I have been working on getting into a pretty nice Saturday routine. Sleep in, take Gibson to the dog park, lounge around, make some delicious foods. Yesterday I threw in ordering The Joy of Cooking and subscribing to Martha Stewart Living (a long-time dream of mine). I am excited.
As previously mentioned on this blog, we bought into a CSA this summer. It has been great and not so great. As Steve puts it, "you really have to love vegetables" in order to enjoy the CSA. I do love vegetables, but have felt a little overwhelmed by the quantities of things that I don't necessarily know how to use, slash do not have the gastronomic capacity to consume it all on my own. Yesterday, I decided to do something about the tomato situation in our house. Again, love tomatoes but had about 4 gallons of them yesterday. I did a little internet research and "triangulated" recipes, as my dad would say, and made up this number. My true inspiration was the tomato-basil soup at The French Meadow in Minneapolis, which Steve and I often refer to as "crack soup." It has insanely addictive qualities.
Calley's Tomato Basil (Crack) Soup
About 20 tomatoes, various sizes and varieties (I honestly didn't count them)
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 small onions
1 can chicken broth
about a cup heavy cream
1 cup loosely packed basil leaves
3 tablespoons butter
Blanch tomatoes, remove peels and seeds. Puree in small batches in food processor. Try to get all the big lumps out. It turns out that tomatoes are really acidic and turn your fingernails yellow and your skin to paper. Awesome!!
In your big pot that you will be cooking the soup in, melt butter and saute the onions and garlic until soft. Add tomato puree, chicken broth and cream. Chop the basil (I used a mini-food processor) and add that in too. Salt and pepper to taste. Heat to your liking. I am going to freeze some of this, so I'll let you know how well it keeps in a couple of months.
Next on my list of things to do yesterday was to finish a birthday gift I had been working on for our friend Courtney. She loves robots--please, please! visit her blog and read her Wall-E story. Start here, then read this. It is truly heartwarming. I found this Sublime Stitching robot iron-on and knew I must put it on something for Courtney, decided on dish towels and then found out that her birthday was coming up. What a happy coincidence! She liked them, I am happy to report.
Finally, I decided to make this sage-walnut pesto recipe I found on this blog. I have a sage plant on my deck garden that I haven't used all summer, and decided this sounded like a pretty yummy dish. And I was correct. It tastes a lot like regular pesto, minus the sometimes-overwhelming garlic flavor. The sage flavor is pretty subtle, though I think you could mix pretty much any leaf with olive oil and cheese and get the same general flavor. Next week I am going to make geranium leaf pesto.
This one I ate on as an open-faced pesto and smoked swiss on wild rice multi grain bread. It went very well with the crack soup.
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1 comment:
Calley! You are like my Cooking Doppelgänger! Or more like The-Cook-I-Wish-I-Was, because every time I am thinking about making something, or wishing I knew how to make something, it shows up here. Seriously, we have an abundance of tomatoes from the Arnold Farm (and not from our lame lame CSA which gave us maybe 4 total), and the French Meadow soup is one of my favorite foods in the world. We also have a good-sized bunch of sage in the fridge that needs to be used. Also, on your last post, I have been having this love-hate problem with my crockpot, where I love the idea of it, but have a hard time finding recipes that do not taste like crap and involve things like cream-of-mushroom-soup - so I am really grateful for that post and link. Lastly, I have also been pining after Martha Stewart Living for many years, maybe it is time to just get it. (The Joy of Cooking is my favorite reference book of all time, that is the only thing I can claim to have already experienced before reading about on your blog).
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