[TND] 11.06 Tomato Soup, Potato Pancakes and Pumpkin Pie

The tomato soup I made is one I make very frequently in the winter, since it's based on canned tomatoes and quite good despite that. Basically put a chopped potato, a quartered yellow onion, 3 cups of water, 2-4 tablespoons of butter, a couple bay leaves, the juice of an orange (save the zest), a tablespoon (or more) of cumin (I like to had ground ginger and a bit of coriander too), a bit of salt and pepper into a big pot. Boil, reduce to a simmer for 15-20 minutes. Add two big (28 oz) cans of peeled tomatoes, the zest from the orange, and bring back to a boil. Let it simmer for at least another 20 min, though it can easily sit and simmer for longer if you need it to. Fish out the bay leaves, blend it with an immersion blender (beware steam/splatter). It can simmer for a while without issue, serve it hot with fresh chives and sour cream. You can supplement the orange with more juice, or even use two oranges, but I don't think I'd use all the zest, in that case. It scales wonderfully, halves or doubles, and is quite lovely on winter nights. The original recipe puts it through a mesh strainer before server, but you lose so much fantastic texture from the tomatoes and potato that I don't recommend this.

Best thing about it is what you can dip into it. I've done grilled buffalo mozarella sandwiches before, but last night we did potato pancakes. There was a recipe in the most recent Fine Cooking, but it relied very heavily on a specific type of food processor with different grating attachments. We grated up a bunch of potatoes, a couple of onions, and mixed them together with salt, pepper, paprika, flour and eggs. Two eggs, two onions for 2.5 lbs of potatoes, maybe half a cup of flour, but it's really just looking for texture. Squeeze out as much liquid as possible, fry, keep warm in the oven. I only have one pan suitable for frying, so it took a long time, but I also made some applesauce to go with them. Surprising to me was that the combination of the potato pancake with applesauce was very nice with the citrusy-spicy tomato soup.

Finally, I made pumpkin pie. I cheated on the crust for lack of time, using the Whole Foods frozen premades, and used the recipe out of the Joy of Cooking with pointers from my Dad. I ended up with excess mixture, which I put into little custard cups and cooked as though they were custard, in a water bath. Water baths suck, I need to work on executing that before I try it with an actual custard. One important note, make sure you stir the pie mixture immediately before pouring into the crusts, or else the spices, particularly the ginger, seems to settle. I also would like to get the appropriate spices from Penzey's, instead of using the McCormick ones, as they really do make or break the pie.