Our reign of soup terror continues! Watch out Giuseppe!
It has slightly become an obsession. I had this idea that we could have like four different homemade soups in the freezer… it would be like living in a restaurant! Unfortunately, we keep eating them. Today, we tackle the classic Cream of Tomato.
Today’s recipe comes from… you guessed it… Americastestkitchen.com. When trying a lot of new recipes you can either buy a lot of cookbooks… which gets expensive and impractical (How do you know if it’s a good book until after you’ve used it extensively?) or you can go to the internet, which has its own trust issues. The ATK family of magazines, websites, and tv shows are all pretty solid, and you can feel confident that the recipe has been well vetted.
However… they generally expect you to PAY for their content. Luckily, the good recipes have usually been reposted on someone else’s food blog….. so here’s the RECIPE for the soup. As you can see from the photo above, quite a few ingredients in this soup.
Good, fresh tomatoes are hard to find in a store. Especially this time of year. This recipe calls for canned whole tomatoes, which is great because they are cheap and you know they’ll be consistent in quality. Here we’re straining the juice (to be used later).
Pulling the seeds out of the tomatoes. Then, after sprinkling with brown sugar, they get oven roasted. That creates a bit of a mess. Definitely want to coat your pan in foil for quicker cleanup.
After last week’s feature of leeks, we bring you this week’s boutique onion… the SHALLOT! Mild, sweet, and delicate.
Simmering butter, shallots, tomato paste, and allspice (Which is “one thing” not a combination of all spices… what a dumb name.) Fun fact: allspice is actually a dried berry.
The soup looks strangely orange after we added the flour and chicken stock to the soup. Now, the reserved tomato juice. The roasted tomatoes go in at this time too.
Just like the Smitten Kitchen lady, we skipped the final strain step, thanks to our magical immersion blender. The soup gets finished off with 1/2 cup of cream, a couple tablespoons of dry sherry, and a pinch of cayenne pepper (just for kicks).
Well, before we show the final soup shot…. lets go to the Ur-Accompaniment for Tomato soup… the grilled cheese! Who doesn’t love a good grilled cheese sandwich with their tomato soup? Just like mom used to make! Coincidentally, neither of our mothers ever served us tomato soup with grilled cheese (that we can recall – No worries mom, I don’t think I liked tomato soup as a kid anyway). Insert sad face here.
We started with some good sourdough bread cut into thick slices. Then I scavenged through our fridge to see what kind of cheeses we had on hand. That’s a Chez Venza rule: always have cheese on hand in case of emergency. I came up with Swiss, cheddar, and parmesan. Three-cheese sandwich, here we come!
Shredded cheese wasn't the best choice, but it was all we had. It gets a little messy, especially when I was buttering the outside of the bread and had to flip it over halfway through. Can’t lose any of that precious cheese!
For experimentation sake, we used a George Foreman grill as a makeshift panini press. It worked out pretty well, but I wish I had more control over the temperature so that I could get a really good brown crust. Here’s the final, delicious result:
Check out the nice grill marks!
Warm and cozy comfort food. The cayenne pepper in the soup adds a nice surprise. It’s very subtle, but there’s definitely a nice finish to the soup that comes from the pepper.
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