Grilled lemon pork chops with pasta e faglioli (as I understand it, a copycat of an Olive Garden dish); tomato soup spice cake for dessert.
Grilled lemon pork chops with
pasta e faglioli (as I understand it, a copycat of an
Olive Garden dish);
tomato soup spice cake for dessert.
Yep, you read that right. Tomato soup spice cake. A can of condensed tomato soup went into this cake. Which completely and utterly messed with Chris's head, and broke his brain a couple of times: first when he saw the recipe Monday, and again, in a long and protracted manner, while he ate the cake Tuesday night. It was kind of amusing.
A brief spot of research (y'know, done after baking it and eating a piece, as all good researchers do) showed that apparently Campbell's devised this recipe (or the idea of tomato soup cake, at least) and stuck it in a cookbook half a century or so ago. Hardly surprising. It tastes ... odd. And it may actually need a bit more sugar, to be honest; without the icing, it's not sweet at all. It's not bad, though, and he ate the whole piece (and I'm having more tonight). But I don't think we're going to keep it, because I'd like to limit the number of times my partner's brain implodes. Too many times can be harmful, y'know. But I'm glad we tried it; I saw the recipe, and it was so bizarre, I just had to.
Dinner was really, really good, unequivocally. I was really pleasantly surprised about the pork chops: putting oil in the marinade seemed rather odd to me, but it worked out well! I didn't brine these before marinating, and they still turned out well. We did them on the George Foreman grill in lieu of a proper barbecue grill.
And the soup was quite good; the photo doesn't do justice to the taste. Ah, well. Click on that Olive Garden link, they've got a pretty picture, and it looks about the same. I did that with half cannellini beans and half pinto beans because it's what I had to hand, and we wound up adding a bit of water after the simmer, because it'd gone a bit too thick, but all in all it was really good! Just add that water sparingly - I got carried away with the leftover soup I had for lunch today in my water-adding. Oops.
