This past winter I feel like I could easily pass for The Soup Nazi on Cramer verses Cramer. The soup pot aka pressure cooker here has been in high gear with homemade soups being made a couple of times a week. The fact that I can put a great homemade soup from scratch on the table in under an hour is very appealing. More appealing is simply by changing out a few ingredients I can end up with a totally different soup so while we have had a lot of soup this winter all have be different.
The Prep
Beef soup bones (1) are one of my favourite starters for homemade soup. There is just enough meat on them for the resulting soup. Soup bones are packed full of flavour and they are very inexpensive. This soup started with the soup bones, a carrot, celery and chunk of onion with enough water to fill the pressure cooker 2/3 full (3). After 30 minutes in the pressure cooker the meat was falling apart and the stock rich (4). I removed the bones then removed the meat and set aside then strained the stock. Additional ingredients (2) were tomato stock, beef stock, a bay leaf, browning, Worcestershire Sauce, tomato powder, carrot powder, diced carrots, frozen peas, celery, and alphabet pasta. I was going to add corn but decided not to after the picture was taken.
Alphabet Soup
The two key ingredients in this soup that really made the flavour was the tomato stock and the tomato powder! Both added a depth of flavour that took this soup well beyond a regular beef based soup. Of course any kid or kid-at-heart would love scooping up the alphabet pasta. This really was a gorgeous soup!
Pictured is the alphabet soup in a porcelain bow with platinum detailing. I seriously have 6 complete set of dishware, one homemade, and extra odd pieces. Now before you say that is a lot of dishware unless I absolutely have to I prefer to serve my guests on real dishware not paper or plastic. As an aside, I have enough dishware and cutlery to serve comfortably 36. The red and black set are are daily dishware so you really don't get to see a lot of the other dishware except when I want a change for some reason. Of this set, the cappuccino cups and saucers get used the most. I like the contrast of the soup against the platinum although I don't like the reflective glare.
4 food lovers commented:
I have never heard of tomato powder, but your soup looks yummy!!
Thanks Spicybugz! Tomato powder is easy to make and once you've used it, it is one of those ingredients you will wonder why you didn't use it sooner.
Hi tuzahu973 and thanks for visiting. I included a link in this post to a post describing how to make tomato paste. Carrot powder is made by steaming carrots then pureeing and drying them. Once dried the carrots are then ground into powder. HTH
Here is a lovely email recieved from tuzahu973
Now this person was ticked off because apparently I have a life outside of the computer so did not answer her question within 2 minutes so she took the question to a group I participate in. When I requested this stop as it wasn't appropriate she left this message in my inbox. What she doesn't understand is changing her name does not hide her IP and that dear Starla or whatever you want to call yourself was your downfall so now I am outing you. How dare you ask my help, get pissy because I'm not at the computer waiting your quesion then send me this kind of crap?
From: "hollywoodgreats@aol.com"
To: sfg.oamc@yahoo.com
Sent: Thu, February 11, 2010 12:32:43 AM
Subject: Re:A Request Please
Hey, stop being a GARDEN GROAN . You post your link to the group, don't complain when it's discussed. If you don't want the attention then don't promote your site. There is no such rule that a topic can only be discussed on the site it was seen. Grow up or shut up.
Post your recipes on the list and stop the links if you are so fragile about your blog. Your blog is not all that anyway, be happy someone commented on it.
Starla
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