Smoky bacon and tomato soup (serves 2)

Hi there,

I'm trying to be a bit more proactive (i.e. bit less lazy) about getting recipes up on here, so I'm typing this one up as my steaming bowl of soup is sat next to me on our nice new dining table - no more eating off our knees (hooray!).

Tom cooked for us last night and ended up going a bit overboard on the veg... as a result we had quite a bit left over which I thought might be nice to turn into soup using my newest toy, a Salter hand blender :) This makes me very happy as I've wanted a hand blender (or as I like to call them, soup sticks) pretty much ever since my year abroad in France. But anyway, I digress.

The veg we had left over was just basic mixed veg (baby carrots, cauliflower, broccoli) and some peas that had come from the freezer so there were quite a few options when I looked on the BBC Food website, but really I wanted something I could use my blender with, and something a bit tomato-ey. We also happened to have some smoked bacon in the fridge so Ian Rankin's recipe for Smoky Bacon and Tomato soup seemed an ideal place to start. You can click on the link above to see the original recipe but this is what I used and what I did.


Ingredients (serves 2)
(original recipe served 1 so I just roughly doubled the ingredients)


1 to 2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
2 to 3 garlic cloves, crushed
3 slices smoky bacon (I didn't want to use the whole pack!)
1 pint chicken stock
1 tin chopped tomatoes
1 soup/cereal bowl leftover veg (broccoli, baby carrot, cauliflower, peas)
5 tbsp tomato puree
1 tsp red pesto (completely optional, I just added it to see if it brought anymore tomato-ey-ness, but I'm not sure if it did)

Method

My method was pretty much the same as in Ian Rankin's recipe, but here's what I did anyway.

1. Heat the olive oil in a large heavy bottomed pan, add the onions and garlic and fry for 3-4 minutes until softened.

2. Add the chopped bacon and fry for another 3-4 minutes.

3. Add the leftover veg, stir in and cook for a minute or so.

4. Add the chopped tomatoes, 3 tbsp tomato puree, chicken stock (I forgot to actually stir my stock so the dissolved cubes were just sat at the bottom of the measuring jug...yuck!), and let it boil (not too vigorously) for 5 minutes.

5. After the 5 minutes is up, remove from the heat and puree using a blender. It took me a while as it turns out a bit, well, bitty, so I gave it quite a going over with the hand blender. I then added a couple more tbsp of tomato puree and the red pesto just to add a bit more flavour and blended it some more.

The result was a nice thick orange soup which tasted really nice, a good mix of smoky meat and rich tomato flavour, but...if I'm honest the peas didn't blend all that well so I was constantly finding teeny little bits of the outer shell of peas which were too small to be blended any further with the hand blender, but not small enough that I could ignore them. I'm probably just being fussy as it did taste really flavoursome, but after my first soup of the year (Roasted swede soup) turned out so well I don't think the consistency of this one was quite as good. I think next time I'll just leave out the peas.

[To add to this when Tom came home and tried the soup he disagreed with my criticisms and said it tasted awesome, and that it didn't matter that it wasn't perfectly smooth. At least I'll always have one satisfied customer :) ]