Minty Tomato Soup

If you read the recipe for Minty Tomato Soup in the September issue of Cooking Light and thought, "Gosh, that sounds time consuming," then congratulations: You are WAY smarter than we are!

After all, tomato soup is delicious, there are only 4 steps in this recipe, and it calls for very few ingredients. What could go wrong?! Well, the lady whose fingernails are still stained orange will tell you, "A LOT"!

Our idea of a good recipe is one that takes 45 minutes, start to finish. This one took a whopping 45 minutes just to get the tomatoes prepared! Careful readers will notice that you handle these tomatoes several times. The first step is cutting the tomatoes in half. (Not so bad, right?) The second step is juicing them. Yes, juicing them - pressing them through a sieve and collecting the juice. (This is where we got concerned.) Finally, you must grate them over a bowl with a box grater, tossing the skins. (What the...?)

Once we'd done all that, we were instructed to mix the reserved tomato juice, salt, red wine vinegar, and chopped mint with the tomatoes and...that's it. No heating, no pureeing - just grated tomatoes and tired hands.

It turns out the rest of the ingredients are for a pesto topping and some really weak toast. Since we'd planned to accompany this with grilled cheese sandwiches - and because we were flat-out bushed! - we called an audible and skipped the toast.

We prepared the pesto as instructed and tossed our lackluster tomato mixture in with it, pureeing everything until smooth. Then we poured the soup into a Dutch oven and warmed it while the grilled cheese sandwiches were being assembled. And then came the true test: taste.

The finished product wasn't bad, even with our improvisations. There wasn't much depth to it, though; it tasted like grated tomatoes with some mint. It could have used some black pepper and maybe a dash of oregano, too. (Our grilled cheese sandwiches were fabulous, if you wondered!)

We'd love to say we'd try this again but the bottom line was that it just didn't make an impression. For our next grilled cheese night, we'll stick to Campbell's!