Throwback of the House: Triple Play Warmer Is Not So Hot

Mixing dull green pea soup with bright red tomato soup isn't attractive. Red and green make brown. For one promising moment, before the colors blended and turned the color of a sewage lagoon, it looked a bit like mattar curry. How can anything that looks like something so wonderful be bad?

Oh, it can be that bad, all right. It can be so bad that my husband, eater of Vienna Sausages, Spam and split-pea soup, took a whiff and said, "I don't think I can take a bite."

It probably didn't help that I'd just gone all Linda Blair in the sink beside him, spitting my sample with splattering fury.

He did choke down a bite, deeming the soup so bad that throwing it in the trash or pouring it down the sink simply wouldn't do. The only way to erase the memory of this abomination, as stomach-churning as a missed ninth inning catch, was to flush it down the toilet.

We call it number three.

Robin Wheeler writes the blog Poppy Mom. After years of making and eating fancy food, Robin is sick of it all. She's returning to the basics: recipes that haven't surfaced in three decades. She reports on the results for Gut Check every Monday.