Ripe tomatoes are so easy to be made into simple yet delicious soup. I followed the recipe in my cookbook of Party Food and Appertizers. In fact the recipe calls for sun-dried tomato paste so that the soup has intense flavor. However, I didn’t have that kind of tomato paste so I went ahead using normal tomato paste. The soup was still tasty though I wondered how the authentic taste would be like.
We can choose to cook with either chicken stock or vegetable stock, and I picked vegetable stock to get a real fresh and vegetarian soup. I made the toasted cheese croûte with baguette slices and grated Parmesan cheese.
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Blue cheese has a strong and distinctive flavor, which is so outstanding in this soup. I like having this soup with freshly baked hard-crusted bread. As this type of bread stales quickly so whenever I make them, I often plan to prepare some soup to serve with bread as our main meal.
Blue cheese is already salty. My soup this time was a bit salty for our taste even if I used home-made chicken stock – to which I do not often add any salt, but after doing several seasonings, the final soup was still salty after I added the blue cheese. In addition to that, the bacon was a little salty, the hard crust bread was also a little salty, we could only get through our meal with a glass of water. So be careful with seasoning when you make this soup.
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I seldom eat fast food at fast food restaurants. The only one that I go to more often than the others is Subway, where the meals are supposed to be healthier and that I can choose what I want to add to the sandwich. I remember I’ve eaten burgers just only a few times at McDonald and Burger King. They were not so fancy to mel.
Until I watched Kitchen Nightmare hosted by chef Gordon Ramsay and seeing him making beef burger, I was so inspired to make a real homemade burger. What I like is that I can substitute part of the beef with breadcrumbs, and I can control the amount of onion I want to put in the patty, just that the amount is reasonable to be equally distributed in the ground beef.
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This pasta is very simple to cook. I was curious about it in the first place for the presence of breadcrumbs. I’ve never known about this kind of pasta before. When I was browsing my book on Italian cuisine, I came across the recipe and, realizing it was so simple to cook this, i decided to make it right away.
This recipe is rather classic. The original one cooks with only onion, garlic and toasted breadcrumbs. However, there are other varieties originated from the basic recipe. So I cooked the variety with tomatoes as I preferred the pasta with some sauce (this is the influence of enjoying a meal with soup in a typical Vietnamese meal). There’s nothing to regret that I cooked this pasta. It was really good and we had a wonderful dinner.
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This is a sour fish soup which is also very popular in Vietnamese cooking. Only one point is that more people prefer fresh water fish than salt water fish. Of course people from coastal provinces often use seafood to cook into sour soups, and their sour fish soups are also great.
It doesn’t matter for me where the fish come from. Of course some fish cannot be cooked into soups like this one, while some are really perfect to make sour soup with. This time I cooked with king mackerel.
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Tomatoes are my forever-loved veggie. Each week I always have to buy a large pack of tomatoes. In Vietnamese cuisine, tomatoes are used frequently in daily cooking, especially during hot summer, tomatoes are often indispensable in sour soups, which help relieve the heat of the summer.
However, I find tomatoes are best in winter when tomatoes are not only cheap but firm and red. The flesh of the tomatoes then is so "sweet" with less seeds. Here, I often see only two kinds of tomatoes. One kind is the normal tomatoes. The other is baby tomatoes such as grape tomatoes – which are called cherry tomatoes here in Singapore. The vine-ripen tomatoes are available at some specialty stores or some big supermarkets, however, they are not cheap and so not affordable for me.
To make this stuffed tomatoes, I used tomatoes of medium size and chose the ripe but firm ones. The soft tomatoes are vulnerable to break apart while braising. And the small ones like these also look lovelier than the large ones.
Ingredients (serves 2)
- 150g minced pork
- 10 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked to soften
- 2-3 black fungus (wood-ear), soaked to soften
- 1 egg
- 1 tbs fish sauce
- 1/4 tsp ground pepper
- 1 shallot, finely chopped
- several medium-sized ripe and firm tomatoes
- vegetable oil, as needed
- cilantro, to serve
Cooking:
- Rinse the mushrooms well. Reserve the soaking water. Chop the mushrooms finely.
- Rinse the black fungus well, then chop finely.
- Combine the pork, mushrooms, black fungus, egg, fish sauce, pepper and shallot.
- Cut out the top of the tomatoes and remove the seeds inside. Stuff the tomatoes with the pork mixture until all the fillings are used.
- Heat the oil in a large frying pan. Fry the tomatoes, concentrate on frying the tops where the pork mixture is present. Fry until the skins start to dry.
- Transfer the fried tomatoes into a saucepan. Add the reserved mushroom-soaking water. If you like, you may add some dried mushrooms and cilantro roots into the saucepan. Braise the tomatoes over medium-low heat for about 12-15 minutes.
- Serve hot or warm with cilantro.
This soup is undeniably simple. The stock has the flavor of the beef and tomatoes. It is suitable to serve this soup in any season and it goes well with steamed rice. Or even you want to make this soup as a broth base to a kind of noodle, it is also fine.
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I tried a new pasta dish with tuna and tomato sauce. Simple, fast to cook yet delicious pasta dishes always inspire me into cooking and trying new recipes.
This pasta using angel hair is really fast to cook. It took only several minutes for the angel hair to be cooked al dente. The sauce was also quite simple. The true taste and texture of the tuna were preserved as it was. The lemon zest added a special fragrance into the dish. For me, this pasta is quite healthy, which made me very happy and comfortable after finishing the meal.
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