The Best Soup Ever

I couldn't decide what to call this soup. It is, I suppose, a chicken soup. But it's so much more! I'll never go back to regular chicken soup again. Even my picky child was happy with this soup, veggies and all! The most surprising ingredient, if you're not familiar with seeing it in savory dishes, is peanut butter. I brought the leftover soup to work to share and it was rated 11 on a scale of 1 to 10. I promise it is worth trying!

For extra flavor, you can use the bones and/or carcass of the whole chicken if you've got them. I used the leftovers from a chicken I roasted the night before I made this soup. You can purchase a cooked rotisserie chicken and then use any leftovers for this soup. If you do use bones or the whole chicken carcass, you can pull them out of the soup after they've simmered for a while, before you add back the pureed veggies, allow the chicken to cool a bit, and then pull the meat from the bones and drop it back into the soup.

What you'll need:

• 8 cups of liquid (vegetable broth or chicken broth)
• About 5 carrots, sliced into thin rounds
• 1 large potato, cubed or diced
• 2 cups of pumpkin, cubed or diced
• 1 large onion, diced
• Cooked chicken, about 2 cups of bite sized pieces.
• 4-6 tablespoons of unsweetened peanut butter
• 2-3 cloves of garlic (roasted garlic would be even better!)
• 2 large tomatoes, roughly chopped
• 1 cup of noodles (optional) I like thin egg noodles best, but add what you like!
• juice of 2 limes
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh dill
• salt, to taste

What to do:

1. Bring your liquid to a boil in a large soup pot.
2. Add the onions, potatoes, pumpkin and carrots. Turn the heat to medium and allow to cook for 15 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.
3. Remove about half of the vegetables from the pot and put them in a food processor or blender. Be careful! The veggies are hot. Do not use a food processor with a fitted lid that seals completely. Steam must be able to escape while you puree.
4. Add the chicken pieces to the soup pot and leave to simmer.
5. To the vegetables in the blender/processor, add about a cup of the liquid from the soup, the peanut butter, the garlic and the chopped tomatoes.
6. Puree vegetable and peanut butter mixture until smooth, adding more liquid if necessary.
7. Return the pureed mixture to the soup pot and stir until completely incorporated. Your soup should be a bit thicker and a beautiful shade of yellow or orange.
8. Add noodles.
9. Simmer for about 10 or 20 minutes longer.
10. Turn off the heat.
11. Add the chopped herbs and stir them into the hot soup.
12. Add the lime juice and stir.
13. Taste the soup and add salt to taste.

Enjoy!

Roasted Tomatoes

As I prepare to move to Sudan, I'm thinking a lot about what I will miss. Perhaps that's why I've been obsessed with avocados lately. One thing I will NOT miss are American tomatoes. I mean, I'm sure there are good ones out there, but 9 times out of 10, what I find at the store are mushy, watery-tasting tomatoes. Summertime tomatoes are better than wintertime tomatoes, but unless you have your own garden or are visiting a greenmarket, the tomato situation is usually not so great.

Sudanese tomatoes are always fresh. If you don't get them while they're fresh and ripe, you don't get them. No cold storage. No shipments from abroad. And sometimes, when the weather is over 120 degrees for days at a time, there are no tomatoes. Those are sad days, but for the 10 months of the year that tomatoes are plentiful, no American tomato can hold a candle to a tomato grown on the banks of the Nile river.

I eat Sudanese tomatoes happily. Wash, eat, period. Nothing else necessary. For breakfast, tomatoes with a little feta cheese. For a dinner salad, maybe diced tomatoes with onions and a little lime juice and salt. It doesn't get any better.

Here in New York, though, it takes a little effort to bring out the tangy sweetness of tomatoes. I find the easiest way to do that - and also the easiest way to make a pasta sauce - is by roasting grape (or cherry) tomatoes. It's so simple and so tasty that once you try them you'll be roasting little tomatoes constantly and looking for ways to use them!

Roasted Grape (or Cherry) Tomatoes:

• Grape or Cherry Tomatoes (as many as you want)
• Olive oil (enough to just coat the tomatoes)
• salt
• pepper
• garlic cloves (optional)

1. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.
2. Prepare your tomatoes for roasting by tossing them in a bowl with a little olive oil. Make sure they're all pretty well coated.
3. Spread the tomatoes in a shallow pan (glass or metal).
4. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper.
5. If you want to roast garlic at the same time, just take a piece of tin foil, place the garlic cloves on it, add a drop of olive oil, salt, and pepper, wrap them up, and throw them into the pan with the tomatoes.
6. Pop the pan into the oven and wait. After a while, you may hear little popping noises. Yes, the tomatoes are popping. You want this to happen so they can release some of their liquid.
7. How long you roast the tomatoes for is up to you. I'd say roast them for at least 1/2 hour. As you roast them longer, they get sweeter and the flavor concentrates more, so check on them every 5 or 10 minutes and take them out when you're happy with what they look and taste like.
8. Pour this over fresh pasta with the tomato liquid that is in the pan, and you've got an easy, delicious and healthy sauce. If you roasted garlic, mash it up and stir it in.

Here's a before and after picture that I did not take. Sorry. No tomatoes in the house!



Notes:

• You can roast other veggies at the same time. Try zucchini, onion (in chunks), and mushrooms (sorry, Toni. Other people like them!) Actually, I love roasted mushrooms.