Recipes: Autumn Soup

About five years ago, I purchased the 1971 Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library at a yard sale. I think I paid $5. I doubt that I have all of the hundreds of cards that came with the original product, but most of them are here, and the green, plastic box that holds everything is still in excellent condition. I like cooking. I don't do it any too often, but I do enjoy cooking--and, when it happens, it's frequently a recipe on one of these cards that I work up. So, it was an outstanding yard-sale pickup.

Monday afternoon last week, the girl and I were playing around the house, and she spied the Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library in the kitchen. We got it down, dumped out all of the cards in the living room and played various sorting and throwing games in the floor. Along the way, the photograph for Autumn Soup caught my eye.

I love that big tomato sitting in the middle of the brown soup.

So I whipped up a version of the soup on Tuesday. We're vegetarians, so I didn't use the ground beef. I put in more onion and potatoes than the recipe called for (a couple of white onions, three red-skin potatoes). Also, I added ginger, a bit of butter and a couple of cubes of beefish vegetarian bouillon. Plus, I used a 28-ounce can of stewed whole tomatoes (instead of fresh), and I heated until transluscent all of the onion, ginger and celery in olive oil in the bottom of my soup pan before adding anything else. Other than that, I pretty much followed Betty Crocker's plan of attack.

Turned out great. The big tomatoes were the stars of the show. Rachel toasted some bread and lathered it with some sort of cheese spread. All three of us have subsequently enjoyed the leftovers.

I would definitely eat Autumn Soup again, but I doubt I'll make it again only because I think it's more fun to make things I've never made before. Next up in the Betty Crocker queue is some sort of battered meats, and I'm also intrigued by a Chef Boyardee sauce-and-boiled eggs recipe that I saw in an old Saturday Evening Post the other day.