I used to not love tomato soup so much but now I am kind of obsessed with it. The very best tomato soup recipe I know is from Sally Schneider's The Improvisational Cook and involves her versatile slow roasted tomatoes. But the version above, from Vegetable Soups From Deborah Madison's Kitchen, is a pretty good bet when you only have canned tomatoes handy and the souffleed cheese toast is to die for.
Adapted slightly to serve 2 with leftovers:
- 1 tablespoon butter
- 1 very small onion, chopped
- 1 tsp dried basil or herb of your choice (I used herbs de provence since that's what I had handy)
- 1 tbsp flour
- 1 15 oz can diced tomatoes
- pinch of baking soda
- 1 1/4 cup stock (vegetable or chicken) or water
- 3/4 cup milk
- salt and pepper
- 1 egg, separated
- 1/2 tsp dijon
- pinch of cayenne
- 1/2 c grated cheddar
- 1/2 tsp minced scallion
- toasted bread
Melt butter in your soup pot. Add onion and herbs, cook til onion is good and translucent. Stir in flour and cook for a second. Then add tomatoes, baking soda, and stock or water. Bring to a boil, then simmer, partially covered, for 20 min. Off heat, puree with your immersion blender or cool slightly and puree in a regular blender.
Preheat oven to 400. (I did this part while the soup was cooking.) Combine egg yolk w/mustard and cayenne, then stir into the cheese. Whisk the egg white until it holds soft peaks and fold into cheese. Spread on toasted bread and bake til puffed and golden, 5-10 minutes depending on your oven.
While the toast is baking, stir in the milk and season to taste. Bring soup back to piping hot and serve w/a cheese toast half. Or two.
If you have this ridiculously awesome immersion blender, this recipe is super easy because you can use the blender attachment to puree the soup and then the whisk attachment to whisk the egg white. My mother gave me mine, and I never would have thought I needed it until I actually whisked an egg white with the whisk attachment. The motor on that thing makes a hand mixer look like a manual whisk. And if you make soup at all, the immersion blender is so much easier than a regular blender. If I had my kitchen to stock all over again, I'd have started with this and considered the hand mixer and blender optional.
3 comments:
This is simmering on my stove right now. I adore Sally Schneider's roasted tomatoes, and they are the perfect treatment for wintertime plum toamtoes, but I am much more likely to have canned tomatoes in my pantry (thanks, Costco, for carrying 12-packs of organic tomatoes for $4!) in late winter than I am to have fresh tomatoes. We're just having grilled cheese, though, since I didn't feel like running to the store just for cheddar (which we usually have on hand, but used the last of yesterday.
Ok, this is now my go-to weeknight recipe. I doubled it, and it's a good thing. As Adam just declared, "It's the goodest!"
That gives me hope that in 2 years Nathan will eat it. He would not touch it and had just oranges for supper instead. I tried to tell him he was missing out.
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