Soup and Stuff

The tomato soup came out wonderfully, thick and full of flavor. I used a recipe from the Bernardin Jar Lid Company's website. The recipe had several surprising ingredients, like brown sugar, carrots, and cloves. I mean...cloves? Really?

I was not adventurous enough to use the cloves, but I did use the brown sugar and carrots. I also riffed a bit on the other ingredients,  using sweet banana peppers instead of red peppers because I didn't have red peppers. I added hot pepper sauce, Worchestershire sauce, and red wine too, and instead of celery, which I was out of, I used dried celery leaves (always handy to have on hand). 

I used the black tomatoes again, as that is what we have plenty of right now. If you are not familiar with Black Krim tomatoes, they are an heirloom variety that can look pretty dark on the inside. 

See the datk areas? Tbe tops almost always stay a dark green, but that part is actually ripe and very good. I had already cut the hard white parts out of this one.

They also tend to have all sorts of imperfections that make them often look ugly, and have a pretty big internal stem that must be cut out, but their flavor is absolute heaven, and they like our soil so we grow them every year. 

Here you can see the bumpity-lumpity shape of many of the Black Krims. It makes cutting them nicely for sandwiches a challenge! These are almost all actually ripe. There is a lot of color variation in this variety. 

The end result tastes very close to good old Campbell's tomato soup, but ever so much better and with more texture. Larry and I tried it for lunch, adding milk, and it was just amazing.

I ended up with 6 1/2 quarts, not counting what we ate. I think I will make one more batch, because if I serve this when we have company I would probably use 2 quarts at a time. 

The thing about these tomato recipes is that one has to stand there and stir frequently because tomatoes love to scorch. It took at least an hour and a half to cook down the soup and puree' it, then there is the jars to wash, the canner to get ready, jarring up, etc. So in the end, probably 2 hours or more on my feet, which were complaining pretty insistently by the time I was done.

Well, I was also making meatloaf and cherry pie while cooking down the soup too, so a bit of multitasking.  I had to get cleaned up quickly and rush out, leaving Larry to babysit the canner, as I had a haircut appointment in the afternoon, first one in the last year and a half and I did not want to miss it!

It was a nice break to sit back and let someone take care of my old gray hair. Afterwards I stopped in the coffee shop next door for an iced hazelnut coffee. What a treat! I had a few more stops on the way home, including a long roadside chat with a neighbor. You can do that on our road---in the 20 minutes we were talking, only one car came by, and my van was well out of the one-lane road.

I felt revived by the time I got home. It was still a blistering 90 degrees (will this heat ever end?) so the rest of the evening we spent inside, Larry watching a movie while I entered receipts in my spreadsheet. I am kind of proud of myself because as of right now I am all caught up on that task, and believe it or not this is the first time that has happened at this time of the year since I started selling. Usually I am scrambling at the beginning of the year to get all the past year's stuff entered. Procrastination is my middle name when it comes to this job. I hate paperwork and numbers. But it does feel good to be keeping up with it.

Tomorrow I am on the road to the Lewisburg Literary Festival for yet another reading from the Porch Poems book with my fellow poets. This will be an overnight trip, as the festival graciously offered to put us up. Not in the Greenbrier Resort, which is very nearby, though. 

Anyway, the Greenbrier will be up on the auction block soon because our no-good governor doesn't pay his bills and defaulted on his loans. Jim Justice,  who is running for the Senate (and will probably win because everybody loves his dog, not kidding) has been sued over and over again for financial shenanigans,  including ripping off miners' pension funds,  not paying contractors or his workers, etc. He gets out of it by settling out of court for a fraction of what he owes. God help us when this abhorrent piece of humanity gets to Washington. He will be an embarrassment to our state.

Off to bed now, so I can be bright-eyed tomorrow.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.