Roasted Tomato, Garlic and Barley Soup

I know it's been ages, but let's just lightly skim over that, shall we, and move straight to this soup? Now, I'd kinda promised myself that I wouldn't blog until I could take a decent photo of my food, but since that has yet to happen (and believe it, I have tried... you should look at the memory on my husbands camera), that hasn't happened yet. So while I've been cooking away like a mad lady, I've not been sharing, and that is starting to feel mean!

Source: flickr creative commons

So I thought I'd atone for this mean non-sharing streak with this soup. With the colder weather creeping in, and even warm days turning into chilly evenings, my thoughts turn more and more to soup. I've been buying veg at the Earth Fair Market in St Georges Mall on Thursdays, and when I spied some lovely bags of tomatoes for cheap, I bought 2 and planned on this soup. Days passed, and we had some 30 degree days... Not ideal for soup, no, and I planned on a gazpacho instead. But thank heaven, the weather turned back, and autumn crept up on us again. This hearty, tangy, tomatoey soup is full of wonderful antioxidants and vitamins from the soup, and contains almost no fat! There's no cream, the blended barley provides all of the thickening, so as long as you use a good quality, low salt stock, and good quality olive oil, you can eat buckets of this heart-warming soup!

Tomatoes are roasted with garlic until soft and fragrant, then blended with cooked barley, and fresh basil for a hearty but fresh taste. The garlic goes all soft and nutty when it's roasted, and the tomatoes come out sweet and wonderful. Since the soup uses no cream or meat (if you use veg stock), this can be both vegan and vegetarian friendly!

Roasted Tomato, Garlic and Barley Soup

Ingredients:
7-10 tomatoes (I used a mix of ordinary and plum tomatoes)
3-6 cloves of garlic, peeled and quartered
A mix of herbs for sprinkling (origanum, italian herbs, greek herbs, or other preferred herb)
olive oil for roasting
1 onion, peeled and sliced
1 carrot, peeled and diced
115g (1 tin) tomato paste
1.5 litres chicken stock
250 (1 cup) dry pearl barley
2-4 tbsp ketchup (optional, but increases the tomatoey flavour)
salt and pepper to taste
Handful of fresh basil, removed from stalks.

Method:

1. Preheat the oven t0 180 degrees C.
2. Pop the barley into a pot, and cook in the hot chicken stock for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.
3. Halve the tomatoes, and cut out the stalk. Place skin side down in a roasting dish. Place the quartered garlic in among the tomato halves in the roasting dish.
4. Sprinkle with herbs of your choice - feel free to add chilli, if you'd like that zing now, or add to the soup later, and sprinkle with olive oil.
5. Pop into the heated oven, and roast for about 30 minutes, or until soft, turning about half way through. Tomatoes are done when they are soft, and the garlic should be too. Blackened bits are nice, but don't let them burn.
6. When it goes into the oven, slice an onion, and dice a carrot, and fry in a big pot on the stove. Fry on a medium heat until the onion is translucent, and soft, and the carrot is mostly cooked.
7. When the tomatoes are finished, empty the whole roasting dish, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and everything into the pot with the onions, and squash with a spoon. Add the tomato paste, and stir through.
8. Once the barley is cooked, drain off some of the liquid into a jug, in case you need to add it back to the soup, and add the barley to the soup, and heat through, ensuring everything is mixed well, then add the basil.
9. Remove from the heat, and blend using a stick blender, or transfer to a blender, but be careful of the hot soup spraying out. I blend to a rough consistency
10. Return to the pot and heat, and heat through. Taste for seasoning, and add the ketchup if necessary, and salt and pepper to taste. Add some chilli if it makes you happy, or any other spices and herbs you like with tomato. If the soup is too thick, or you've added too much spice, use the reserved barley stock to thin it out, or dilute the heat a bit. Barley is very thickening, especially once it's blended!

Serve with hot, crunchy toast, and shavings of Parmesan or crumbled feta on top, delish!

Potato, Leek and Blue Cheese Soup

Hi ladies!

After the veggie heaven on Sunday, I still wasn't satisfied, and while paging through the latest Fresh Living magazine, I saw a recipe for potato, leek and blue cheese soup, which looked divine! And it was easy (they recommended buying the potato and leek soup mix - and who am I to complain about not having to chop and wash leeks?)

{Image source}

But you know me by now, right? Can I stick to a simple recipe? No! So I jazzed it up (only slightly) with some extra cheese (you knew that, right?) and some bacon. Now, in my humble opinion, you can add bacon to virtually anything and it makes it better, right? So this was, obviously, better. Salty, crispy little bits of bacon buried in the rich melty cheese goodness of this soup, heaven!

And without further ado, I bring you the incredible, rich, cheesy delight that is this soup!

{Image source: Ethan Anderson, Picasa}

Potato, Leek and Blue Cheese Soup

Ingredients:
1 packet potato and leek soup mix
1 triangle (100g) blue cheese
750 ml veggie stock
250 ml milk
1 tbsp blue cheese cream cheese (Simonsberg make it, and it's divine)
4-8 rashers streaky bacon
1 tsp garlic
Salt and pepper to season

Method:

1. Heat a heavy bottomed soup pot on the stove, and fry the bacon until some of the fat melts. There's no need to go mad with the bacon now, we're going to crisp it up in the oven later, this is just to get some of the porky goodness into the soup.
2. Remove the bacon, and set aside.
3. Put the garlic in the hot fat, and fry for a few seconds.
4. Add the potato and leek soup mix in, and stir in the hot fat for a bit. If it gets a bit dry, just add a little olive oil, and continue to stir for a couple of minutes.
5. Add the hot veggie stock and the milk, and simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 30-40 minutes, or until the potato is cooked through.
6. Blend to your preferred consistency (I like mine quite smooth), and return to the heat.
7. Chop the blue cheese wedge up, and add it to the soup, stirring to melt it into the soup.
8. Taste and season with salt and pepper.
9. Serve hot and melty, with a tsp of blue cheese cream cheese and a sprinkle of fresh parsley.

Enjoy!

Guest Post: The Creative Pot with Buttermilk Corn Soup

Hi!

As I have mentioned, while I'm away on holiday, some of my lovely blog and twitter friends have offered to guest post for me! Blown away by this amazing offer, I've given them pretty much free reign to write what they like, and just LOOK at what they've come up with!

Here's Marisa from The Creative Pot with something amazing, just for you. Take it away!

When my fellow schemer, darling Twitter buddy Sigrid shared her distress with me regarding her long absence from her blog and her fear that you, her loyal readers, would run for the hills I knew I had to step up to the plate. Hell, the girl knows where I live. Plus, I had to keep our relationship in good stead, as she still has a large bottle of wine with my name on it squirreled away at her house. Clearly, a lot was at stake here. And after all, I had done one guest post before, so I figured it would be a piece of cake to do another. But I hadn't factored my indecisiveness in. What to make? I wanted to put my best foot forward, whilst also keeping an eye on that bottle of wine and adhering to the spirit of things around here, i.e. quick, easy, accessible-for-every-cook meals.

Hmmmm... Of course there was also a tiny part of me that wanted to keep all the good stuff to myself. There, I've said it. Political correctness is vastly overrated don't you think? I briefly considered cupcakes, in keeping with the name of the blog and her long-running cake-rocks joke. But when I made this soup, I knew I had to surrender the recipe. After all, it was the perfect candidate - easy, yet impressive looking. So I pinned my greedy blogger alter ego to the floor and wrestled this recipe away from my own post queue and plonked it into this one. 'Cause I'm a good friend like that. You hear that? Bottle of wine!

Um... right, so where was I? Oh yes, the soup. Looks easy right? You boil some potatoes, steam a couple of ears of corn, then bang everything together in a food processor with a good glug of buttermilk and off you go! Of course then you can get all fancy-schmancy and tart it up a bit for the all important presentation. Your dinner guests will love you. Especially if you serve it with a still-warm-from the oven bread.

Top tip: If you buy bread ready-made and gently re-heat it in the oven, no-one will be the wiser. I slathered my bread in mashed avocado which I then proceeded to dip with wild abandon in the soup. Yeah, I don't get out much. But I promise the curse doesn't get transferred through computer screens, so you should be safe.

Enjoy!

Buttermilk Corn Soup
Inspired by a recipe from 101 Cookbooks
Serves 4 - 6

Ingredients:
1 tsp olive oil
1 onion
1tsp garlic
1 tbsp cajun spice
2 sweet potatoes, peeled & roughly chopped
4 cups water
4 ears of corn
500 ml buttermilk
salt to taste
chopped green bellpepper, to serve (optional)
chopped red chillies (or peppadews), to serve (optional)

Method:
1. Heat oil in a large pot over medium to high heat. Add onion, garlic and cajun spice and fry for 5 - 7 minutes or until softened. Don't worry if the onion burns a little bit, I find it adds to the smoky flavour in this particular dish.
2. Add sweet potato chunks to the pot, stir to coat in the spices, then add 1 1/2 cups water and bring to the boil. Reduce heat, cover with a lid and allow to cook until soft.
3. Meanwhile, steam corn in their husks until cooked through. I normally just pop them in the microwave for a few minutes - it works a treat. Remove and allow to cool enough to handle them. Remove husks, then, using a knife, slice the kernels off.
4. Add corn kernels to the cooked sweet potatoes, then transfer everything to a food processor and blend to a smooth puree. If necessary add some more water to ease the process.
5. Pour back into the pot, add the rest of the water, as well as buttermilk and salt to taste, then gently re-heat until piping hot before serving.

PS: Happy happy honeymoon dearest Sigrid (and hubby)! Looking forward to have you back in this neck of the woods.

PPS: If you enjoyed this post, why not come and say hi over at my blog, The Creative Pot? Or drop me a witty one liner on Twitter. I promise to be on my best behaviour.

**All images are Marisa's own (and what lovely ones they are!!)

Carrot and apple soup

Hasn't it been absolutely ICY in Cape Town the last week or so? I don't even feel like cooking in this weather, I just want to get into bed and stay there, but I've been threatening to make a carrot soup for more than a week now, and rather than go out to Woolies in the cold to buy soup, I thought I'd better just bite the bullet and make it.

{Image source: joyosity, flickr}

And boy am I glad that I did!! Let me tell you a bit about this soup. You want something comforting, bright, sweet with a hint of spice, with all sorts of wonderful vitamins to help ward off the winter freeze? Well, you've come to the right place. This soup is (very) loosely based on the delicious looking soup that Browniegirl made a couple of weeks ago. For her wonderful looking and sounding soup, go here. I went so far as to actually write down the recipe (my home printer doesn't work) and look at it for several days, bought a few of the relevant ingredients, and then sorta went my own way. I think I'm pathologically unable to actually follow a recipe to the letter. But anyway, this soup was flavourful, delightfully carrotty without being overwhelming and, well, just the right thing for an icy freezy winter evening!


Comforting Carrot and Apple Soup

Ingredients:
8 large carrots (or about 600-700g), chopped roughly
2 small or 1 large yellow onion, diced
1 apple, diced
Juice of one orange
± 1 litre chicken stock
1 tbsp curry powder
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp mustard powder
1 tsp ginger
2 tsps garlic
A splash of muscadel or other sweet wine
2 tsps brown sugar
Salt and black pepper
2 tbsp apricot jam


Method:

1. Heat a little oil in a big soup pot, and fry the onion, garlic and ginger until the onion is translucent. If you want to add any other veggies you have lurking around, you can dice them and throw them in. I had yellow patty pans that needed to be used, so I tossed them in, but I don't think they made any difference to the flavour, so I left them off the ingredient list.
2. When the onions are cooked, throw in the carrots and apple, and fry for a bit.
3. Throw in a splash of sweet wine, just to deglaze the pan, and get up all the slightly caramelised bits at the bottom.
4. Cover the veggies with the stock, and bring to the boil. Turn down and simmer for 35-45 minutes, or until the carrots are cooked.
5. When everything is cooked, remove from heat, and blend. I use a stick blender with the soup still in the pot, but some people prefer to transfer in batches to a food processor. I like the control the stick blender gives me, and I give it a good go, as I like my soup smooth and silky.
6. When blended to your liking, return to the hot plate and heat through, adding salt and pepper, and sugar (I say 2 tsp, but just add to taste) and the apricot jam! This may sound weird, but the soup was missing something, and the jam just gave it that little something extra it needed. I used my soon-to-be-mother-in-law's apricot jam, which is smooth and delicious.

{Image source: eightprime, flickr}

Please make this soup, it's not hard work, and it's so rewarding to have a hot cup of delicious soup on these ridiculously cold evenings! (And not that I'm a soccer fan, but who isn't getting a bit excited with all this madness around? So if you're supporting Holland, the bright orange of this soup will go down a treat!)

Enjoy!

Spicy Red Pepper, Tomato and Barley Soup

Mmm. It's Tuesday, not my favourite day of the week, it always seems too far from the weekend. It's not Monday, during which you still have the pleasant glow left from the weekend. And it's not Wednesday, which is only 2 days short of the hallowed weekend. It's just stuck in the middle, like, well, like a Tuesday. And so, it is on this day that I bring (back) to you (again) this delicious soup! It'll warm your heart, your mouth, your tummy and even your fingers, if you chop chillies like I do!

{Image source}
I have posted this soup before, but I made one or two changes this time, like using (previously fresh and now dried) chillies that were a gift from a friend who grows them. I got them when they were glossy and fresh, and was scared of using them, and now they're wrinkly and dry, but still just as good chopped and used in soup! Oh, and a word to the wise? When you chop chillies, touch them as little as possible, and then wash your hands immediately! Don't carry on, like I did, and then go and touch your nose or something like that, because it will burn! BURN!! And please, please don't touch your eyes, it will hurt!

Now we have the safety warnings under control, please don't let them stop you from making this soup. It's warming, filling and, above all, easy to make! And with that, I give you, for Meat Free Monday, Spicy Red Pepper, Tomato and Barley Soup.

Ingredients:
200g Imbo Soup Mix (buy it at Pick n Pay, by the pulses and grains; if you aren't in South Africa, substitute with a mix of pearl barley, split peas and brown lentils)
2 cans (410g each) tomato and onion mix, or chopped tomatoes
1 red pepper, diced
1-2 cloves of garlic, crushed (or 1-2 tsps bottled crushed garlic)
2 onions, chopped (I used 1 red and 1 yellow, but I don't think the colour makes any difference to the flavour)
1 red chilli, deseeded and chopped OR 1-2 tsps red or cayenne pepper, dependent on heat tolerance
1 litre chicken stock
I also threw in a chopped fresh tomato, because I had one languishing in the fridge.

{Image source}

Method:

1. Heat some oil in a heavy bottomed, large soup pot. Fry the onions, garlic, chopped chilli and red pepper until the onions are translucent. I also put the chopped tomato in here, when the onions looked like they were close to being done.
2. When the onion and pepper mix is done, pour in the tomato and onion cans, and the chicken stock, then add the 200g of Soup Mix.
3. Bring to the boil, then turn down to a gentle simmer and cook for 1-1.5 hours, or until the barley and split peas are cooked, stirring regularly to prevent the pulses from sinking to the bottom and burning.
4. When everything is soft, take off the heat, and blend with an immersion blender until the desired chunkiness is reached. Sometimes I prefer it smoother, sometimes more rustic. Use more of the soup mix for a thicker, more rustic feel if you like.

When this stage was over, I had some whole kernel corn in the fridge and some frozen peas, which I threw in for some extra colour, which gave it some nice sweetness to offset the spiciness of the chilli. This soup can also benefit from some chopped chorizo lightly fried and added in at the end, and some cream or sour cream stirred in just before serving to lighten the chilli. I didn't add any meat, since it was Meat Free Monday, but I think it would work very well.

{Image source}

Foolproof Potato and Leek Soup - perfect for winter!

OK, so to be honest, and I always try to be, this isn't my recipe, but I did make it, and it was amazing. So I'm going to share it with you. The original recipe came from What Do I Want To Cook Today (that link goes straight to the recipe on her blog, in case you'd like it from the horses mouth, so to speak).

{Image source: Kara Reuter, flickr}

So, moving on. I did it slightly differently to the original last night, and ended up with a green, but no less delicious soup. I like the oniony ends of the leek, the green parts, so I remove all the icky bits and chuck them, retaining and using as much of the leek as possible. I also wanted leftovers for work, so I expanded on the recipe slightly.

Here's my version of this amazing soup:
 

{Image source: FotoosVanRobin, flickr}

Foolproof Potato and Leek Soup Serves 4, with leftovers

Prep time: 10-15 minutes
Cooking time: 20-30 minutes

Ingredients: 

4-5 medium to large potatoes, peeled, washed and diced
4 leeks, chopped into 1 inch pieces
1 onion, diced
1-2 tsp cooking oil or butter (whichever you prefer to fry with)
750ml chicken stock
250-300ml full fat milk (depending how creamy you like it)
salt and pepper to season  

Method:

1. Chop and wash the leek, until all sand is washed off. There will be a lot, leeks are sandy creatures. 
2. Melt the butter, or heat the oil in a large saucepan. When hot, throw in the onions, leeks and potatoes. 
3. Saute lightly on a medium to high heat, for a few minutes, until all veggies have been added.
4. Turn down to a medium to low heat, and fry until almost soft, but not coloured, stirring regularly, for 10-15 minutes. (Note, I used the green parts of the leek, but if you want a pure white soup, only use the white parts of the leek, obviously. I didn't mind the green tinge, I thought it made it more interesting, and made it more healthy (we all know green is good for you!)
5. Having made the stock, add it and the milk (just 250ml for now). 
6. Simmer on a medium heat, and try not to let it boil, as it changes the milk. 
7. When the potatoes are cooked through, (the smaller you chop 'em, the quicker this will be!), which shoul take about 10-15 minutes, take it off the heat, and let it cool for a bit. 
8. Using a stick blender, blend it to the desired consistency. I like my soups quite thick and tasty, but if it's too thick (potato is a natural thickener), just add come more milk, stock or just water to loosen it up a bit. 
9. If it's gotten really cold by now, heat through again, being careful not to boil. 
10. Serve with crusty buttered bread or toast, with chopped chives on top. 

* Note from future self: I'm just going through my old posts, and came across this one! It's winter again in Cape Town, and I was wondering which soup to make next - this looks like a winner to me! Make this, and enjoy!