Gutsy Cooks Club Menu 29: Soup & Sandwiches

We definitely go the Soup & Sandwich dinner route during the week regularly. Usually some sort of panini; ham, swiss & pear or turkey, fresh mozzarella, tomato & basil with soup: creamy basil tomato is our usual go to soup most often.

This week's Gutsy Cooks menu recipes reminded me a "Foo Foo" Soup & Sandwich meal. It actually would of been perfect for a baby or bridal shower but since we didn't happen to have any of those going on this weekend we went for plain ole' Thursday Night Soup & Sandwich Night on the upscale.

First was the sandwich: Coronation Chicken Rolls from The Illustrated Kitchen Bible. When I read through the recipe I knew I'd love these. First, it's a curried chicken salad and I LOVE CURRY and second it gave us a reason to use these:

Are you familiar? We love these rolls. We first started using them to make burger sliders now we use them for any roll stand in possibility out there. And they were perfect with this chicken salad. The roll is incredibly soft & sweet just perfect for a savory topping like curried chicken salad.

We went the rotisserie chicken route, it was Thursday and T had bronchitis so this had to be as doable as possible to pull off. We diced the chicken.

Then chopped the shallot. Gotta love shallot.

The next step was to saute the shallot with 1 tsp curry powder ( loving curry as  T does we used 2 Tblspns) with tomato paste and Worcestershire sauce.

You then put the curry mixture into a food processor with mayo and it called for apricot halves in juice. ( T misread this when we went to the grocery store we bought dried apricots instead) So we improvised and did some chunks of dried apricot and some diced peaches in their juice....and we ended up with this:

After adding the sauce to the chicken you end up with a lovely chicken salad. One of our favorite summertime treats. Our favorite combo includes red grapes, sliced almonds, curry and tarragon. We often make it on crusty bread to take out for a day on the boat. But this is pretty good too.

Next we made the soup; Vichyssoise who knew we actually eat Vichyssoise all of the time. It's potato leek soup. We usually get it from Metropolitan Market's Soup bar every other week at least. It's G's favorite.

Since G loves this so much we didn't get "gutsy" with it. T just wanted it to be as good as the Mets is. We first washed the leeks, after we sliced them we let them soak in cold water awhile, it's important leeks get fully clean. (our leeks look a little sad we bought them on Saturday and kept them in the fridge until Thursday ..might of been a day or two too much.)

We sauteed the leeks in butter, since it was on 43 degrees outside on this day we went for the serving it warm option listed in the recipe.

I then chopped potato, celery and chive.

Added chicken stock instead of veggie stock that recipe called for and let all the veggies cook with the leeks.

We then removed the soup from the stove and used an immersion blender to blend the soup a bit. We like it just a tad chunky, so you get a potato bit or two per bite so we chose not to go the blender route. Drizzled a little heavy cream, added fresh ground pepper and chopped chive.

T was very optimistic about this one. We have to say some of the recipes in this cookbook have definitely been some hits and some misses.

We served our "foo foo" soup & salad meal with our regular, especially lately we're on a wine budget evidently, mid week Columbia Crest Two Vines; tonight the Pinot Grigio varietal. (To be honest the Chardonnay is much better than the Pinot Grigio, this was pretty tasteless with this meal.)

The big test was if G tasted it and thought it was as good as the Mets. He was distracted on his ipad and so he made T wait for his response but when he finally tasted it; response: "Yeah, this is good." translated= "A hit" that's as excited as he gets on a Thursday night.

Overall this was a good showing from The Illustrated Kitchen Bible.