Cream of Fresh Tomato

I have not made this soup in quite a while, not sure why because it is one of my favorites. Actually, this is the soup that triggered my more intense interest in making soups. This recipe is from Ina Garten's show "Barefoot Contessa" on Food Network. If you watch any of her shows you know she is not reluctant to use cream and butter in her recipes. This soup is proof of that with a good dose of heavy cream. Not whole milk, not half & half, heavy cream. That's one reason it tastes so good.

This recipe makes 5 - 6 servings. This is the recipe that prompted me to buy an immersion blender. The first few times I made this soup I used either a blender or a manual food mill to puree the tomatoes. The blender was a pain because the transferring of the tomatoes to and from the blender was very messy. The food mill was an improvement because I could puree the tomatoes right over the soup pot which eliminated one transfer. The only downside was a fair amount of tomatoes didn't get fully pureed and it was a bit of a pain to take apart and clean. So, Berdie bought a Cuisinart immersion blender as a birthday present for me last April. What a great idea! This device is really powerful and works great! It has a few attachments that I have yet to use. Check it out on Amazon. This thing is powerful. You have to be careful when using in a pot because if you raise the blender too much you end up with a swirl of food stuffs being sprayed all over the kitchen and you. If you find yourself using a blender for different recipes you should consider an immersion blender. They don't take up much room in the cabinet when not in use.

A couple of tips on the ingredients. For the minced garlic I use the jarred stuff from Spice World. You find it in the produce section. I don't enjoy peeling and mincing garlic. I end up with very sticky fingers and knife along with a cutting board that carries garlic forever. I find the Spice World garlic very good and real easy to use. For the tomatoes I've used different types, romas, beefsteaks and several from our garden of different varieties and they were all good tasting. For the tomato paste I end up using a whole small can because the recipe calls for only 1 tablespoon and the rest of the can would not get used. An option would be to buy the paste that comes in a tube so you use only what the recipe calls for and reseal the rest.

INGREDIENTS
3 tablespoons of olive oil
1.5 cups of chopped red onions, about 2 onions
2 carrots, unpeeled and chopped
1 tablespoon of minced garlic (3 cloves)
4 pounds of vine-ripened, coarsely chopped, about 5 large fruit
1.5 teaspoons of sugar
1 tablespoon of tomato paste
1/4 cup of packed chopped fresh basil leaves
3 cups of chicken stock
1 tablespoon of kosher salt
2 teaspoons of freshly ground black pepper
3/4 cup of heavy cream
Croutons for garnish

METHOD
Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy bottomed pot over medium heat.
Add the onions and carrots and sauté for about 10 minutes, until very tender.
Add the garlic and cook for 1 additional minute.
Add the tomatoes, sugar, tomato paste, basil, chicken stock, salt, pepper and stir well.
Bring the soup to a boil, lower the hear and simmer uncovered for 30 - 40 minutes until the tomatoes are very tender
Add the cream to the soup and process it with an immersion blender, food mill or blender. Reheat the soup over low heat until hot and serve with julienned basil leaves and croutons.

Cheddar Cheese Soup

I skipped soup last week and will also skip this week because there are just not that many people still working this last week of our plant's work year. I have enough vacation days left that I could take 3 days off this coming week but I'm thinking I'll likely stick around most of the week but may take a half day here and there to finish up some shopping. Tommy has an XBox game still coming, needs some new lacrosse gloves for the upcoming season and I'm still stumped for what to get Bertie. She broke her wedding ring a few weeks ago and it needed a few hundred bucks of repairs so she says that should be her present. I'm not going for that but am more than a little perplexed as to what to get her. I wished she loved to cook 'cuz there's all kinds of cool stuff to get.

So, the week before last I tried a new recipe. Cheddar Cheese Soup. This was a really great tasting soup. This was one that I could have just kept eating and then licked the bowl clean. I found this recipe on a website called copycat.com. This site specializes in providing recipes of dishes from well known restaurants. I've tried several of them and have had success with all of them. Check them out and let us know what you think. This recipe is formally titled "Gallagher's Cheddar Cheese Soup", I'm not familiar with who the Gallagher is or if it is a restaurant somewhere. I don't recall Googling it when I first found the recipe, if anyone knows anything please comment.

This recipe was very easy to make, so easy I felt guilty not doing more. The surprising thing in this recipe is that it uses cheese spread, the bottled stuff, rather than real cheddar cheese. I will try it with real cheddar the next time I make it but it tastes so good with the cheese spread I question the wisdom of changing but who knows it may be better with real cheddar. Hey maybe Velveeta!

The flavors that really stood out for me were the mustard and cayenne pepper. The mustard was very subtle but added a great zing and the cayenne really added a good bite and had a little delayed impact. In addition to using real cheddar next time another change I might try is adding some pickled jalapeños.

INGREDIENTS for 8 servings
2 cups of water
1/3 cup each of finely chopped carrots and celery
1 cup of finely chopped green onions
1/2 cup of butter
1/4 cup of flour
1 medium size white onion, chopped
4 cups of milk
4 cups of chicken broth
1 15 oz jar of pasteurized process cheese spread
Add salt and black pepper to taste
1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon of yellow mustard

METHOD

1. In a soup pot over high heat combine the water, carrots, green onions and celery. Bring to a boil and boil for 5 minutes. Set aside but do not drain.
2. In a large stockpot melt the butter over medium heat and add the onion. Saute for 1 minute then add the flour blending well.
3. In a large saucepan bring the milk and broth to a boil.
4. Whisk the milk-broth mixture into the flour-onion mixture in the large stockpot with a wire whisk.
5. Stir in the cheese, salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, mustard and the cooked veggies including the water in which they were cooked.
6. Bring to a boil and serve immediately.

This soup was not as thick as I thought it would be so don't be surprised if it comes out that way for you too.

Swedish Meatballs

Last week's soup was Green Pea with Spinach. I didn't particularly like it. Kind of bland even though I tried real hard to improve the flavor but never got it there. The recipe called for fresh mint and it overwhelmed the soup in my opinion but I asked some of the folks at work about it but no one shared my feeling. There was a couple of cups left in the pot which doesn't usually happen so I'm not planning on a reprise anytime soon so I'm not going to post the recipe. I got the recipe from a book titled "The Complete Book of 400 Soups". I picked the book up at Borders for $5 in So. California over Thanksgiving. I'm should have looked through the book more carefully because the majority of the recipes aren't something I'm inclined to try but I figured for $5 what the heck.

So what do Swedish Meatballs have to do with this posting? Since I won't be posting about soup this week I figured I should post something, otherwise I might drift too far from the routine and lose momentum. I made Swedish Meatballs for our dinner Saturday night using a recipe I got from SimplyRecipes.com. I get regular emails from their website and I've found them to be really good so check them out and let me know what you think. If you already use them let me know some of your favorites. I read this one Saturday morning, printed it out and put it near my keys so I would remember to pick up the ingredients I was missing when I ran to Home Depot. Home Depot? The project for the weekend was to build a third garden box for our backyard. I've posted about our backyard garden previously and will have a follow up post on the subject very soon.

Now back to Swedish Meatballs.

I don't recall having Swedish Meatballs before. I'm sure my Mom must have prepared them for us growing up. My Mom was a really good cook and feeding six kids and my Dad on a budget I'm guessing she prepared them for us considering ground beef was inexpensive and a staple of ours. Anyway, the recipe sounded good and with pretty standard ingredients, except the cardamom, and didn't sound too time consuming. The only ingredients we didn't have on hand were a white onion, ground pork and the cardamom. I picked them up on a side trip to Fry's before going to Home Depot.

This was the first time that I had a recipe call for the onions to be grated rather than diced. Not wanting to deal with the tears of grating a whole onion I opted for a food processor with the grating attachment. This generated a lot of liquid with the onions which I didn't expect and was concerned about making the meatballs too wet to hold together. Oh well, forging on. After sauteing, the onions had a nice brownish color from the butter and were more watery than I'm used to but they smelled good.

Next up was prepping the meatballs. I have used cut up bread in meatballs and meatloaf before but this recipe called for soaking the diced bread in 2/3 cup of milk for 20 minutes and then "pulverizing", their word, the bread in a food processor. So by now I'm even more concerned about too wet meatballs because of the soggy onions and the milky bread. But, forge on! After "pulverizing" the bread mixture and transferring to a very large bowl you add the sauteed onions to the bread along with the eggs, ground pork, ground beef, salt, nutmeg, cardamon and pepper. Be sure you use as large a bowl as you can because mixing the meat is a lot easier with more room in the bowl. Use a squeezing action with the meat mixture and keep rotating the whole mound through and through. A good 3 minutes of mixing will get a good blending. If the meatball mix has warmed up too much it will be very sticky and difficult to make the meatballs. If this is the case just place the bowl of meatball mixture in the freezer for 10-15 to get the mixture to firm up.

Use a tablespoon to measure out the meatballs. I usually vary the size of the meatballs quite a bit because sometimes I like picking up a bite sized one every now and then and also like having a huge one to serve up to the big guys in the group. You should get about 40-50 meatballs. To brown the meatballs use a large frying or saute pan with 6 tablespoons of butter heated up. Over medium heat, any higher will burn the butter, add enough meatballs to have about 75% coverage of the pan being sure not to crowd the pan. Brown on all sides. To turn the meatballs I found a large spoon more effective than tongs. Tongs tended to break up the meatballs especially early in the browning. Once the meatballs were browned on 2-3 sides they could hold up to being moved with tongs. Remember you're only browning them not cooking through. You'll need to work in batches, removing the browned meatballs and setting aside on a large plate. You may need to add additional butter to the pan as you get about halfway through all the meatballs.

For the sauce you'll be using the same pan and butter used for the meatball browning. Check the butter for taste. If it tastes burnt discard the butter and start with a new 6 tablespoons. Now heat the butter on medium until it gets hot. Slowly whisk in the flour using the whisk to break up the fond on the pan (that fond is the good flavor stuff). Stirring often, let the flour cook until it is the color of coffee with cream. Believe it or not, you've now got a classic roux, you're channeling Julia Child!

As the roux is cooking, heat the beef stock in a large soup pot (one you will use as your final cooking pot), until it simmers. Slowly add the roux to the simmering stock. The mixture will become silky and smoother. When the stock and roux have been thoroughly mixed and getting to a simmer you can start adding the meatballs. Turn the heat to low, cover the pot and cook the meatballs for 10 minutes. You may have to do this in batches. To finish, move the meatballs to a large serving dish. To the sauce in the pot add the sour cream and stir. You can either add the the jelly to the sauce or serve it on the side.

I cooked some linguine and served the meatballs over the linguine and spooned the sauce over the meatballs and linguine. You could also use rice or just have the meatballs and sauce and save the carbs.

INGREDIENTS
Meatballs
1 large yellow or white onion, peeled and grated with a cheese grater or food processor
2 Tbsp butter
2/3 cup milk
4-5 slices of bread, crusts removed, cut up into pieces
2 eggs
1 pound of ground pork
1.5 pounds of ground beef
2 Tsps salt
1 Tsp freshly ground nutmeg
1 Tsp ground cardamom
2 Tsps black pepper

Sauce
6 Tbsp butter
1/3 cup of flour
1 quart beef stock
1/2 to 3/4 cup of sour cream
Salt
2 to 4 Tbsp of Lingonberry, cranberry, red currant or raspberry jelly, more or less to taste (optional)

METHOD

1. Saute the grated onion in the butter over medium high heat until the onions soften and turn translucent and much of the liquid has been cooked off, about 7 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cool.
2. In a medium bowl, mix the bread pieces with the milk. Set aside for 15-20 minutes, or until the bread soaks up all the milk. When it does, pulverize the bread in a food processor and pour it into a large bowl.
3. Add the cooled onions to the bowl of bread and milk. Add the rest of the meatball ingredients -- eggs, ground pork, ground beef, salt, nutmeg, cardamom and pepper. Using your just washed hands, mix well for about 4 minutes until the ingredients are well combined.
4. Use a tablespoon to measure out the meat for the meatballs. As you form the meatballs, set each one aside on a sheet pan or plate. You should get 40-50 meatballs. If you mix up the size as I noted in my posting above the number of meatballs will vary.
5. Heat 6 tablespoons of butter for the sauce in a large saute' pan over medium heat. When the butter has melted add some of the meatballs. Do not crowd the pan. Work in batches, browning them on all sides. As I described in the posting above be gentle when you turn them so they don't break apart. Don't cook them all the way through, only brown them. They'll get cooked later in the sauce. When they are browned use a slotted spoon to remove them from the pan to a plate setting them aside so you can make the sauce with the remaining butter and fond.
6. Heat the beef stock in another pot until it simmers.
7. To make the roux, taste the butter to see if it has a burnt taste. If it does taste burnt discard it and replace with 6 new tablespoons. Heat the pan butter on medium until hot. Slowly whisk in the flour. Stirring often, let the flour cook until it is the color of coffee-with-cream.
8. When the roux has cooked add it to the beef stock a little at a time while stirring. The sauce will thicken and become silkier when done.
9. Add the meatballs to the sauce and turn the heat down to low. Cover the pot and cook on low heat for 10 minutes.
10. To finish, move the meatballs to a serving dish with a slotted spoon. Add the sour cream to the sauce and mix well. You can add the jelly to the sauce or leave it on the side.
11. The meatballs are served with the sauce ladled over them. You can serve them over pasta, rice or without.
12. Serves 8-10.