Friday Night Dinner: Creamy Sun Dried Tomato Soup & Balsamic Pear Salad

It's Friday! It's the one night of the week I can chill and wait up for my husband who works evenings. Friday night dinner is always special, because it's the one meal of the week I am guaranteed to have some quality time with my husband - even if I have to wait up until 9 or 10 to do it!

So tonight I made Creamy Sun Dried Tomato Soup & Balsamic Pear Salad.

My husband loves soup, so I decided to try my hand at my version of tomato basil soup. 

For the soup I used:

1 jar of sun dried tomatoes

1/2 red onion

1 tbsp basil

2 cans of tomato paste

1 can of diced tomatoes

1 can of diced tomatoes with green chilies

2 TBSP of sugar

1c half & half

Salt & Tony's Creole Seasoning to taste

First, I chopped my red onion and used my blender to chop the sun dried tomatoes. Then I started heating them in a pot on medium high until the onions became soft and caramelized slightly. 

I added my tomatoes and tomato paste, and heated it evenly. 

I used my immersion blender (that my wonderful hubby got me for Christmas) to make it a little less chunky. I usually like my tomato soup thick, though.

I added the half & half to the mixture and let it simmer.

But what would tomato soup be without bread and cheese??

For my crostini I sliced a loaf of soft French bread (not a baguette since this will be toasted). I sliced the ends of the loaf very thin to serve alongside my salad, and I cut the largest portion into thick slices. 

For my topping, I grated pepper jack cheese into thin pieces and placed it onto my bread slices and put them in the oven. (You may want to save this step for a couple of minutes before serving.)

After 2-3 minutes on Broil in the oven, they came out crisp and golden!

It was delicious!!

For the Balsamic Pear Salad:

I mixed spinach greens with romaine lettuce first. I chopped up some Priester's pecans (they are so big and delicious!) and sliced half of the remaining red onion to garnish the greens. 

I sliced a little under half of a large cucumber for the salad, and placed small pear halves on the plate along with the tiny crostini slices I had made. Then, I finished it with a balsamic vinaigrette.

On a whim: Since I had cucumber and red onion left, I decided to make some pickled cucumbers for later tonight or tomorrow. 

In a bowl (with a lid) I mixed vinegar, water and sugar to taste (1 c water, 1-1/2 c vinegar, 1/4 c sugar).

I sliced the remaining cucumber as thin as I could, and added them to the vinegar mixture. I cut the red onion into slivers and added it to the bowl. 

I sealed the finished product and set it in the refrigerator to marinate for at least a couple of hours.

Why I chose writing...

Sometimes, I have to remind myself of why I chose to pursue writing. Thus far, I have certainly not pursued it as a career - and perhaps I should as I develop my portfolio. I have pursued it as a hobby, but it has been a while since I have stretched my creative mind much less run a creative marathon.

So why did I choose to follow my college education into writing?

I wanted to be everything.

As a kid, I can remember wanting to try it all! As I found in notes from my junior high years, I wanted to be a senator and a lawyer. Very early on, I wanted to be a paleontologist, geologist, or astronaut. Anything I studied, I wanted to make my career. Reading was my life. I wanted to do everything all of my books talked about. I wanted to be a historian, an archeologist, or some other artifact seeker. This desire to do everything followed me even to my first years of college when I began my higher education in pursuit of an architectural degree - this turned into an art degree which I finally abandoned for English and Creative Writing in my second year. Writing it what felt right!

Going into my fourth year, I tiptoed through my creative writing. My peers made my writing much more restricted than I would have liked. The focus was narrowed, and I stopped writing for myself and started writing to please my classmates and professors - none of whom agreed with me for the majority of the time on what made a good story.

All of my English major friends warned me that linguistics was a killer class... Wary of the required class that all of my classmates spoke of with intense loathing, I saved it for my second to last semester when my load was lightest. I shouldn't have! I loved my one and only linguistics class. It was another study I would have loved to pursue! I could be just like Henry Higgins from Pygmalion, I thought. Yeah right.

Recently I revisited my choices in education, wondering what possessed me to take such a pinball approach. Now that I am almost two years out of college and have some real-world job experience (as a receptionist and administrative assistant) I have the distance needed to reevaluate what I want for my career - my life.

I want to write. I have no idea what I want to write. I have no idea where to begin writing. I jump from one project to the next, trying to get a picture of what I really want to accomplish with my writing. For so long I've considered a blog, but what to write about? Will I be consistent enough? Will anyone care what I write about? How can I possibly write about everything I want to write about and contain it in a blog that should have some thread of relevancy throughout?

I still don't know.

But I am excited to try. So. Here I go.