MOCTEZUMA CHEESE SOUP

INGREDIENTS

10 ounces queso quesadilla jalapeno (queso = cheese)
½ cup Crema Mexicana (sour cream)
¼ cup grated Four Mexican cheeses
¼ cup water
½ tsp cumin
¼ tsp cayenne

PREPARATION

(Wave your wand and ask that this home-cooked meal be magically cooked by the mythical tomtes of Sweden. Nothing will happen. There are no tumptes and if there were, they would be busy conjuring up Swedish dishes. So you’re on your own. Fortunately, this dish is easy. Are you? I’m too much of a gentleman to ask.)

Anyway, crumble the queso quesadilla jalapeno and put it in a soup pot. Add Crema Mexicana, Four Mexican Cheeses, water, cumin, and cayenne. As mentioned in other parts of this cookbook, you might not have the exact ingredient or don’t want to go to the store again. Again, substitute, substitute, substitute. For example, you can use plain sour cream instead of Crema Mexicana and a can of nacho cheese soup for queso quesadilla jalapeno.

Cook soup on medium-high heat until hot and thoroughly blended. This also makes a nice dip.

TIDBITS

1) This soup is named after the hometown of my grandmother. She married my grandfather who was a surveyor and a lieutenant with the engineers in World War I.

2) My grandfather and his fellow surveyors accidentally started a forest fire in northern Mexico. I would love to have heard the whole story on that one.

3) My grandmother’s grandfather was a doctor who came to Mexico from Missouri after the Civil War. He couldn’t cotton to the Union victory.

4) Her son, my father, and his friends from college went to Mexico during Spring break. Somehow mattresses in the back of their pickup truck caught on fire and kept catching on fire.

5) I went to Calexico with a friend of mine from grad school. An hour after we crossed back into the U.S., a candidate for the Presidency of Mexico was assassinated in Tijuana. I would like to stress I had been in Calexico, not Tijuana, and had been in America already for one hour.