cloudy with a chance of meatballs

If you've never heard of or read this book, shame on you.

I love soup. I can always appreciate a good bowl of soup, and with the cold weather coming (sooner than later hopefully), it's soup season and I want to learn and get good at making this tasty stuff. Soup reminds me of the story "Stone Soup." Now that was some damn good soup....

With my last free Monday for a while, I decided to make some tomato soup, from a recipe I read from the LA Times. I always end up making too much so this time I really rationed my ingredients, and came out with too little. So it goes.

First, I chopped up some carrots, onions, green onions, fennel bulb(a new ingredient for me, a bit pricey, but smelled good), and celery. I cooked it in a pan with some olive oil and butter, then added some cloves of minced garlic. I wasn't exact with the proportions for everything, and I"m going to make some adjustments for the next time I make this.



















Next I diced some tomatoes, and added them into the mix. Into this, I added some salt, gin, sugar, pepper, paprika and lemon juice. I could smell the alcohol burning off and it smelled damn good. I added some red wine too for good measure. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to put it in, but I like using wine. I let this cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally for a while until the mixture thickened a bit.



Last step was to take this stuff, put it into a food processor, and puree that sucka good. Then put it into a pot, and however much chicken broth you want. I used the low sodium/low fat, which probably wasn't as flavorful, but I wanted to taste the vegetable mix I made. Scoop, dish out and garnish with some basil.


The end product. As you can see, the consistency seems a bit off. I thought I had blended it long enough, but I guess not. It doesn't look too much like the LA Times picture. Maybe I should have blended it for a longer amount of time, or I should have added more chicken broth. I used about 3/4 of a can. There really wasn't much, as there was about two small bowls worth. Visually, I didn't like it because it reminded me of salsa or baby food. The taste was good though, although I thought it was a bit sour, which I was guessing from the acidity from the tomatoes, with not enough of the veggies to balance it out. I'm going to add some more carrots and sugar to make it a bit sweeter.

I bought a basil plant today. Hopefully I won't kill it. Basil is expensive at markets...running 3-4 bucks a pop. You get an okay amount of basil, but if you've ever gone to a farmer's market, you know that you get way more, for about a 1/10 of the cost.

I reckon that's all for now folks. Stay tuned for more. Next up: My first try with making hot carrots.