Posts Tagged ‘soup’

You need to make this tomato soup. It’s bright and spicy and savory and sweet and best of all, easy. In fact, with very little effort, you can bring a smile to a tableful of eaters, especially if you pair it with yummy grilled cheese. I know I did last week!

The key is to adapt the spiciness to your taste by adjusting the amount of crushed red pepper. Start with less and add until you’re happy with the zing. Remember, you can always add more, but you can’t take it out. Once it’s got the right degree of heat, blend and strain it, and you’re ready to go.

The soup was so simple to make that…

Category: Recipes

Ribollita — Italian for “reboiled” — is a hearty Tuscan vegetable and bread soup with peasant origins.  Its name comes from the practical reheating of yesterday’s minestrone soup, throwing in whatever leftover vegetables and stale bread you had lying around, and reboiling the whole concoction. I’m happy just to start from scratch and wind up with the same lovely, warm, comforting soup, since leftovers are so rare with four teenage boys eating us out of house and home!

If I had to pick my favorite cuisine, it would be rustic Italian or French. Nothing fancy, just simple, traditional, slow-cooked, handcrafted dishes that you know are made with a whole lotta love. Ribollita is a perfect example…

Category: Recipes

Looking for a comforting, hearty, winter dish that you can pull together pretty quickly? Look no further! This simple one-pot wonder can be enjoyed as either a delicious soup or a belly-warming stew, depending on how long you reduce the broth. And leftovers—if there end up being any—are a most welcome sight and reheat easily over a low flame.

The recipe comes from a favorite old cookbook called American Brasserie by Chicago chefs Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand. With my lifelong penchant for collecting cookbooks, my library has long since outgrown a shelf in my kitchen, and I have to be selective about which books make it to the shelf of honor and which live a…

Category: Recipes

My experience with this gazpacho was like going on an exquisitely swoonful first date—where the guy is Jon Hamm-handsome; you trade exceedingly witty, wise and charming discourse; and you wake up the next morning walking on clouds and daydreaming with a silly grin on your face—and then following it up with an even more enchanting second date just days later. Oh yes. It’s that sublime.

I spotted the recipe while flipping through Fine Cooking, and was instantly intrigued that the author was inspired by a handwritten recipe from her Spanish mother-in-law, who hailed from Sevilla, the birthplace of gazpacho. Like she urges, you must wait until the tomatoes are ripe and juicy, or the resulting soup will…

Category: Recipes

Sure, I’ve written about French Onion Soup before, but now that there’s a slight chill in the air and people are feeling sort of “autumny,” I couldn’t resist revisiting one of my favorite recipes. If I could have video’d the cheers and excited hugs last weekend when I announced I would be making my soup for dinner, you would’ve thought I’d told the boys that it had all been a huge mistake, and the Red Sox really were going to the World Series! But let’s not go there.

As I wrote previously, the inspiration for my soup is Thomas Keller’s recipe in the Bouchon cookbook. I cheat a little by using store-bought beef stock, but I…

Category: Recipes

I now have two experts in making stock-based creamy veggie soups! Matt learned just how easy it is to put a bunch of chopped veggies in a pot with chicken stock, puré it, and voilÃ!

Matt hearts zucchini. He learned to love it, of all places, at the local hibachi joint, where they slice it up and sautè it with carrots and the onions they use to make that crazy volcano. So when he saw this recipe ““ even though he didn’t know what vichyssoise was ““ he was instantly enchanted. He chunked up the zucchini, potatoes and what turned out to be the cleanest leeks in existence (I was a little bummed I didn’t get to do…

Category: Recipes

Here are the two finest compliments a dish can get:

1. “I don’t really like _______, but I loved this!”

2. “I love ______ and this was the best version of it I’ve ever had!”

And when you get both compliments on the same dish? You know it’s truly a winner!

Yes, both the skeptics and the die-hards waxed poetic about this ambrosial tomato soup. Zack was a pro making his first chicken-stock-based vegetable soup, gathering up tomatoes and basil at the Friday Farmers Market in East Hampton, and sending his dad around town for a food mill, one of the few kitchen gadgets we had neglected to buy initially.

Again, a simple process: simmer up the veggies…

Category: Recipes