As promised earlier I made this for lunch.
1. Ingredients as described...I added a bit of class with some Paxo as it was all the corner shop had in.
2. This is where my concerns first began to grow. I was feeling meticulous (ie. I took an extra 10 seconds) to cut the tomatos into eight instead of quartering them which still seemed to be too big. It seemed obvious that the onions would be much better diced considering the short cooking time, but we're following the recipe so in they went 'finely sliced'.
3. In goes the stock cube, tomato puree, stuffing and a bit of water.
4. I wasn't really sure what the point of 'slowly adding' the rest of the water was, but again we're following the recipe so in slowly it went along with the vinegar and sugar.
5. I let it cook for 20 minutes - but with the occasional stir as it seemed to thicken up very quickly despite me using the full 400ml of water in the recipe.
6. The whole lot served in a mug which isn't especially large
Review
In fairness to Jack this didn't taste as bad as I was expecting. It did however have a couple of major problems.
The first was the flavours. As above it didn't taste as bad as I was fearing, but the issue was that none of the flavours really seemed to come together. You got the tomato flavour, and the onions (see below) but the only real taste of seasoning was when you happened to get a couple of nuggets of the stuffing, because they don't really dissolve or otherwise flavour the whole dish.
The second, and bigger issue, however was the texture. As I said above, my fear when chopping the onion and tomato was that they really should have been diced up so that they would cook properly and this was definitely an issue. The tomato had just about broken down so wasn't terrible, though the skins were still a bit tough. The onions however were still very stringy and had quite a bit of crunch to them, which wasn't very pleasant as part of the overall dish.
The 20 minute cooking time is quite short for something like this anyway, but with Jack for some reason not specifying to finely dice the onion and tomato, the whole dish just didn't taste properly cooked. I managed probably slightly less than half of the mug and I really didn't want any more.
I think the main thing I came away from this thinking was simply 'why?'. I think i'd rather just have a tin of tomato soup with some bread than the effort of making this. It's the addition of the stuffing that is particularly weird for me. Surely most people are more likely to have a bit of stale bread and some dried herbs in the cupboard than a pack of stuffing that you need to open just to use a couple of spoonfuls of?
This gets a "2 - Terrible" largely because the recipe as followed gives you something that doesn't taste like its properly cooked and the stuffing just feels totally unnecessary. Calling for the tomatos to be cut in quarters (or eighths if you're 'feeling meticulous') and slicing rather than dicing the onion just smells of laziness - you save a few seconds of prep but end up with a dish that would probably be much better if you'd just done it properly in the first place.
Now fuck off x