Tomato Drop Soup

American Soup

TOMATO DROP SOUP

INGREDIENTS

1 10.75 ounce can condensed tomato soup
10.75 ounces of any water from tap to bottles from Norwegian glaciers
1/2 teaspoon Vegetable MagicTM spice
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
2 large eggs
3/4 cups Monterey Jack cheese

PREPARATION

Pour condensed soup in pot. (This is easy on a planet with gravity.) Fill empty tomato can with water. Pour water into pot. Sprinkle in vegetable spice and garlic salt. Stir and heat at medium-to-high temperature. Add the eggs as soon as the soup looks like it’s fixing to boil. For consistency’s sake, make sure you break the yolks after you put them in. Stir in the cheese.

Soup is ready to serve when egg yolks are done and cheese is melted. This is so easy. Try it.

TIDBITS

1) This dish is called “Tomato Drop Soup” because you could drop everything into the tomato soup base. I do not, however, recommend dropping the raw eggs into the soup at any great height. Hot soup does nasty things to your skin when it splatters onto you.

2) The cans listed at 10.75 used to be 11 ounces. They might have been 12 ounces at one point. Soup companies and canners in general often prefer to shrink their products rather than raise prices. Fine, but we recipe writers and readers hate this practice.

3) Now that I’m in a slightly foul mood, let me rant about the chickens’ complete inability to lay even the simplest of fractional eggs such as 1/2. I might have made this recipe with 1 1/2 eggs, but the lazy chickens pig-headedly lay entire eggs.

4) When my mother was a young girl, her mother raised chickens. Often Grandma would let the chickens peck for their own food in the backyard lawn. Since the grass was normally too high for the chickens, Grandpa would cut half the lawn one week, as that was all the lawn the chickens needed to inspect, and half the next week. Mom grew up thinking that’s how everyone mowed their lawns.

5) Once rain water got into the chicken feed. The feed fermented. The chickens ate the fermented feed. The chickens got drunk and staggered around, often falling. That would have been something to see.

6) I wonder if that counts as marinating the chickens.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.