If you don’t start with the right ingredients, you’re screwed.  You can try upgrades, fanciful add-ins, and an array of different techniques, but if the fundamentals were never good to start with…good luck, honey.

Yesterday I kicked up my heels at the helm of my stove, just dying to try a tomato soup recipe from one of the new cookbooks I received in December.  But I made on fatal error:  my canned tomatoes were not San Marzano, nor were they fresh, vine-ripened.  They were (God forgive me) generic foodstuffs, which sometimes is just fine, but in the case of tomatoes that need gentle, loving care when placed into tin cans and placed onto shelves for who knows how long - I made an unfortunate decision which I have lamented for thirty-six hours or more.

Halfway into it, I knew it was going south.  I tried everything - mascarpone, brown sugar, I even pulled down the Roman blinds in the kitchen and retrieved my white truffle oil which is hidden next to the saffron threads - I put my hands over my eyes and poured (not drizzled, poured).  I was desperate to save it, my tomato soup so beautiful in color, so drab in taste.

Today it didn’t taste half bad.  I actually liked it, but until I can make soup better than the “Gourmet” counter of the local food store, until I can create smoked tomato bisque similar to what I ate everyday while pregnant and working at the hotel, I won’t be satisfied.

I can order smoked tomatoes or San Marzanos over the net - I can get almost anything from any corner of the world I want, I have access, I have experience, and gosh darnit, I can spot a rotten piece of just about anything now.  It didn’t come easy - I have learned, man, have I learned, that you can’t add truffle oil to a crappy tomato and expect delicious results.  Sometimes, no matter what you do - you just can’t help it, save it, or go back and alter your choices.

If it looks rotten, smells rotten, it is rotten.  It’s not a difficult concept, nor is tomato soup, but the most obvious things escape us sometimes.

Oh, and the grilled cheese sandwich that accompanies the tomato soup - how could I fail to mention it?  Because therein lies a romantic rescue effort, an interdependent culinary love story. 

There will be days when the grilled cheese, the devoted other half of the tomato soup meal, will rise to the occasion when the soup doesn’t meet standard; days when the soup has been simmered perfectly and the sandwich on the griddle a little too long.  But they have each other.  Despite the changing ingredients that effect the overall demenor of them - for the grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup, it’s the idea of each other, the perfectness of their pairing, the history they have -  they go together. 

A tomato and bottle of olive oil meet a loaf of bread and hunk of cheese - they bring out the best in each other.  Start with the right ingredients and it’ll be fine.