Tomato Soup I

I got these HUGE heirloom tomatoes at the grocery store and wanted to make a nice tomato soup.  I found a recipe in The Essential New York Times Cookbook called very simply, Tomato Soup I.

Look at these babies!  They are more than 3.5 lbs altogether.

They were nice and deep red on the inside...tasted good, too.

First I cooked them down a bit - nothing but the tomatoes in here just now.

Meanwhile, I scalded some milk.  Now, I've never scaled milk before - I've always been worried about going to far and burn it, but I just did what Amanda said....heat it on med-high till there are some bubbles around the edge and some steam.  Then remove from heat.  I did so and did not end up burning any milk and the pan cleaned up nicely.

Got to use my food mill!

And was left with about 4.5 cups of cooked tomatoes.

I heated up a little butter, put in some salt, pepper, and five crushed-up saltines.

Then added my hot milk and tomatoes.

It came out more pink than red, but it was very, VERY good.  I think maybe the best version of tomato soup that I've had.  I have to say, the tomatoes themselves were critical to the taste of this.

I love these bowls from Le Creuset.  There are two full ladles of soup in there and I could still carry it to the table without worrying about being burned (which did, in fact, happen to me once before with hot home-made soup and resulted in a trip to the ER. Oouuch.)

I don't like gourmet cooking or "this" cooking or "that" cooking. I like good cooking. ~James Beard

My mother's praised chicken.

Nigella Kitchen

I really like Nigella Lawson.  I like her shows and I have a couple of her books.  I like her relaxed approach to food - she clearly enjoys shopping, cooking, entertaining.  I saw an episode of Nigella Kitchen where she prepared this chicken and I ran right away to my copy of the book to find the recipe.  She calls it "praised" as in a combo of "poached" and "braised" - and I love both of those methods!

First I infused a little olive oil with garlic.  I love this little 6 inch pan for that.

Then I browned my bird in the garlic oil.  She has you sort of flatten out the bird first.

 Leeks, carrots, and celery all prepped.

Everybody into the tub...

Add some vermouth and water...

Here's how I do Bouquet Garni if I don't have fresh herbs.  TIP:  I usually don't measure in cooking (but I do for baking).  So how I 'measure' is to pour the herb or spice into the lid and judge the amount from there.

Those are some parsley stems in there.

Bring to bubble, turn it down low, cover and set a timer for 1.5 or 2 hours.

There's a little bit of active time for this, but it's all in the beginning.  This dish would give you time to relax for a while before dinner, or you'd have time to do another dish that might need more attention.

This chicken is so yummy!  I love doing a whole chicken - my husband gets his white meat and I get my dark so everyone's happy.  Then after dinner I pull all the remaining meat off of the bones.  If I've just roasted it, I will put the extra meat into a container and refrigerate it and make something different the next day with it.  But in this case, I just shredded it and put it back into the water, which has now become a nice broth and is therefore now a nice soup with nice veggies (I removed the parsley stems).  I also put my chicken bones into the freezer, when I get two birds in there, I make stock.

~ks

Soup's not dinner, Jerry. ~Kenny Bania

My husband and son would agree.  Not huge soup fans, particularly of the thinner ones.  And my husband really only enjoys them when the weather is cold.  Well, there are times when I could just LIVE on homemade soup and bread!  I didn't make bread tonight, but I did make a simple soup.

Ingredients for Sweet Potato Vichyssoise, and the cookbook.

Healthy Cooking for Two (or just you)

Looks like I didn't catch a picture of the completed soup by itself, so we start from the ingredients.

I made this once before and my seven-year-old niece tried it.  She's so cute...I guess the word "vichyssoise" is a lot for a kid to wrap her head around, so she called it "Sweet Potato Squishy-Squash".  I will never, ever forget that!  

This is a pretty easy soup.  It called for leek but I didn't have one so I subbed an onion.

Things get cooked.

Things get blended.

Pretty yummy way to get your beta-carotene.  Also, this cookbook is nicely set up with two sets of quantities for the ingredients - for two servings or four usually.  This is nice for smaller households.  My sweet potato weighed in at 1 lb, enough for the four-serving portion.  But I only defrosted 2C of chicken stock, the two-serving amount.  I figured I could just add water if I needed to, but it turned out pretty nice the way I did it.  It was thicker, so hubby liked it.  I did use butter and chicken stock, but I think this could be made very nicely as a vegan/vegetarian soup with just a couple simple modifications.

Now, that really isn't quite enough for dinner, unless your appetite is off for some reason.  However, I didn't have any meat defrosted, so I had to resort to an old fall-back.

Pierogies and sauteed onions.

Ok, that may not look like much but we hardly said a word during dinner....just a lot of quiet happy-noises.

The Victory Garden Cookbook

The pierogis are simple enough...buy at store, boil a few minutes, drain, saute in a little butter - and you don't even have to saute them if you don't want to.  You know what they are, right?  They're like fat little raviolis but stuffed with mashed potatoes and cheese.  How can you go wrong with that?  But I like a LOT of sauteed onions to go with them.

I love this cookbook - Marian Morash is so good about explaining all kinds of things about each major group of veggies.  She gives you gardening advice if you are so inclined to that.  She gives you a bunch of basic information about the item, basic ways to cook it, and some more complex recipes, too. I turn to this book for new ideas, and also for reassurance sometimes.  I think it's out of print (I heard they were going to reprint it at some point...not sure if it happened?)  Anyway, I've only seen it in a used bookstore once, whereupon I snatched it right up.  (I LOVE used bookstores for cookbooks!)

There go six medium onions...and I wish I had done more!

Here the onions are about done and the soup is waiting in the wings...ain't it purdy?

And there's the little dumpling darlings getting browned up a bit.


This recipe is vegetarian in the looser sense of the word, but it isn't vegan, since the pierogis had cheese in them.

This is a pretty easy put-it-together-quick sort of thing.  The pierogis could also be used as a side dish, but I never have.



~ks