Truth be told I've been spending a fair bit of my free time working on a present for Tom that I'm making (I decided pretty much at the last minute to do it, so there was no way I was going to be able to finish it in time for Valentine's day so he got a home made card (which is very cute if I say so myself) and a steak dinner, and then because he wasn't feeling very well on Valentine's Day itself I also did a nice dinner last Sunday :)
I shall reveal what I've been making when it's ready (and if I deem it of acceptable quality to share with the internet, hehe).
Anyway, I have still been cooking recipes off my list, I just haven't updated the totals, or written anything up.
Last week, sometime, I have actually forgotten when it was (probably on a weekend though), I made another soup recipe from Ravinder Bhogal's Cook in Boots book, the Roasted Tomato Soup with Ham & Cheese Soldiers recipe from the Comfort Food section. I wasn't in a depressed mood or anything, it just sounded (and looked) delicious, plus as I mentioned Tom wasn't very well at the time, and didn't have a huge appetite so thought he might appreciate it. See, I can do considerate too.
This one was again pretty easy, but I have to admit it's the one time I wished I actually had a proper blender rather than my hand blender. It did a good job, but I think the soup would have been even more delicious if I could have got it that little bit smoother, but then nothing is perfect in life so I try not to beat myself up about things like this :D
This recipe made a fair amount of soup for both of us to have a serving and a bit more on the night, and I still had enough to take it to work in a flask two days in a row, and still have a mugful left at the end. Now that's a sure sign of a good soup recipe in my book!
I'll give a quick overview of the recipe for those who are interested, but I really can't recommend buying the book enough (I should be on commission!); the photos are gorgeous and feminine (even to someone like me, who practically growls every time my mother suggests I try to be more 'girly'), the choice of recipes and structure of the whole book is great (each chapter serves a specific purpose in a woman's life), and the range of ingredients is varied enough to be interesting, but not so exotic as to be impossible to come by in a less ethnically diverse environment. Ok, now you're all going to think I AM on commission - honestly I'm not, I just love this book.
Anyway, here's what I used and what I did for Roasted Tomato Soup with Cheese & Ham Soldiers:
Ingredients (serves 6, or 2 with lots left over)
1 kg ripe tomatoes, halfed - I used a mix of normal vine tomatoes and cherry tomatoes that were reduced in the Co-Op and needed rescuing :)
4 garlic cloves, chopped
3 sprigs of thyme
2 red onions, sliced
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 litre vegetable stock
dried basil (I didn't have fresh)
creme fraiche, to serve
For the soldiers (I adjusted the proportion to be enough for 2 people rather than 6)
20g melted salted butter (I don't normally bother with butter but this stuff was made by the Food processing unit at the College where I used to work, with milk from their top-notch dairy herd!)
4 slices white toasting bread
1 heaped tsp English mustard (I spread it thinly as I don't like it that much but thought I'd give it a go anyway)
100g double Gloucester cheese (also from my old workplace)
4 slices wafer thin ham
Method
1. I preheated the oven to 220c, and arranged the halved tomatoes in a roasting tin with the cut side facing up.
2. I then scattered over the thyme leaves, sliced onions, and the salt and pepper to taste.After that I sprinkled over the sugar and drizzled it with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
3. I then popped it in the oven for about 35-40 minutes (a bit longer than the original recipe stated as I didn't think my oven was quite hot enough. The smell was just divine....
4. Shortly before removing the tomatoes I put the stock on to boil in my awesome Alessi stockpot (I love that pot so much, it was made for making soup...), and once the tomatoes were looking blistered, wrinkled and split on the edges, I took the roasting tin out of the oven and added the whole lot to the stock.
5. You're then supposed to cook at the same temperature for 5 minutes while mushing the tomatoes with the back of a wooden spoon.
This was the bit I found a little bit difficult as they didn't seem to want to break up all that easily and it was quite hot working around the steaming stock. I'd definitely recommend wearing an oven glove or something similar at this point. I suppose if you actually HAVE a blender then it doesn't matter so much how you much you mush up the tomatoes as they'll get blended properly later on. In my case though I suspected that the hand blender wouldn't quite suffice, so was trying to mush them up as best I could. I almost gave in and used the potato masher, but then I remember you're not supposed to use metal spoons or utensils with tomatoes as the acids react with the metal and end up giving the food a nasty after-taste.
6. Once I was happy with the mashing job I'd done by hand, I reduced the temperature to a low-ish simmer, got out the hand blender and blended it in the pot for about... hmmm.... probably a good 5 - 10 minutes, but maybe more, until I was happy I gotten rid of the worst of the bits. It'd probably take much less time in the blender.
The thing to remember with hand blenders is that the powerful ones will suck your hand and therefore the blades towards the bottom of the pan, so if you've got a good quality pan with a non-stick coating then you'll want to take it easy with the blender so as not to scratch the surface. But at the same time you need the blending hood bit to be beneath the surface of your liquid or it might spray hot soup all over your hands/face/kitchen! Safety warning aside, they are a lot of fun to work with though, and I certainly won't be getting rid of mine anytime soon :)
7. I then left the soup on the back-burner on the lowest gas mark while I made the soldiers.
[Basically the soldiers are very similar to a croque-monsieur which is a very common French snack food (literal meaning is crunch-mister, so doesn't make a lot of sense), and which you might find under the ''Petit Creux' section of the menu. This means 'little hollow', as in I've got a little hollow space in my stomach that needs filling with something like a Croque Monsieur i.e. I'm peckish. I love the expression 'petit creux' so much that I use it over here in Britain all the time. In fact I've got a 'petit creux' right now]
Anyway....I heated my griddle pan until very hot as instructed, and brushed one side of each slice of toasting bread with the melted better.
8. On two of the unbuttered sides of the bread, I spread a teeeny thin layer of mustard, and then layered it with the cheese and ham, and topped with another slice of bread (so that the buttered sides are on the outside).
9. I then griddled each sandwich on both sides until the cheese started to melt. In my case I think the pan could have been a bit cooler as the cheese took a while to melt, and the bread was at risk of burning.
10. Once they were cooked, I cut each one into 4 soldiers and poured out two big bowls of tomato soup. I added a heaped teaspoonful of creme fraiche and stirred it into the soup and served with the soldiers as below (apologies for the shoddy picture, I was too hungry at that point to fiddle around with the phone camera settings to get a decent image!)
So there you have it, another recipe to tick off the list, and another recipe that I shall most definitely be trying again, although I have to admit I think I'll probably leave off the mustard as I didn't love it. The soup tasted really good without the creme fraiche when I took it to work, but it did certainly add something to the soup, so I'd recommend trying it both ways and just seeing what you prefer.
So that brings the current tally to:
9 completed recipes, 63 recipes remaining and 44 and a bit weeks left.
It sounds like a lot, but I've got more recipes to write up so we are getting there, albeit somewhat slowly! Plus I've got a few birthdays coming up, so that gives me more opportunities to get the sweet stuff out the way (and not just eat it all myself!).
Bye for now,
Lettie
xx
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