DigiBites: Chef Charlie’s Cure For The Common Cold (Day) – Tomato Soup And A Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Happy New Year to our News24/680 readers!

My family, friends and I enjoyed a long, happy, food-filled holiday season, and I’m ready to get back to work!  I hope you have enjoyed sharing our journey over the last year. I took a look at our posts, and they really followed a clear seasonal path.  I hope to do the same this year with new recipes, travel-food highlights and bringing back some great new ideas from around the world to our local neighborhood newsfeed!

If there are any food themes or concepts you would like to see explored here, please let me know. And, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about anything I post, please let me know. I enjoy responding to reader’s queries as this is the hallmark of this “interactive” platform.

To start off the year, I am going to share what my family and I had on New Year’s Eve (our twins are just 16 and we still stay home with them and enjoy our family time together; the classic pairing of spicy, roasted tomato soup and sharp cheddar grilled cheese sandwiches.

In this recipe, I use canned fire-roasted, diced tomatoes (I prefer Muir Glen, 365 Whole Foods), which add a nice complex smokiness to the finished  soup.  Fresh tomatoes are a summer “fruit”, so I use canned in the late-fall-winter months.  Fresh “winter” tomatoes come from too far away (carbon footprint issue) and are usually hard, under-ripe and tasteless.  Canned tomatoes during the winter months are a good, convenient alternative to fresh, as they are picked at peak, maintaining their texture and flavor.  The batch we made, had a good level of spice (from the red pepper flakes) and recommend enough to provide a nice spicy, lengthy finish at the “back of the throat”.

This particular soup freezes well, so I suggest you make a double batch and hold half for later use. – Chef Charlie

Grilled cheese:  I could send another recipe, but it’s too easy… Acme Rustic Sour bread, Tillamook sharp cheddar cheese and Clover Salted Butter.  The key to a good grilled cheese: great ingredients; cover the skillet while grilling (to properly melt the cheese) and tomato soup along side!

Questions? Just ask!

Again, happy 2019, and looking forward to sharing my year with you all!

– Chef Charlie

Spicy, Fire Roasted Tomato Soup

Ingredients:

1/4 cup olive oil

1 medium yellow onion, peeled, and cut into a 1/4-inch dice

1 large carrot, scrubbed, and cut into a 1/4-inch dice

4 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped

2 tablespoons dried oregano

2 tablespoons dried basil

1 tablespoon dried rosemary, crumbled

Pinch of red pepper flakes, to taste

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

2, 24-ounce cans diced fire roasted tomatoes

1, 24-ounce can water

Procedure:
•     Heat the olive oil a saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the onion, carrots, garlic, oregano, basil, red pepper flakes and a big pinch of kosher salt. Sauté, stirring frequently, until the vegetables are tender, and the onion is translucent, 5 minutes.
•     Add the canned tomatoes, plus the 1 can of water. Bring the liquid to a simmer, and then decrease the heat to low. Simmer the soup over low heat for 45 minutes. •     Purée the soup in a blender until smooth.  Return mixture to the soup pot, re-heat gently and adjust the salt and spice. •     Serve warm with grilled sourdough bread or grilled cheese sandwiches

Serves 8

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