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Recipe: Tomato-Dill Soup With Roasted Garlic 21 February 2007 10:08 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking, recipes, soup, sundance, vegan, vegetarian , trackback

As much as I like “It’s not just for eating anymore,” sometimes I want to invent a new subtitle for TracyFood about how really, people just read it for the recipes.

Whenever I started a prep shift at Sundance with the news that we were out of a soup out front, this recipe came to the rescue. I could go from zero to soup ready to serve in under an hour — with time to make a crappy sign like the one above, and more than 20 quarts of backup soup to spare. To be fair, we had pre-peeled cloves of garlic, which sped things up considerably, but this soup is also a nice one to linger over, so take your time with it if you can. If you’re like me (and I know I am), you’ll need to thaw your obsessively frozen tomato paste before adding it to the soup, so start a kettle of water boiling as one of your first steps (of course, if you’re really like me there’s a good chance you’ll already have the kettle on in preparation for your next pot of superfood — I mean, tea). Finally, you can substitute a 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes for the two smaller cans; just divide it and purée half very briefly before adding it to the soup (before blending the tomato paste and water).

A slightly less craptastic sign. This particular version of the soup used dried dill in an attempt to make it cheaper, but I wasn’t very happy with the result, and the soup wasn’t super-expensive to begin with. The moral of the story: use fresh herbs if you can. You’re worth it. (Note to self: plant more herbs in garden this year.)

What You Need (Ingredients and Equipment)

What You Do

  1. Preheat the oven to 350 F or skip this step if you’re using a toaster oven for the garlic. Start the kettle boiling if you need to thaw frozen tomato paste.
  2. Slice half the garlic cloves into slivers (for all but the hugest cloves this just means cutting them in half) and toss with 1 TB oil. Spread cut, oiled garlic in an even layer on the baking sheet. Roast 10-15 minutes until irresistable (they’ll be browned and soft to touch, but please don’t burn yourself testing them). Set aside to cool when done.
  3. Meanwhile, mince or press the rest of the garlic cloves while the remaining oil warms in the soup pot over medium heat on the stove. Sauté the garlic in the hot oil, stirring frequently. When it starts to turn golden brown, sprinkle on the paprika and stir.
  4. Add diced tomatoes and stir again. Add crushed tomatoes (or briefly blended diced tomatoes) and stir some more.
  5. Blend tomato paste with 1-2 cups water (again, it’s a good idea to warm the water if your tomato paste started out frozen, but please be careful any time you put hot liquids in the blender — cover the lid with a towel and hold it firmly in place, and remember that steam burns are just no fun). This was actually one of the most time-consuming steps of the original recipe, which used 2 six-ounce cans of paste, which I blended in batches to make sure there were no lumps. Stir the resultant broth into the soup along with 2-4 more cups water, the roasted garlic, and the frozen peas. Turn up the heat until the mixture boils, then lower to a simmer. Taste the soup and add more water to taste (it should be a fairly thin but intensely flavorful broth).
  6. Season the soup with fresh dill, salt, and balsamic vinegar. By now the peas should be thawed and the soup steaming hot and ready to serve.

Makes 8-10 servings in well under an hour. If you like, you can cook a cup or so of your favorite small pasta (orzo spring to mind) separately and stir those in, but I recommend keeping pasta separate from the soup unless you’re absolutely certain there will be no leftovers (otherwise the noodles get really overdone and mushy and gross, and nobody wants that).
Fancy tomato-dill soup!

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