Wednesday, January 27, 2016

My souped-up lunch lacks one essential ingredient

"Go ahead, expand your horizons," said the woman behind the lunch counter, but if all it takes to expand my horizons is to try a new type of soup, then my horizons are pretty constricted. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I shouldn't have needed to buy lunch at all today thanks to my forward-thinking work in constructing a lovely ham sandwich with mustard on homemade rye bread last night, but a ham sandwich forgotten in the refrigerator back home provides little satisfaction when I'm miles away at work, so I decided to try the soup despite the fact that it was billed as "Philly Cheese Steak Soup." It strikes me that soupiness would not be a desirable trait in a Philly Cheese Steak, and I don't want to think about what would result if you put a bunch of Philly Cheese Steaks in a blender and hit "Puree." But the lunch counter lady told me to expand my horizons so how could I resist such a challenge? 

I am now prepared to reliably report that the soup contains just about everything you'd expect to encounter in something called Philly Cheese Steak Soup: pale melty cheeselike product, limp bits of green bell pepper, floating microscopic shards of a substance that may at one time have been attached to a cow.

Everything, that is, except flavor.

It did not taste like cheese. It did not taste like steak. It did not taste like onions, grilled peppers, or a toasted bun. It did not, in fact, taste like anything. I submit to you that any food product that claims a resemblance to Philly Cheese Steak ought to, at the very minimum, taste like something, but this soup failed the taste test. I'd rather try to survive on an invisible ham sandwich.

Now I'm busy trying to contract my horizons to exclude Philly Cheese Steak Soup. I just hope my horizons have not gone all flabby from being overstretched.

1 comment:

Stop all the Complaining said...

That sounds horrible. I would not have even been brave enough to try it.