Fresh Tomato Soup, and other supper goodness

Supper tonight was, I have to admit, all the left-overs from last week’s farmer’s market haul. I had to make room for the new stuff!

The beans were the leftovers from lunch, served cold. New potatoes were simply washed, quartered, and boiled; top them with a little butter, salt and pepper at the table if you like.

The soup pulled it all together and added the bulk of the meal’s protein, thanks to the last of the cheddar cheese curds from the Thornloe cheese factory I picked up during our August long weekend trip there.

Fresh Tomato Soup

2 tsp olive oil
2 gloves garlic
1/2 small onion
8 or 10 fresh Roma tomatoes, chopped (mine worked out to 3.5 cups when chopped)
2 cups chicken stock
1/2 tsp dried basil (by all means substitute 1 tbsp fresh – I didn’t have any)
2 tbsp flour in 1/4 cup cold water
1/4 cup cheese curds

salt and pepper to taste

1. Heat the oil in a largish pot and add the garlic, minced, and the onion, chopped up.
2. Add the stock, tomatoes, and basil, and simmer uncovered for 20 minutes.
3. Use an immersion blender, if you have one, to blend the soup in the pot. Otherwise you can use your blender, but you should let it cool a bit first, and then put it back in the pot to warm back up.
4. Mix the flour into the water until there are no lumps, and add to the soup. Let simmer for five minutes – it should thicken up a little.
5. Divide the cheese curds between two serving bowls. Ladle half the soup into each bowl.

The beauty of the cheese curds is that they melt into those lovely toothsome strings that you get with proper poutine. You can, of course, just slice up some cheddar and add that instead – mozzarella would probably be good too.

Each serving is 193 calories, or 4 Weight Watchers points. You get an impressive three servings of vegetables for that.

EDIT:  It’s Saturday now, and I just heated up the leftover soup from last night; the two servings were a bit too generous, even for us.  Even though my usual reaction to “stir in a spoonful of plain yogurt” is “ugh, no thanks”, I just did it; and it’s great!  It adds some creaminess and adds a bit of a tang, without adding that overpowering plain-yogurt tang.  I do wish that I’d peeled my tomatoes, though – I hate those little bits of rolled-up skin.

French Beans

French beans are very much like regular green beans, but you can recognize them by their thinness. When you taste them, you’ll notice a difference too.

I haven’t posted any recipes yet, because to be honest, we haven’t had anything I could call a ‘recipe’ without laughing at myself. The first time we ate them, Will and I just washed them, put them in the microwave for 1 minute, then ate them in front of the TV with our fingers while watching the Olympics. You wouldn’t have thought it would substitute well for popcorn, would you?

Today I had them for lunch, with this ridiculously easy cooking method that I also hesitate to call a ‘recipe’.

Sautéed French Beans

2 tsp butter (or olive oil if you like)
1 large clove garlic
1 slice onion (or shallot cut up fine, or green onions chopped)
1 pound french beans

1. Melt the butter in a frying pan and add the garlic, minced, and the onion, cut into quarters and broken apart. Leave it on a fairly low heat so the butter doesn’t burn and the white stuff doesn’t brown.
2. While that’s cooking, prep your beans by washing them and cutting off the stem end.
3. Throw the beans, still wet, into the frying pan. Pop the lid on for about eight minutes. Stir them once or twice.
4. Either eat them hot out of the pan with your fingers, or let them cool and eat as a salad the next day.

Sharing this with someone gives you each 1 Weight Watchers point (for the butter or oil), plus two servings of vegetables.  If you’re counting calories, it’s 118.

P.S.  Artistic note: please cut your onion slices skinnier than I did, so your onion bits don’t end up looking like albino earthworms.

Cucumber Salad

Vinegar taste test

My grandmother makes a couple of cool and refreshing cucumber salads, one vinegar-based and one milk-based. I’m always amazed by the number of vinegars that seem to proliferate in the kitchen, so I pulled them together to perform my own mini taste-test on which ones go best with cucumber.

To my surprise, after letting them sit for a couple of hours, the winner was the plain white vinegar, the one my grandmother always used! The rice wine vinegar came in second, with the slightly sweet flavour seeming a bit incongruous to me. The other three all overpowered the cucumber, and even though I usually like balsamic vinegar (especially on tomatoes), it didn’t do it for me here. Perhaps I’m not cut out to be a food writer.

On to the actual recipe. I’m adapting mine from an old Usenet post in December 1997 from Doris Stowe Weber, since it’s the closest I can find to what I remember my grandmother doing.

Cucumber Salad (the Vinegar one)

2 to 3 cucumbers, sliced (peeled partially if you like)
1 small white onion
white vinegar
water
salt and pepper
ice cubes

Slice cucumbers into a bowl – make them lie flat so they take up as little room as possible. Slice the onion into thin rounds and put them on top. Add a little salt and pepper. Pour vinegar in to come half-way up the cucumber and onion slices. Add water just until everything is covered, and put 7 or 8 ice cubes on top.

Let sit for at least an hour. If it’s still too tart when you start eating it (the ice cubes should soften the strong onion taste), stir in a bit of sugar.

As long as you don’t need to add sugar, this is a zero-point Weight Watchers food, and has negligible calories per serving.