I’ve never made tomato soup, so I wanted to try one… (hint: it didn’t work exactly as planned..) I watched a few videos and decided I’d try to make one where the fresh ingredients are first roasted, but I also wanted to have some marinated ingredients there. So this became a multi-day experiment…
Marinated Bell Peppers
Ingredients
- 1 large yellow bell pepper
- 1 spring onion
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 1 tbsp. olive oil
- salt
- black pepper, ground
- ½ tsp chili flakes
Wash bell pepper and onion. Cut bell pepper to strips (Julienne). Slice onion to rings, peel and mince garlic clove. Mix in a small bowl, pour in olive oil and season with salt and pepper, add chili flakes. Let it sit in a fridge for a day or so. I left mine for two days simply because I didn’t have time to finish it.
Tomato Roast
Ingredients
- 6 fresh tomatoes
- 1 large onion
- 5 cm of leek
- 2 stalks of celery
- 1 spring onion
- 3-4 tbsp. olive oil
- 2 dl mashed tomatoes
- Marinated Bell Peppers from earlier
- 3 tbsp chili cream cheese
- 5 tbsp sun-dried tomato cream cheese
- 5 tbsp chives cream cheese
- 1 dl low-fat cream
Wash onions and tomatoes. Chop tomatoes and onion in four. Fine dice celery, leek and spring onions. Take an oven tray, put tomatoes and onions in it, pour the Marinated Bell Peppers on top. Spring the onion, leek and celery on top. At this point it should look like this.
Pour the mashed tomatoes (I just bought a pack straight from grocery store to make it easier. It’ll probably taste better if you do that yourself, but I didn’t have time and means [see later]). Mix well.
Pre-heat oven to 200C (~400F). Put the tray into the over and bake for 45 minutes or when the tomatoes get roasted on the surface.
Without giving it time to cool down, mix in the cream cheeses and the cream. Be careful as the mixture is super hot at this point and you’re working with a relatively shallow bowl.
Once it’s all mixed well, it’ll look sort of like that. Not too appetizing, I’ll admit. It’ll be better later. It was at this point that I noticed my blender was not working. So I waited until it cooled a bit, and stuck it into a fridge for the night and went to sleep angry. The next part is soo much easier if you don’t have to wait for it to cool down, or have one of those hand-held blenders (we call them “sauvasekoitin”, which is close enough to “shaft blender” in English), that you can blend the mix right in the tray itself.
Anyway, blend the whole mix into a fine, smooth mixture. Mine came out a bit too thick to call it a soup, so I had to call it a Tomato Bowl. Garnish with a pinch of chives if you’d like. Serve hot.
Tomato Basil Onion Mozzarella Salad
Ingredients
- 3 tomatoes
- 1 onion
- 1 “ball” of mozzarella
- few basil leaves
- salt
- black pepper, ground
Wash tomato, peel onion. Chop them to slices (don’t mince or dice, just large thick rings). Take a plate and put in a layer of tomatoes. Season lightly with salt and pepper. Put in a layer of basil leaves (just a few, don’t have to cover everything). Same with onion, make a light layer of separated onion rings. Cover that with a light layer of mozzarella slice. Again season with salt and pepper. Carry on as much as you have ingredients (from the list it only makes a tiny amount, feel free to make a lot more at a time. After the first tomato layer it goes basil -> onions -> mozzarella -> seasoning -> tomatoes. Repeat until you don’t have anymore.
Cover with a similar plate or with foil or something. Let it sit in the fridge overnight. I garnished mine with a pinch of chives.
I served them with a slice of the meatloaf and a side of rice seasoned with soy sauce and Anna’s Special Mix spice blend..
Anna's Kitchen Experiments 