Recipe: Tomato-Lime Soup 10 May 2007 11:44 pm
Posted by Tracy in : advice, cooking, recipes, soup, sundance, vegan, vegetarian , trackback
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I made this for dinner last night, with cornbread on the side (yum). To continue in this week’s theme of serving you by admitting all my mistakes so you don’t repeat them, my advice about this soup is: don’t use key lime juice. We tried exactly that last night, and the result was weird and oddly bitter and in my opinion just plain bad, so I took an extra day on the recipe writeup to consult the original Moosewood Restaurant Cooks At Home recipe that inspired me and figure out what went wrong and translate those small wisdoms into this recipe. Long story short: Stick to regular limes and you’ll be fine (I like the bottled not-from-concentrate juice from Santa Cruz Organic, myself), don’t overdo the hot sauce because it’s secretly full of sour vinegar, and beware: some tomato juice contains lemon juice, which can make everything extra-bonus sour as well. My scribbly notes on the original Sundance version of this recipe (19 quarts!) include a big, circled “Darren + Erin need a copy.” so the following is dedicated to the van Browns, with love.
What you need (equipment and ingredients)
- soup pot and stirring implement(s)
- measuring cups and spoons
- cutting board and knife for onions/garlic and cilantro garnishing goodness
- 1-2 TB vegetable oil
- 2-3 tablespoons minced garlic
- 1 small or 1/2 large onion, diced (or more garlic; last night I used about 4 heaping tablespoons of elephant garlic, which is somewhere between onions and garlic in pungency)
- 1 TB ground cumin seeds
- 1 TB Tabasco or other similar hot sauce (we usually have Tapatio or Cholula)
- 1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes
- 1-2 TB tomato paste (pretty optional, but remember: if you don’t have tomato juice you can always approximate it by diluting tomato paste with water)
- 1 quart bottle tomato juice
- 1/4 cup lime juice
- 2-4 cups water
- 1 cup frozen corn
- salt to taste
- fresh cilantro for garnish
- tortilla chips and/or grated cheese for garnish (optional but so delicious)
What You Do
Heat the oil in the soup pot and add the onions and/or garlic. After a minute, add the cumin and stir well. It will stick to the bottom of the pan but that’s okay; it comes off when you add liquid. Speaking of liquid, add that hot sauce now, but don’t hover too close to the pot unless you like being teargassed. Also add the tomato paste, if you’re using it, and stir. Next add the canned diced tomatoes and stir (all the cumin should have come off the bottom of the pot by now). Add the tomato juice and stir in the lime juice as well. Let the soup get hot through and through, then stir in the frozen corn and add water to dilute it to your desired consistency (I like it fairly thin; it’s refreshing). Season with salt to taste, and garnish with freshly chopped cilantro.
This soup is fantastic served over crushed tortilla chips with a little cheese; it’s like instant tortilla soup, or hot chips and really fresh salsa. Yum. At home you can probably throw it together in 15-20 minutes; at Sundance it took around an hour, which was great when we needed soup in a hurry. Is it ironic that I made this soup on my last day in the Sundance kitchen, when perhaps I should have made something long and involved to linger over? I don’t know; I just wanted to make sure I ended on a good note, and this soup was really popular, especially with some of my coworkers at that time. But I digress. Leftovers reheat well and (like the sign says) are even good cold.
