Roasted Tomato Bisque

Last night we wanted grilled cheese and tomato soup. I have some Costco tomato soup in the freezer, but I decided I wanted to make some from scratch. Of course, I thought roasting fresh tomatoes would be superior to canned. I added some white wine and fresh aromatics. The secret to a creamy soup without a ton of calories is evaporated 2% milk. Somehow, evaporated 2% milk has the same amount of calories as evaporated skim milk, so that was my choice. It still has things added to it, but I thought maybe it would be less altered than the skim.

Roasted tomato bisque with grilled black forest ham & cheddar & chèvre on homemade bread

Roasted Tomato Bisque
2 1/2 lb vine tomatoes (choose organic if it's not too cost-prohibitive), halved with stem removed
oil spray
1 to 2 T butter
1 large yellow onion, chopped
2 large carrots, chopped
2 large celery stalks, chopped
4 cloves garlic, smashed and peeled
1/2 t dried thyme
1 C white wine (I used pinot grigio)
4 C chicken stock
1 can (12 oz) evaporated 2% milk
salt and pepper

Preheat your oven to 450°F. Lay tomatoes on a baking sheet, spray with oil, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast for about 45 minutes, until tomatoes are soft and caramelized.

In a large pot over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the onion and cook until it starts to brown. Add the carrot, celery, garlic, and thyme and cook for another 5-10 minutes, until the carrot starts to soften. Pour in the wine, deglaze the pot, and bring it to a boil.

Let the wine cook down a bit (just a few minutes), then add the chicken stock and bring to a boil. Carefully add the tomatoes to the soup.

Deglaze the baking sheet with some liquid from the pot and pour it into the soup. Add salt and pepper to taste. Let the soup simmer until the carrots are tender. Puree the soup either with an immersion blender or by ladling it into a blender.

After blending, strain it for a less rustic texture. I like it rustic, so I didn't strain it. Stir in the evaporated milk and bring it back up to temperature if you used a regular blender because it will have cooled.

Serve (preferably with grilled cheese)!

Serves 6 (that's 3 big ladle-fulls).

Spaghetti with Good Stuff™

I don't know what happened, but it appears that Blogger has lost all the photos from my older posts. So I'll be steadily going back and replacing those in case anyone wants to see my old carefree recipes.

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing MFP and came across a really cool recipe for Creamy Avocado Pasta (it was in the recipes forum with a link to someone's Pinterest site, but I found the original). It was way too intriguing not to try, so I promptly picked up some avocados and mini heirloom tomatoes. I'm not a huge tomato fan, but let me tell you how much I now love roasted mini heirloom tomatoes! They are tart, sweet, juicy, and their texture is very pleasing.

Well, I had planned to make avocado pasta again when my father was here last weekend, but that... didn't happen... and I ended up with mini heirloom tomatoes I needed to use (aka roast). The shrimp I had defrosting to go on top had gone bad, so I decided to try something different. Pasta still seemed like a good choice, and then my brain said to me "bacon goes really well with tomatoes." Sometimes my brain is really smart. Then, I remembered the fresh chèvre I had in the fridge. YUM. But I didn't feel like the dish was complete until after reading yet another "what's for dinner" thread on MFP in which someone posted about caramelized onions. Perfect! The final step was getting a bit more protein into the dish... and I remembered how this one time, I poached some eggs in white wine. OMG exciting! I must warn you, though, that this is not exactly low-calorie, but things can be adjusted.

Spaghetti with Good Stuff™
1 lb mini heirloom tomatoes (or any small tomato)
Olive or coconut oil spray
1/2 medium yellow onion
1 T butter
4 strips of delicious bacon (I use black forest bacon from Trader Joe's)
1/3 package (about 5.3 oz dry) spaghetti
White wine for poaching
1 T white vinegar
2 eggs
1 T olive oil
4 T fresh chèvre, crumbled
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 300°F. Quarter the tomatoes and lay them out on a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Spray the quarters lightly with oil spray and then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place the tomatoes in the oven for one hour.

Meanwhile, thinly slice the onion. Melt the butter on low heat and then add the onions and a little salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions turn brown and sweet. They will take around 30 minutes, so time them accordingly.

When the onions have cooked for 10 minutes, start the bacon on low heat and leave it, turning occasionally, until its fully cooked. You can either crumble it after it's cooked or cut it up and then cook it. Either way is fine. Alternatively, you could bake the bacon ahead of time, which is what I do. I bake a whole package of bacon on a rack on a cookie sheet at 400°F for 20-ish minutes and then keep it in the fridge until I'm ready to use it.

When there are 20 minutes left on the tomatoes, start boiling a heavily salted pot of water (it should taste like sea water - that's the Italian secret!). Once the water is boiling, drop in the spaghetti and let it boil for about 10 minutes, according to package instructions, until it is "al dente."

The thing you want to do last is poach the eggs. If you've never poached eggs, I recommend doing a google search just to see some techniques. I use a very small saucepan for this so that I don't have to use a lot of wine. Fill the saucepan with enough wine that it will cover the eggs when you put them in; it will need to be about 2 inches. If you run out of wine, you can supplement with water. Add 1 T of white vinegar and bring the liquid to a low boil over medium heat. Crack one egg at a time into a small dish (like a little ramekin), and then drop it into the hot liquid. Repeat with the other egg and let them poach until they reach a consistency you like. You can poke them with a spoon to check the jiggle.

While the eggs finish poaching, everything else should have finished, so drain the pasta and toss it in the olive oil. Portion it onto two plates and then top with the onions, crumbled bacon, tomatoes, and chèvre. Remove the eggs with a slotted spoon and place on top of each dish. Enjoy with a nice salad.

Serves 2.

A Couple of Quick Bites

After I made these two, I realized that I needed to document how delicious they were...

First, a BLT, but with fried gold tomatoes. The 'maters were green when I bought them, but by the time I was ready to eat them, they had turned yellow-orange, though not ripe enough to eat plain. First I sliced them and then lay them out and salted them. After about 5 minutes, I dipped the slices in a buttermilk-egg mixture, then coated them in a cornmeal-flour mixture. Salt and pepper was included in each step. They were so juicy and tart and sweet, and perfect with the bacon (the same bacon as for my most recent pizza) and Companion sourdough toast.

Then I attempted to make laksa. But I cheated and used store-bought Thai red curry paste. I accidentally used too many noodles, and wished I had used ramen instead of rice noodles (I couldn't find singapore or laksa noodles, and I didn't have time to go to the Asian stores). The broth is just curry paste, chicken stock, and coconut milk. Veg are carrot and broccoli, because that's what was in the fridge; red bell pepper would have been awesome. The shrimp were fantastic. It's topped with some basil (not Thai, because, again, I couldn't get it) and a wedge of lime. There were shrimp-less leftovers, into which I cut up some pressed 5-spice tofu. That was also very good.