Sunday, January 20, 2013

Cream of Tomato Soup

This one I made yesterday. Again it's my own recipe, and again it's all made from scratch. About that, I've learned two things: 1) It's very tiring to do everything from scratch, but 2) it's very satisfying.

Without further ado:

Another Anchor container

Ingredients:

About 1.25 kilos (almost 3 lbs) of round tomatoes, peeled, cored and seeded, then chopped. Oblong tomatoes should work, but the round ones cook faster and better. They're also easier (but not easy) to seed.
1 small or medium clove of garlic, minced
1 thick slice of onion, chopped.
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1.5 liters chicken broth
3/4 Cup low-fat or non-fat milk
5 Tbsp. Cottage cheese (I use regular, which is rather low in fat anyway)
1/4 tsp. Cumin
1/3-1/2 tsp. Paprika
420 gr. Tomato puree (or paste, or sauce)

First peel and seed your tomatoes. This is hard work, and I usually assume my readers know how. But in this case it's important that you seed the tomatoes over a strainer in a bowl, to catch and keep the juice that seeding usually produces. So my method for seeding is to quarter the tomatoes and manually remove the seed parts.


Heat the olive oil in a soup pot and set the onion and garlic to saute. Add the tomato when the onion begins to turn translucent. I cut mine into fairly large pieces, but go any way you want. As they cook, they'll release a lot of juice and will soften considerably; so you want to keep stirring them in order to keep them from burning. When they're soft, add the juice you reserved from seeding.

Cook with the juice until it barely begins to boil. Despite the released juices and the added juice, the mix will be very thick and will form large steam bubbles. So lower the flame to minimum and add the chicken broth. Bring to a slow boil, stirring on occasion.

A word here. I used actually hot water and two low-fat, low-sodium chicken bouillon cubes. The reason is to have a more subtle chicken flavor. If you can do that with broth, great. If not, try my approach.

Good. When the mix boils, turn off the heat and let it cool a bit. You guessed it, the mix will be going to the blender. Do it in batches, adding a little milk and some cottage cheese on each batch. You may want to transfer the soup to a container first, as it's all going back in the pot.

Once it's back in the pot, add the tomato puree, cumin and paprika. Stir well, and again set the heat to low and bring to a slow boil, stirring frequently. Let it simmer a bit after it boils and then serve.

I love tomato soup. I usually have it mixed with boiled, plain white rice and a little lime (yes, lime; I'm like that). Or with crackers and lime, or with croutons and lime, or with rice, crackers and lime. Enjoy!

As I said, it's very satisfying to do it all from scratch (I know I used chicken bouillon cubes and tomato puree). So much so that I later thought "Shouldn't I get canned diced tomatoes?" And I answered myself "No. I might as well get a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup!"

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