You say tomato, I say tomato

I'm going to be honest here, seeing as I've already shared the unexpected result of yesterday's soup with a few people. My intent was a roasted red pepper and pear soup, but it came out tomato. That's ok though, it was a delicious tomato!

We have had a couple different versions of roasted red pepper soup over the last month that we've really enjoyed, so I decided to give it a shot. We headed into the market after kettlebells yesterday morning. There are still loads of vendors, but unless you're looking for pumpkins, squash, cauliflower or brussel sprouts, you have to keep your eyes peeled for anything else. Brussel sprouts gave us a delightful surprise though, being one of those veggies that you've likely picked up in the frozen food aisle most of your life, you never thought about how it actually grows. Well, it's like this (thank you wiki):

Interesting eh?

We left the market sans brussel sprouts, but with some red peppers, tomatoes and ground cherries. This first ingredient was intended to help me make a successful and decadent roasted red pepper soup.

Here's how it became a tomato soup:

Into a dish I tossed 3 chopped red peppers, a chopped onion and 3 cloves of chopped garlic. This was drizzled with olive oil and put into the oven at 325 for about 25 minutes. When it smelled delicious, I took it out, and added it to the pot where I had a litre and a half of the stock that I made last week. I then added a can of Hunt's tomato and sweet onion, and a quarter of a tomato that was left over from making sandwiches. At this point I did consider that that was an awful lot of tomato, but decided not to add any more red pepper, for reasons beyond me. That pot full of goodness simmered for 10 minutes or so, then I removed from heat to puree with my trusty hand blender.

Back onto the heat it went, medium, and I tasted where we were so far. It was sharp. It needed something. I added nutmeg. Nutmeg really did the trick! Then some pepper. No salt, it didn't need any and I learned later that J had added salt to the stock before he put it in the freezer! I tossed in a peeled and chopped pear, then let it simmer at low heat until J woke up from his name.

Overall, this was a yummy soup, familiar to those days of childhood when you came in from playing outside in the snow and your mum made this for you for lunch, with a side of a grilled cheese sandwich or a pile of those premium plus crackers. Yum!

Cauliflower

I made a cauliflower soup based on a recipe from the same book as yesterday. It was called a velouté. If you know what a velouté is, you`re one step ahead of where I was a few minutes ago. Of course I googled what a velouté is after I made this soup, which made me understand how important one of the ingredients that I left out is.

Wiki has told me that velouté is one of the `mother sauces`of french cuisine, consisting of stock (chicken, fish or vegetable), butter, flour and salt and pepper for seasoning. A velouté soup is a soup that`s been thickened with the same, plus eggs. The eggs are what I left out of my soup. Oops. In any case, it turned out pretty velvety, and tasty.

Here`s how my wanna-be velouté made it to the bowl:

- Roughly chop and steam a head of cauliflower

- Brown a medium sized onion with a tbsp of butter (the other day I learned that if you add salt to the onion, it won`t brown. The reason being that the salt sucks all of the moisture out of the onion, which it needs to brown. Don`t salt the browning onion!)

- Once the cauliflower is soft, drain, add the onion to the pot with a cup of stock (I used chicken today, thanks to J for running out and getting some, what would a soup blog be without stock!)

Blend these three things together with the handy dandy hand blender

- In a pan, melt 3 tbsps of butter. Add 3 tbsps of flour, and stir frequently until a nice golden brown. This takes about 15 minutes, keep stirring.

- Once the flour is golden, slowly add 3 cups of stock, while stirring. Add some seasoning (I just added lots and lots of pepper) and let simmer for 20 minutes or so.

Add the latter to the former, stir and serve. I didn`t do the egg part, so I`ll have to repeat this recipe at some point and let you know how that goes.

Pardon all of the backwards apostrophes, copying and pasting velouté has done something to my apostrophe-ing ability in this post