Sometimes it works out that the a recipe that turns out to be delicious just doesn’t photograph all that well. And, then, of course, there are the finished products that are plenty photogenic, yet lackluster when it comes to taste (yesterday’s focaccia ringing any bells?). Today, I’m sharing two recipes, one in each of these two categories.

Let’s start with the ugly. Well, actually, “ugly” only in the sense that I have thrown out the recipe (and the leftovers) and deleted the link from my semi-out-of-control recipe spreadsheet. This deeply, brilliantly green soup you see here here jumped out at me from the pages of last month’s Eating Well, magazine. The hue and the flavors just seemed too springy to resist. So I whipped up a pot, delighting in the smell of the rosemary, the healthy promise of the spinach and, of course, the color. But it just fell flat. The flavors were muted and kind of muddy tasting. I managed to spruce it up by adding tiny diced (really tiny: 1/8 inch) sauteed potatoes, shreds of smoked turkey that I warmed quickly in a dry pan and a hefty dallop of Fage yogurt. That all detracted from the pristine puree that had allured me in the first place, but—hey—at least it was edible.

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There are times when I look forward to having dinner guests because it’s an excuse to craft intricate menus and take on wow-factor recipes. But there are also times when I feel lucky to have the kind of friends coming for dinner who won’t mind when you announce that you’re making tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Not only that, but they assure you they have been craving just that very menu. Even if they’re lying, these are my kind of dinner guests.

Of course, I wasn’t planning to pop open a can of Campbell’s or unsheath a stack of Kraft singles for the occasion. In fact, I’ve been on the prowl for a new tomato soup recipe because, while the one I’ve been relying on for a few winters now is quite lovely, eating it always feels a little bit like slurping down a bowl of marinara. Um, yeah, time for a new recipe.

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The recipes that have been populating this blog lately are definitely in our “weekend” category. Truth be told, we do not eat ribs, cheesecake and cookies on the average Monday through Thursday. For the most part, our everyday meals are things I’ve already told you about (like this, which I baked on Sunday morning; this, our weekly installment of Salad Monday; this, which went straight into tupperware, brown bag lunches and our bellies; and this, which was just the re-fuel I needed after I nearly died during my first Bikram yoga class on Tuesday).

Sundays, though, exist in a kind of purgatory between week and weekend. If you ask Kevin, who has a chronic case of Sunday Blues, it’s depressingly closer to week than weekend. But, cooking-wise, I never feel quite right making a plain ol’ weeknight meal on a Sunday night. I’m not about to undertake homemade pasta, mind you. But I still like to end the weekend with something at least a little special.

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I feel an teensy bit guilty posting about French Onion Soup on this very American Super Tuesday. I thought about baking an apple pie (as American as it gets, sure, but also a little late summer/early fall) or something red, white and blue (but, really, shouldn’t such tri-colored treats be limited to the 4th of July or banished for good?) or, more aptly, something just blue (wink, wink). But since I’ve been too glued to CNN’s Ballot Bowl to have time to make anything new, I’ll have to share the French Onion Soup we made last weekend instead. Call it Freedom Onion Soup, if you must.

My favorite part about making French Onion Soup is watching the onions transform from a pile of crisp half moons to a limp mass of soft caramelized curls. Take a peek at the transformation, which takes about 45 minutes:

And once you get yourself a pot lined with caramelized onions, you stream in even more delicious richness (red wine and beef stock, in my recipe), which will lift up the caramelization the onions imparted on the surface of the pot. Wouldn’t want to let that go to waste, now would we?

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I accidentally fell in love with split pea soup recently. Let me explain. One of my favorite pastimes is wandering around the little market a couple blocks from our house. Every time I’m there, I discover something else that I’d never noticed before. For instance, yesterday I found an extremely impressive array of pickles (not just cucumbers, but all manner of pickles) tucked away in a small corner. I’ve been to that nook of the store dozens of times, but there is so much to look at it, the pickles somehow alluded me.

While I could go on and on about my love for this little market, I’ll get back to the split pea soup now. Like the pickles, I somehow failed to notice that the market offered up several homemade soups every day. Perhaps it’s the weather that’s called such a thing to my attention. But the other day, the handwritten sign listing the soups of the day suddenly called out to me. And among the offerings, split pea soup inexplicably beckoned.

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