Here’s another recipe using some of the heirloom tomato bounty that came out of our yard this past summer. We doubled the Roasted Tomato Soup recipe on Epicurious because we had so many tomatoes.
Roasted Tomato Soup
Tag Archives: Soup
World’s Best Lasagna
When you’re drowning in a crimson tide of homegrown, heirloom tomatoes like this:
One of the myriad things you can do with them is make sauce. The good thing about sauce is, you can freeze it for later. We usually keep them in quart-sized freezer bags and pull them out as needed.
To make the sauce, we boiled down 15 lbs of heirloom tomatoes plus chunks of bell peppers, diced onions, sugar and salt until the sauce was reduced by half. I buzzed it with the hand blender until smooth. This was the most amazing tomato sauce ever – so sweet and savory at the same time!
Gazpacho
So I was standing there, chopping veggies to make chopped salad (see previous example here), and wondering what to do with all that reserved tomato juice I had saved from the salad plus the lomi lomi salmon. Suddenly, a word popped into my noggin: Gazpacho! Oooh, I hadn’t had *that* in a while.
I like tomato-based soups, and gazpacho is one of my favorite variations of tomato soup, with that spark of spicyness from the raw garlic. A chilled soup would go along great with the chopped salad. So I went over to Epicurious and found this recipe
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Gazpacho-239209
It’s a pretty simple recipe, but one ingredient that was new to me was smoked Spanish paprika. And what do you know, we actually happened to have a package of that, that we purchased at the Penzey’s Spices store in Houston!
This was one of the best gazpachos I’ve made. It’s not too spicy, as I held back on the pepper and the raw garlic. That smoked Spanish paprika made the dish, I thought. Our friend raved about it, saying it was better than the one he had tasted in Italy that got him hooked on gazpacho in the first place.
This recipe is a keeper. I’m gonna make it again soon (of course, using only Annie’s homegrown tomatoes)!
Aloha, Nate
Hokkien Prawn Mee
When you talk of Hokkien Mee, you have to qualify yourself: do you mean KL-style Hokkien Char Mee, or Penang-style Hokkien Prawn Mee? The two couldn’t be more different. KL-style means thick, yellow noodles braised in a thick, dark soy sauce with pork, squid, fish cake and cabbage and, if you’re lucky, some crispy pieces of lard. Enjoy it with some pickled chile peppers for a spicy-vinegary kick.
Penang-style Hokkien Prawn Mee is a soup-noodle dish, using both egg and rice noodles. The broth is made from lots and lots of prawns, plush pork and / or chicken bones. The noodles come laden with prawns, fish cake, pork, and crispy fried shallots.
Annie adapted this Hokkien Prawn Mee recipe off of the Rasa Malaysia website. She made a stock from shrimp shells and pork bones with some rock sugar for sweetness. Egg and rice noodles go on the bottom, followed by shrimps, pork, and a hard boiled egg. Ladle on the rich broth (great, unctuous mouth-feel with little bits of pork fat floating in it), then top with fried shallots. Serve with a spoonful of chili sauce made from blended chiles, shallots, garlic, and oil.
Our shrimp stock is not as dark as Rasa Malaysia’s because we used mostly shells and not enough prawn heads. Next time, more heads!
Aloha, Nate