In my planning for my 60×60 goals, I wanted to try making some soups. This past week, I did. And while I often choose recipes well enough to add the result to my personal collection, this one didn’t make the cut.

I have a digital recipe book called The Teen Kitchen: Recipes We Love To Cook by Emily and Lyla Allen. As the title suggests, two teens made a book of recipes they like to cook, and the recipes are not particularly complicated. Even if they have a few extra steps, they’re all relatively straightforward. They fall in the easy to moderate range.

I found a recipe for Creamy Crunchy Tortilla Soup that sounded enticing and gave it a go.

For the main ingredients, it had a sweet onion, celery, carrot, zucchini, garlic, a can of diced tomatoes, and frozen corn kernels. Spices included turmeric, paprika, cumin, chili powder, and salt. Other ingredients included EVOO to cook the onions and celery, and vegetable broth.

You basically cook the first little bits, get them going, add in a few more large items from cans or bags, and then add the vegetable broth. After you basically cook it all together, you then have to use an immersion blender to get it down to a creamy consistency.

And I think that was part of my distaste for the prep side of the recipe. I do not like blenders of any kind (nor cleaning them), particularly if they are likely to fling stuff out of the pot, and particularly if one of the ingredients is turmeric. It wasn’t terrible, but was a bit finicky, and since I don’t do it regularly (come to think of it, this may have been the first time I ever used an immersion blender), I found it more work than it was worth.

Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t taste BAD or anything. Just nothing that special. It was nice for a meal, but nothing to write home about, so to speak.

I didn’t completely follow the recipe for one aspect. They have options to make your own tortilla chips. or use storebought, and we have some really high-end ones from a butchery in Bells’ Corners, so used those. They’re good quality, not too salty, and add some much-needed extra texture. The soup was definitely better with the tortilla chips than without, but as I said, not good enough to warrant the extra work to add it to the personal collection. Glad I tried it, and I can count it towards the goals, but not a keeper. FWIW, here’s a simple pic of the resulting soup: