cooked maggots probably taste like chicken.
“Dinner’s ready!” I called out to my husband and daughter, Megan.
“HMMMMM … smells good!” David gushed approvingly, as he entered the kitchen, relieved, I’m sure, that his wife had pulled off yet another dinner ‘miracle’. (As he was beginning to wonder when his own starving stomach might commence eating itself.) Dinner was finally ready and steaming on the stove top!
“Well, honey, it’s a new recipe! See, here’s the picture!” I said, flashing the above recipe in front of his face. “Except I didn’t have fresh leaves (whatever they are) for garnish!” … “And uh … well, you go first, dear! There’s plenty of it, a whole pan full!”
“I’ll have a TV dinner!” declared Megan. Smart girl. I suspect maggots do taste a lot like chicken. If you hadn’t made the soup, how could you really be sure … well, you know.
I won’t tolerate anyone around here complaining of hunger. We still have a hearty portion of that leftover tomato bisque maggot glop stowed tightly in a container in the way back of the fridge. And I even stuck a sprig of fresh rosemary on it as a garnish.
Yeah, well, tonight we ordered pizza.
Tags: gourmet cooking, tomato bisque
The Decompression of a Boomer 
August 29, 2009 at 12:40 pm |
i personally used to buy lite’n’easy until i got sick of their crap tasting food… but seriously, some stuff was alright and no i am not affiliated with them
August 30, 2009 at 5:13 am |
Hmmm, haven’t heard of lite n’ easy, but I like the sound of it. I’ll have to check it out.