soup and cheese

I have proved, once again (to myself at least), that grilled cheese and tomato soup are the ultimate food pairing. And maybe not just an ultimate comfort food, but an ultimate food. Period.

Soup:

• one onion, sliced
• eight smallish carrots, likewise
  
• a few stalks celery, chopped
  
• two leeks, sliced thin
• four or five large orange tomatoes (I used the ones with red near the top, shaped like beefsteaks), chopped into big chunks
• four cloves garlic
  

Sauté the first four ingredients in olive oil and a nob of butter. Season with salt. Cook until onion starts to get some color (twenty minutes on medium-low?). Add the tomatoes and garlic. Add enough water to cover the tomatoes. Cook for half an hour or so until very soft. Pass through a food mill. Add some olive oil into the pan and cook 2tbs flour for a few minutes. Add puréed soup back to the pot and reheat. Add pepper.

Make that grilled cheese while it reheats. This is great with emmenthaler on sourdough. Nasturtiums add a nice green and peppery touch. With these tomatoes there's no need for the baking soda trick: these are a little lower in acidity as it is. So you just get pure tomato goodness. And cheese and bread, fried, make it heaven.

bread

I made a Vollkornbrot -- a 100% whole rye bread with sunflower seeds. It's mainly a sourdough with a teeny bit of yeast (which I'll probably omit next time as it was probably not necessary). I used coarse whole rye (70%) and rye chops (30%). It made this one heavy loaf that was baked for about 80 minutes (470ºF for a quarter of an hour, 380º for the rest -- the initial heat helps it get lift since there's so little gluten). I let it rest for 48 hours, and then I cut into it:


It's been a week since I first cut into it and it's now as good as that first slice -- it may even be better. With time the rye gets a full flavor, almost spicy, and the sourdough element keeps its tang.

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On a very different note, the ultimate winter comfort lunch:



It's a grilled cheese of cheddar and sourdough semolina bread (this and the last from Hamelman's Bread) with an cream of tomato soup from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. It leaves me with just a few jars of tomatoes from last year's canning madness, but was well worth it.