lasagna soup

A side effect of working on my thesis day and night is that I’ve been thinking about my mother an awful lot lately. She made a delicious dinner called lasagna soup once and for some reason I found myself craving it, so I looked online until I found a recipe that seemed like the one she used and headed to Kroger for my ingredients. First miss: I couldn’t find mafala, which are little mini-lasagna noodles, so I grabbed rotini instead. (Someone once told me I reminded him of a curly noodle — I took it as a compliment, because, really, how else are you supposed to take that?) Second miss: The Husband insisted I leave out the can of diced tomatoes suggested in the recipe because I don’t like their texture.

The soup is fairly basic — it’s pretty much lasagna with too much tomato sauce and no ricotta cheese. I diced some garlic and onions with our ground turkey, threw some Spatini and varied Italian spices into a pot of tomato paste and water, then combined the whole shebang with the rotini noodles. It was looking pretty good until I realized I forgot the garlic bread, so I left the soup to simmer while I took care of that … and wound up with this:

Definitely not soup.

I guess maybe I simmered it too long or the missing tomatoes were an integral component whose absence destroyed the dish, and I wound up with rotini and tomato sauce. It wasn’t so bad, really — in fact, I’ve nearly finished the leftovers single-handedly — but it was disappointing in that it turned out nothing like the soup my mother used to make. But then again, I’m firmly convinced she was some sort of magic.

Speaking of magic, I knocked my thesis advisor’s chocolate-chocolate birthday cupcakes out of the park:

He ate two of them during our 20-minute meeting on Thursday. Now my index cards have chocolate fingerprints on them.