Yummy Malaysiana: roasted tomato soup with broiled cheddar

Lest you think I spend any part of my days doing Important Things preparing, and totally not at the last second or haphazardly, for my only childs second birthday, or for his first week of pre-preschool; assembling warm, wholesome meals for his lunch each day; meeting my manuscript deadline; dealing with the shoe bomb that went off in my closet, etc. its only fair and honest that I tell you that Ive spent a significant portion of the last year considering ways to merge grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup in a single vessel.

In a way, though, it relates to all of those things (well, not the shoes). Theres something very back-to-school-ish about tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, and because its still September, if youre lucky, you can still get some tomatoes worth eating, and if not that, at least worth cooking down. In my imagined intersections of grilled cheese and tomato soup, I dreamed of grilled cheese croutons in one-inch rounds but rejected it for being overly precious. I considered grilled cheese bread bowls, but never worked out the logistics. But it was when I revisited the ne plus ultra combination of cheese and soup French Onion Soup! th is past spring that I knew unequivocally that the very best solution would be to simply broil an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich on top of a bowl of tomato soup. The only thing left to do was to wait (and wait, and wait) for the slim overlap of tomato season, soup season and a gloomy, rainy week. And that, my friends, brings us to today.