31 Whole Days!-8/3/09

With 31 days to do the 60 recipes in this month's Gourmet magazine, I took the weekend off from cooking. Since April, I've been jamming each month's recipes into as little as two weeks because of traveling and I was ready to spend a night at home without doing dishes. It was nice but I'm ready to get started with August's Gourmet recipes.
My first recipe of the month was one of a number of tomato based recipes in this issue, the Roasted-Tomato Soup with Parmesan Wafers (technically two recipes). I was a little nervous about using the plum tomatoes I'd bought at the grocery store. If these tomatoes weren't flavorful, the soup would be really bland. Thankfully, the hour-long roast really helped bring some great flavor to these tomatoes and that translated to the soup. The blend of tomato and cream was perfect and preserved the tomato taste. The Parmesan Wafers were very easy to make. I don't have a nonstick baking pad so I just lay wax paper on a regular baking sheet. That way worked just fine. The wafers quickly melted into the hot soup so I had to take my picture quickly but then the Parmesan flavor melted nicely into the soup.
The main dish I made tonight was linguine with the Tonnato Sauce with Arugula. This sauce was one of seven sauces that are featured in this issue. I have to admit, I was glad to get this one out of the way. Canned tuna and mayonnaise sounds like a sandwich, not a pasta sauce. Sadly, my impressions were correct. I thought the recipe called for too many capers, the caper flavor was overpowering. I felt like I was eating a tuna fish sandwich on linguine. I'm sure it will all get yummier from here.
Roasted-Tomato Soup with Parmesan Wafers-B+
Tonnato Sauce with Arugula-D

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