Before I start - those of you who check in the morning should be aware that I made two updates to yesterday's journal entry, so if you checked before about 2:30, you haven't read it all!
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Well, we had a nice evening last night. We were trying to decide what to do about dinner when K.T. called and asked whether we wanted to come over for dinner. Before I could even tell Matt what she was planning to make, he said, "Yes! Sounds great! Fantastic!" (Go on - guess whose turn it was to make dinner.)
KT made Reuben soup for us. There's a brief story behind this soup. KT once worked for a restaurant in Williamsburg called Beethoven's. Beethoven's was a moderately pretentious sandwich shop that played classical music on its sound system, kept board games and toys for people to play with on the tables, had extremely slow service and moderately high prices, and only used rye and pumpernickel bread. The food was very good, I understand. I have to understand this, because I don't care for pumpernickel bread, and a childhood mishap with rye makes me nauseous just smelling it; never mind trying to eat it. Since this was a sandwich shop, you can imagine that this significantly reduced the number of things on their menu that I was able to eat. When outvoted and dragged there anyway, I usually just had a cheese and cracker platter.
I'm getting off track. The point was, Beethoven's, despite being a little pretentious, made pretty good food. While KT was working there, they occasionally made what they called Cream of Reuben soup. The soup was, more or less, a Reuben sandwich (corned beef, sauerkraut, swiss cheese, and russian dressing) minus the bread, in a cream base. The traditional bread for a Reuben is rye, and so I'd never tried one. Besides, I didn't like sauerkraut or swiss cheese, and these seemed ample reasons to avoid the soup as well. But K.T. loved Reubens, and she adored this soup. So she asked for the recipe, promising that she wouldn't give it out and she'd tell everyone where she got it. (Another local sandwich place, the Cheese Shop, employs this tactic with its employees to safeguard the recipe for their fantastic house dressing.)
Beethoven's refused.
Now, K.T. is nothing if not determined, so while she was living in Lynchburg, without much else to do, she reverse-engineered the recipe. As a sort of revenge to Beethoven's for being so snooty to her, she gave the recipe to a number of delis in the Lynchburg area, at least one of which added it to their regular menu. It's a wonderfully rich soup, if you like Reubens. (I learned to like them later, when I'd decided sauerkraut wasn't all bad and swiss cheese was bearable in small doses - and when I'd found someone who would make it for me without giving me weird looks for asking for it on a roll instead of on rye.) It involves all the ingredients for a Reuben sandwich - aside from the bread, as I said, along with cream and sour cream and broth. This is not what we call a heart-healthy soup. But it's sooooo good.
After dinner, we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas. Matt and I had been playing the soundtrack to it while we carved our jack-o-lanterns, and one of the songs had gotten stuck in my head. So I suggested we bring it with us to watch. Of course, as it was starting KT realized that she had her own copy of it on her shelf! But it was fun. It's a fairly silly little movie.
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I'm a little sleepy today. After we got home, I still had to take a shower, so I didn't get to bed until about 11 or so. And that's why this is all you're getting. Enjoy the animated gif and stop grumbling.
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