Top Chef, re-prep, fourth course: Palate Cleanser.

Tonight, poppets, after a two week hiatus, Top Chef: New York returns to the air after a two week hiatus. And I have two things to say about this:

1) It’s about freaking time.
2) It had better not suck.

I spent yesterday abed, trying to muster my energy for tonight’s triumphant return.

Actually, no. I spent yesterday abed with a cold in my nose and three weeks of One Life To Live and General Hospital on my DVR. And I have two things to say about this:

1) I hate having a cold in my nose.
2) 90% of General Hospital right now is more inanely written, badly acted, and poorly conceived than anything I’ve ever seen on soaps. And I watched Days of Our Lives during the “Virtual Eden” storyline.




That? More plausible than a show where the hero is a hired killer who expresses his emotions through blinking, and the two heroines are smug, hypocritical, horsefaced hosebeasts.

What saved yesterday was the fact that this weekend I’d undertaken another recipe from the Top Chef cookbook: Betty’s Roasted Red Pepper Soup from the Comfort Food Challenge in Season Two—the one that was judged by a bunch of firefighters and some dude from TGIFridays.

I was conflicted about making this, because I fucking hated Betty. I hated her fake perky, wannabe sexy, Suzanne Summers’ fatter, desperate sister surface, and I hated her yelling, incoherent, irrational bitchy core. I hated her plasticine boobs and her chiclet teeth and her age-inappropriate bangs*.

On the other hand, I really like soup.

Anyway, the cookbook says you start by roasting the three red peppers and chopping them coarsely. It doesn’t give any instructions on how one should roast them, and while part of me wanted to do it on the burner comme ca, a larger part of me knows that me + food + fire = bad idea. So I checked The Best Recipe, since it’s been right about everything except baking potatoes, and it instructed me to cut up the peppers and arrange them on a foil lined baking sheet thusly:

And then I put them in my broiler for about ten-ish minutes until they looked like this:

And then I transferred them to a bowl and covered it with plastic wrap. And there I let them steam for 15 minutes while I diced up one red onion, one medium carrot, a half cup of basil and two celery ribs (the recipe calls for “one medium celery rib,” but I was using organic celery, which has it all over conventionally produced celery in that it actually, you know. . .haz a flavr. . .but it tends to be a little on the anorexic side).

After the red peppers had had their steam and were cool enough to handle, I set to peeling the peppers, which took a freaking year. If you decide to make this recipe, I suggest you have a friend call you and settle in for a good 30 minute chat, like I did, because otherwise you will lose your freaking mind from the tedium of it all. Anyway, after all of the peeling and swearing, you coarse chop the pepper and you end up with this nice little array of chopped up veggies.

And then you heat ¼ cup of Extra Virgin Olive Oil in a big pot, and throw in the carrot, celery, and onion and let them cook until they become a delightful wodge of mirepoix-y goodness.

This accomplished, you throw in the roasted peppers, two 28 oz cans of whole tomatoes with their juice, the basil, a tablespoon-ish of balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper. You bring that to a simmer, lower the heat, and then simmer it for 25-30 minutes.


Here’s where the adventure starts. You then take it off the heat, transfer it to a blender in batches, and blend it until it’s all nice and smooth. Why’s that an adventure, you ask? Oh, because look at my blender:

I know. It’s ridiculous. It’s a college blender. It’s a dude blender. But. . . I’m only one person. And I have a very tiny kitchen. And so after Sandra Lee killed my last blender, this is what I bought. And in my defense, I’ve made soup with it before—I’ve made Nigella’s pea soup with it (NOM—it tastes like spring time) and Giada’s tomato and cannellini bean soup in it (NOM—it tastes like tomato soup).

The trick is to run the soup through twice. Fill the cup from the pot; blend the soup; put it in the bowl. Repeat until pot is empty, then reverse: fill the cup from the bowl; blend the soup; put it in the pot. Yes, it’s time consuming. But it works.

Usually.

This time, I got to the last batch on the first go-round (pot/blender/bowl). . .and I noticed a change in the blender’s sound.

And then I noticed the smell.

And then I noticed the smoke.

And I thought “huh. That’s both not good and awfully familiar.”

But still, I thought “perhaps if I use one of the different interchangeable cups and the other blender blade, I’ll be able to continue. So I poured in the first batch of the second go-round (bowl/blender/pot).

Sound. Smell. Smoke. I lifted the blender part out of the base part and noticed little plastic . . .bits that had melted off the rotating part that connects the two.

And that’s how I killed the third blender of my lifetime. I think this qualifies me as a blender serial killer.

Anyway, I resigned my self to the fact that my soup would be less smooth and creamy than intended, and returned it to the pot as intended. I added ½ cup of heavy cream and stirred it until it was combined.

So here’s the thing. The recipe says it makes five servings. This is made of lies. Please take a gander at how much soup this produced:

Each of the smaller plastic containers contains slightly more soup than is in the bowl. Each of the larger plastic containers contains about two of the smaller containers. And then there’s the bowl. By my math, that’s 8 servings, if you’re serving generously.

But I suppose “the recipe makes too much!” is kind of a bogus thing to complain about.

Anyway, the recipe in the book—and, I suppose, as served by TGIFriday’s after Betty won the challenge—is paired with a Grilled Cheese and Portobello Mushroom sandwich. It looks good, but I decided to forgo making it because I didn’t feel like spending 30 minutes roasting vegetables for a grilled cheese sandwich. So I enjoyed it with some buttered organic whole wheat bread.

It doesn’t look anything like the illustration in the book which makes me think that the food stylist for the cookbook probably just dumped a can of Campbell’s Tomato into the cup for the shoot.

Anyway, it was good. It wasn’t great—frankly, having made both recipes I think Ilan’s corn and bacon salad should’ve won that challenge—but it’s a good soup, and only occasionally marred by the stray surviving chunk of carrot that managed to evade the blender.

And I’m glad it’s good, because clearly. . .I’ll be eating a lot of it.

It also made me realize that I really need to cook something not from Season Two. I hated Season Two—it made me fear for the future of humanity—and yet everything I’ve cooked is from that season. So prepare for me to try my hand at Dale's Seared Elk Loin.

Or perhaps, since Elk Loin is unlikely to be available at my local Harris-Teeter, perhaps Dave’s Salami and Gouda Panini.

* Maybe I just hate people with bangs. Hm. . . .