welcome friends welcome back to the kitchen another stuff in our pantry
recipe today we're going to make a tomato and bean soup it's a super simple
soup comes together really quickly and it uses mostly tinned or canned goods
with a couple of fresh vegetables mostly just onion you could get away totally
just with onion if that's all you had so into this Dutch oven I have put some
olive oil and I'm just gonna let that come up to temperature a little bit I'm
also going to use this garlic this is this is garlic fresh out of our garden
it is the end of the first week of April and this stuff is up I could have picked
this out probably last week now there's three ways to grow garlic and Julie and
I grow it two of the three ways and the first way
is to plant cloves and so you break open a bulb of garlic and then you take the
individual cloves and you plant them and that's the way that most commercial
garlic is grown in North America probably around the world the second way
is to plant bulbils which are little mini garlic cloves that
grow at the end of escape and the third way the way that is least common is to
grow it from seed there are very few garlic varieties that will flower and
set seed and make it these tiny little black seeds and you plant them and so
Julie and I have a variety that does that and we plant that and it takes two
years for it to grow to this point and it's not until probably your three or
four that you can pick it and get a full clove of garlic but it comes up really
early in the spring and it tastes wonderful so it's the only garlic I have
right now and I'm gonna use it in this super fine if you don't have it just use
regular garlic so I put an onion in there and next in I'm going to put some
chopped celery AK I call it cell react a lot of people say I mispronounce it that
it's celeriac let's just call it celery root um so about a half a head of celery
root if you don't have that you could use celery
I don't have celery you could also put in fennel fennel would go extremely well
with this combination of flavors so I'm gonna put that in sort of medium
medium-high heat you just want to sweat out the onion you don't want to bring
any color to it well that's happening I'll just chop up
this garlic just needs a rough chop not much and I use the whole plant each part
brings just a slightly different flavor okay I'm gonna put this into the pot now
with the onion and the celery root next in our two bay leaves some fennel seed
some dry basil dry oregano a little bit of salt and some pepper
okay give this a little bit of a stir
now I want to put in some tomato paste and I'm gonna put in about half a can
you want to put this in and you want to fry it along with the vegetables maybe
turn up the heat just a little bit and let that tomato-paste caramelize
okay we are almost there so I've got a can of whole tomatoes and I'm gonna put
that in now after you put these in I'm just gonna break them up with the back
of the spatula you could use any tomato that you have you could use chopped
tomatoes diced tomatoes any kind of canned tomato would work I'm filming
this in April 2020 so I understand the limitations that some of us are under
now you need two cans of beans don't look at that sandwich loaf I see you
looking at that sandwich loaf that's for later we're making soup so you need two
cans of beans I think any kind of means that you want I have some navy beans
that I'm gonna use and I have some leftover pinto beans from a shrimp and
bean thing that we did a couple of days ago we're gonna put those in as well or
just stir that in what you have are dry beans you can use those as well take
about a cup of dry beans soak them overnight and then boil them until
they're cooked through a lot of people don't even soak them overnight just
cover them with water and boil them for about an hour hour and a half until
they're cooked through and then you just drain them and put them into the soup
and it would really help if you put a sliced up onion in the water as you were
boiling the beans just to give a little bit more flavor next in is some stock
desperate times and I don't have any homemade stock not saying that you
always have to have homemade stock stock in a carton is great and I'm using
vegetable stock this time but of course depending on what you like you could put
in chicken stock or pork stock or any stock that you have and if you don't
have stock you could just use water water would be just fine in this
instance the last thing I want to put in here is some vinegar just to add a
little bit of acid and I know that a lot of people think that tomatoes are too
acidic I don't think that they're too acidic I like the acid from them but I
find that putting in just a little bit of vinegar at the end sort of brings
another brightness to it and so this is a this is a nice cider vinegar it's from
Quebec they leave the apples on the trees until they freeze and then they
make cider from it just like you would make ice wine and then they'd turn
that cider into vinegar and it is absolutely incredible if you don't have
that any apple vinegar any apple cider vinegar would do any wine vinegar would
do even straight-up white distilled vinegar would be fine
you just want to bring a little bit of that brightness and I can already smell
it brightening up okay as this comes up to a simmer let's give it a taste and
see where we are okay that's good I'll check it again just before I serve
it might need to touch more salt and pepper we'll see but for now I'm gonna
put the cover on loosely and I'm gonna let it simmer for about 20-25 minutes
okay it's time for Sue so it's a tomato bean soup beans middle since I mean it's
you know it's hot it just came from the stove alright okay I really like the
flavor though even though I almost burnt my mouth I really do like the flavor
it's subtle like it's not there's nothing that's overpowering in any
direction I don't think was a good soup was it good - if I'd had any hot pepper
flakes I would have put them in well we're out of hot pepper flakes how did
that happen and normally I just run to the grocery
store but you can't just run to the grocery store anymore so we're gonna do
without the hot pepper flakes I think that would add just a little a little
bit of a zing to it but this is good and
mmhmm mmm white sandwich loaf that we made you can
check out that video somewhere else but this would be really good it's a great
way also to kind of just nibble on it without it being too it when it's still
too hot mm-hmm so soups don't have to be really difficult you can just take a few
canned items out of your pantry put it together and within like an hour you've
you've got a pot of soup so play with it it's just a method like I know home it's
always what I say but you could play with the spicing you play with the
vegetables that you put in you could really just make this your own
so thanks for stopping by stay safe stay healthy see you again soon
you