Cream of Tomato Soup with a Surprize

It' s been cold here again. That always makes me think of soup. Luckily, Jane thinks the same way, so we've been having a variety of soups and stews lately. In our pre-vegan life, one of our old standby meals was cream of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, with a green salad. The only possibility left from that meal is the green salad.

This week's foray to the library resulted in us borrowing The Taste for Living Cookbook: Mike Milken's Favorite Recipes for Fighting Cancer by Michael Milken and Beth Ginsberg. It's not a vegan cookbook but it promotes itself as a collection of recipes for fighting cancer, so that got our attention (Jane's family history of cancer being one of the primary reasons we're vegans now). The book is fresh looking and attractively laid out, and a number of the recipes are vegan, and sound interesting. And lo and behold, one of the first recipes in the book is for Cream of Tomato Soup.

So, last night Jane made their version of cream of tomato soup. Cream? you might ask. Well in place of the cream it comes with a surprise... Their note states that oats can be used as a cream replacement in any pureed soup. (Huh?) To accompany the soup, Jane made grilled cheese sandwiches with vegan cheese. (Woo hoo, old standby!) And, as usual a green salad, this time topped with Chili Lime Dressing (recipe from the aforementioned book).

To recap: new cookbook, two new recipes. The salad dressing was outright awful. Thankfully, Jane only made half the recipe, so dumping the rest down the drain wasn't as wasteful as it could have been. The soup wasn't awful, but didn't hold up to the grilled cheese at all. We had leftover soup tonight with the last of the Tender Potato Bread Focaccia; it was better the second day. I don't know whether that's because the flavors had a chance to mature overnight, or if the bread was a better compliment than the grilled cheese.